Beyond the terrible toll in human lives and suffering, the Ebola epidemic currently afflicting West Africa is already having a measurable economic impact in terms of forgone output; higher fiscal deficits; rising prices; lower real household incomes and greater poverty. These economic impacts...

International Debt Statistics (IDS) 2015 is a continuation of the World Bank’s Global Development Finance publication, Volume II (1997 through 2009) and the earlier World Debt Tables (1973 through 1996). IDS 2015 provides statistical tables showing the external debt of 128 developing countries...

In 2013, the World Bank Group adopted two new goals to guide its work: ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. More specifically, the goals are to reduce extreme poverty in the world to less than 3 percent by 2030, and to foster income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the...

Every policy relies on explicit or implicit assumptions about how people make choices. Those assumptions typically rest on an idealized model of how people think, rather than an understanding of how everyday thinking actually works. This year’s World Development Report argues that a more...

Today, the World Bank Group works with over 80 foundations around the world. This publication brings together examples of those partnerships. The report is not comprehensive, but an attempt to capture a sense of the breadth and extent of collaboration between the World Bank Group and the...

The biggest pension policy challenge faced by most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) today is low coverage of formal pension systems, both in terms of the proportion of workers participating in pension schemes and the proportion of the elderly receiving some kind of pension...

The decline in commodity prices that began with metals and agriculture four years ago—joined by crude oil in mid-2014—continued in 2015Q1 (Figure 1). Energy, metals, and agricultural prices were down 28, 11, and 5 percent, respectively, from the previous quarter. Increasing supplies, bumper...

To permanently end poverty and hunger by 2030, the world needs a food system that can feed every person, every day, everywhere; that can raise real incomes of the poorest people; that can provide safe food and adequate nutrition; and that can better steward the world's natural resources. Urgently,...

The 2014 World Bank Group Corporate Scorecard for the fall Annual Meetings is designed to provide a high-level and strategic overview of the World Bank Group's performance toward achieving the two goals. It is the apex from which indicators cascade into the monitoring frameworks of the three...

This report focuses on the risks of climate change to development in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and parts of Europe and Central Asia. Building on earlier Turn Down the Heat reports, this new scientific analysis examines the likely impacts of present day...