China made impressive progress in developing renewable energy to provide access to clean energy and electricity to its predominantly rural population before the economic boom that followed the open door policy, by improving energy supply to the economy as the country industrialized and urbanized...

Successive waves of COVID-19 disrupted the Thai economy in the first half of 2021, but their impact was mitigated by recovering global demand and substantial fiscal support. After a second wave of COVID-19 infections began in late 2020, the government strengthened public health and social...

Several studies have identified problems in the DRC health sector, including: low budget allocation, high household expenditure, dependence on external funding, poor use of available resources, low budget execution, governance problems and a decentralization process that remains largely...

Mauritania, a country sparsely populated of 4.5 million people and a sustained growth of 60.4 percent in its urbanization rate, increasingly relies on enhancements in its transport connectivity among and within its urban areas to realize its economic potential and the improvement of its human...

The pandemic has dealt a major blow to the economy, but the government's quick policy responses have helped to cushion the impact, and a partial recovery is underway. In response to the improving conditions, many of the tax and regulatory relief measures extended at the onset of the crisis have...

Somalia has a triple challenge of low levels of labor force participation, low productivity, and high levels of poverty. Economic growth in Somalia has been low, subject to shocks; and thus, insufficient for job creation. Shocks to the economy have contributed to forced displacement, a dominance...

The objective of this report is to explore innovative financing instruments and approaches for catalyzing private sector financing to fill the climate-smart investment gap in cities. The report reviews the existing literature, highlights key barriers in scaling-up private investment in...

The Enabling Conditions for Urban Climate Finance Part 2 is a contribution of the World Bank to the State of Cities Climate Finance Report 2021. Part 2 analyzes enabling frameworks and presents solutions for mobilizing urban climate finance at scale to transition cities to low-carbon,...

Over the last decade, turkey has initiated several regulatory and institutional reforms to better mitigate and reduce disaster risks, with a focus on seismic risk. The Squatter (Gecekondu) Law No. 775 (1966) was the first regulatory effort to produce housing for low-income groups in Turkey, and...

The ongoing health and security crisis have partly undermined the benefits from past years of strengthening economic growth. Sustaining an upward trend over the recent years, real growth stood at 5.9 percent in 2019. However, it fell to 3.6 percent in 2020, because of the pandemic and...