These remarks, as prepared, were delivered by World Bank Group President David Malpass at the Eighth Ministerial Meeting of the Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Action, during the Annual Meetings on October 12, 2022. The remarks focus on major challenge of climate change and the global...

New shocks hit the Ugandan economy in 2022, just as it was recovering as the COVID-19 pandemic waned and related mobility restrictions were fully removed. Commodity price surges and disruptions to trade and supply chains because of the war in Ukraine worsened a global economy that was dragging...

This paper examines to what extent slowdowns in economic growth after natural disasters are accompanied by widening fiscal deficits and corresponding pressures on public debt. Empirical analysis based on exogenous measures of physical disaster intensity shows that natural disasters lead not only...

The economy has shown resilience to recent global shocks thus far, with output surpassing its pre-pandemic level in 2022 Q3, earlier than expected but trailing behind peers. Thailand's economic recovery, however, lagged that of its ASEAN peers, most of which returned to pre-pandemic levels by...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) can sometimes be perceived as a means for delivering infrastructure for free. A more nuanced but still inexact view is that they are a mechanism to overcome fiscal constraints. Some argue, perhaps rightly, that often governments enter PPP contracts without...

This study investigates the effects of public transfers and taxes on the wellbeing of children in Ethiopia. It applies the Commitment to Equity for Children methodology to examine the burdens of taxation and the benefits from government transfers and spending, and their differential wellbeing...

A large literature has documented that fiscal policy is procyclical in emerging markets and developing economies and acyclical/countercyclical in advanced economies. This paper analyzes fiscal procyclicality in commodity-exporting countries. It first shows that the degree of fiscal...

This paper studies the volatility of fiscal policy in a large sample of countries with a focus on emerging markets and developing economies and commodity exporters over 1990-2021. The findings show that fiscal policy has been more volatile in emerging markets and developing economies than in...

Colombia is one of the most unequal countries in the region and the world. Given the redistributive role of fiscal policy, this study uses recent data from the 2021 Integrated Household Survey to explore the impacts of taxes and spending on poverty and inequality in Colombia. The study...