Myanmar exhibits poor health outcomes and lags regional peers. Myanmar's Human Capital Index (HCI) score is 0.47, compared to a regional average of 0.60. Every year, 2,000 pregnant women and 50,000 children die from preventable causes, and 29 percent of children under age 5 are stunted. While...

This report aims to map poverty and inequality in Sudan and would be representative of the 18 states and 131 localities of Sudan. The poverty mapping technique is based on a small area estimation (SAE) technique developed by the World Bank to derive estimates of geographic poverty and...

Carbon prices are needed to incorporate climate change costs into economic decision making. Carbon pricing should be included as part of a broader arsenal of tools to achieve domestic climate targets, but it is not a silver bullet: other policy instruments and investments (for example, public...

This study includes three main sections that have been organized in a chronological order within this report: the first one, "What can we learn from education emergency responses in low- and middle-income countries?" analyzes the emergency education responses to the COVID-19 pandemic of over 120...

Human capital development is imperative to achieve sustainable economic growth in Iraq. At the heart of Iraq's human capital crisis is a learning crisis, which is exacerbated by effects of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis on education service delivery. The low levels of human capital...

The pandemic severely disrupted economic activity in Tanzania, and the World Bank's latest firm-level data suggest that the situation had only modestly improved by the end of 2020. New data sources show that COVID-19 continues to weigh heavily on employment and income. Data for the first quarter...

Procurement of commonly used items is a challenge for government agencies. If the items are repeatedly purchased in one-off fashion, so that the total volume is significant, there may be potential problems like loss of economy of scale, loss of efficiency, lower competition, and no long-term...

The COVID-19 pandemic adds further challenges to the development of capital markets. For many emerging markets and developing economies challenges have intensified because of (i) the deterioration in the macroeconomic environment, including the contraction of the economies, and larger fiscal...

This approach paper considers the role of public finance to build, protect and utilize human capital as countries seek to recover from the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis and lay a foundation for inclusive, resilient and sustainable development. The paper defines the problem in...