Purpose - Egypt could face total water depletion by 2050 due to the current waterscarcity of aboutseven billion cubic meters. Climatic shocks worsen this crisis, alongside Ethiopia's unilateral construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). This has caused a stalemate, raising...

Social governance models of global value chains (GVCs) are criticized as being dominated by advanced economy multinational corporations (MNCs) and primarily focusing on civil society organizations (CSOs) from developed countries, marginalizing the local agency, knowledge, and needs of...

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed systemic vulnerabilities in financial markets and raised pressing questions regarding the resilience of technology and entrepreneurship under shock. This study investigates whether two innovation-intensive sectors, technology and pharmaceuticals, exhibited...

We present a micro-founded monetary model of the world economy to study international currency competition. Our model features "unipolar" equilibria, with a single dominant international currency, and "multipolar" equilibria, in which multiple currencies circulate internationally. Long-run...

In 2010, at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), an Intergovernmental Committee started its negotiations that notably aim at protecting traditional knowledge from fraudulent patents. On that same year, French company Chanel Parfums Beauté committed itself to combatting this...

As a cornerstone of the modern financial safety net, the Lender of Last Resort (LOLR) is essential in mitigating liquidity crises and containing financial contagion. However, during periods of economic stability, risk-taking incentives in the banking sector may undermine its effectiveness. Using...

This paper examines the impact of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure on the cost of capital for banks as well as financial technology companies in Europe, America, and Asia from 2010 to 2024. The study investigates how sustainability affects financing conditions in the two...

Global development policy is a particularly revealing field in which the Trump administration combines crude transactionalism with a high level of ideological commitment, namely an authoritarian libertarianism oriented toward elite interests. This is coupled with, at times, a chaotic absence of...

Global public goods (GPGs) are goods that are produced locally but have global effects. GPGs are essential for securing global development. The climate and biodiversity crises, pandemics, as well as fragility, conflict and violence are threatening livelihoods and well-being around the world, and...

Does the outbreak of a major international war change political discourse? Drawing on theories of political communication and elite cueing, identity salience, and threat perception, we hypothesize that the outbreak of a war of aggression by a major power increases the use of nationalist rhetoric...

Climate change is widely recognized as a driver of violent conflict, but its broader social effects remain less understood. Ignoring these dimensions risks a vicious cycle where climate policies might undermine socially just adaptation. Evidence is still limited on how climate shocks influence...

This background paper highlights the urgent need for climate‑resilient sanitation systems as cities face increasing climate‑related pressures. The growing impacts of extreme weather events expose the deep interconnections between sanitation and other essential urban systems, including water...

Systemic crises pose pressing threats and jeopardize economic growth and prosperity. These recurrent events disproportionately affect vulnerable households as well as micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (MSME), all of whose limited financial assets and restricted access to finance...

This brief presents the 2025 update of the GovTech Maturity Index (GTMI), offering a global snapshot of public sector digital transformation across 197 economies. The GTMI assesses four focus areas, Core Government Systems (CGSI), Online Public Service Delivery (PSDI), Digital Citizen Engagement...

Understanding the drivers of credit constraints is essential for fostering private sector development and firm growth. This study examines the channels through which electronic payments influence firm credit constraints across 101 economies. It explores heterogeneity at the firm and aggregate...

This paper, based on the Mattei Lecture that the author delivered at the 2025 Africa Growth and Opportunity–Research in Action Conference, argues that Africa can anchor a new model of growth—and bolster global resilience—by shifting from commodity dependence to value-added production and...

Pluralistic ignorance is a social norms phenomenon in which people mistakenly believe that their personal preferences are not what most people around them support or prefer. This misalignment can lead individuals to adjust their behaviors away from their preferences. Pluralistic ignorance can...

This note synthesizes the World Bank’s approach to supporting the Philippines in addressing the plastic waste crisis. As one of the largest contributors to marine plastic pollution globally, the Philippines is estimated to leak more than 0,3 million metric tons of plastic waste into the ocean...

IEG@50: Celebrating 50 Years of Independent Evaluation at The World Bank Group is a commemorative report marking five decades of independent evaluation across the World Bank Group. The report celebrates the legacy of the Operations Evaluation Department and its transformation into the...

This paper develops a functional and historical appraisal of finance. We start by proposing a taxonomy of three core, theory-driven functions of the financial system - intermediation, entrepreneurial, and accumulative - that coevolve throughout the history of capitalism. We build an empirical...

Industrial policy interventions have surged since 2020, increasingly driven by geopolitical concerns. The New Industrial Policy Observatory reveals over 36,000 interventions globally since 2009, enabling a systematic analysis of patterns and impacts. Industrial policies can improve products'...

The semiconductor industry comprises two distinct sectors: advanced chips for smartphones or data centers and less advanced ones for cars. While political and media attention focuses on advanced chips, European industry does not use them. NVIDIA and TSMC dominate the supply of the most advanced...

We demonstrate that foreign institutional ownership (FIO) is associated with stronger stock return sensitivity to the Global Financial Cycle (GFC), indicating greater global co-movement among stocks selected by FIOs compared to those not selected. We conjecture that this may be because (i) FIOs...

Energy security risks and private sector development are inherently intertwined and serve as pivotal determinants in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of the renewable energy (RE) industry, especially in emerging economies, where the transition to sustainable energy constitutes a critical...

Global warming remains one of the greatest threats to the sustainability of the planet. The literature is replete with studies investigating the economic effects of global warming with very little attention being paid to the financial ramifications. To this end, the present study attempts to...

Corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings are receiving growing attention in the current literature. However, most empirical studies fail to examine whether corporate ESG ratings are influenced by financial globalization (FG). This study offers a novel perspective by...

Formulating decarbonisation strategies with carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies, as well as integration of an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy into the core business of multinational companies, are highly debated research areas. The former would bring...