From The World Bank Group: Documents
and Reports Archive
From World
Development Reports:
Selected
World Development Indicators
-----------------------------------------The Complete World Development
Report Online
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World
Development Report Background Papers
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World Development Report 2016
The Digital Dividens
Digital technologies have spread rapidly in much of the world. Digital dividends—the
broader development benefits from using these technologies—have lagged behind. In many
instances digital technologies have boosted growth, expanded opportunities, and improved
service delivery. Yet their aggregate impact has fallen short and is unevenly distributed.
For digital technologies to benefit everyone everywhere requires closing the remaining
digital divide, especially in internet access. But greater digital adoption will not
be enough. To get the most out of the digital revolution, countries also need to work
on the “analog complements”—by strengthening regulations that ensure competition among
businesses, by adapting workers’ skills to the demands of the new economy, and by
ensuring that institutions are accountable.
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World Development Report 2015
Mind, Society and Behaviour
"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 realistic account of decision-making and behavior will make
development policy more effective. The Report emphasizes what it
calls 'the three marks of everyday thinking.' In everyday
thinking, people use intuition much more than careful analysis.
They employ concepts and tools that prior experience in their
cultural world has made familiar. And social emotions and social
norms motivate much of what they do. These insights together
explain the extraordinary persistence of some social practices,
and rapid change in others. They also offer new targets for
development policy. A richer understanding of why people save, use
preventive health care, work hard, learn, and conserve energy
provides a basis for innovative and inexpensive interventions. The
insights reveal that poverty not only deprives people of resources
but is an environment that shapes decision making, a fact that
development projects across the board need to recognize. The
insights show that the psychological foundations of decision
making emerge at a young age and require social support. The
Report applies insights from modern behavioral and social sciences
to development policies for addressing poverty, finance,
productivity, health, children, and climate change. It
demonstrates that new policy ideas based on a richer view of
decision-making can yield high economic returns. These new policy
targets include: the choice architecture (for example, the default
option); the scope for social rewards; frames that influence
whether or not a norm is activated; information in the form of
rules of thumb; opportunities for experiences that change mental
models or social norms. Finally, the Report shows that small
changes in context have large effects on behavior. As a result,
discovering which interventions are most effective, and with which
contexts and populations, inherently requires an experimental
approach. Rigor is needed for testing the processes for delivering
interventions, not just the products that are delivered."
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World Development Report 2014
Risk and opportunity. Managing risk for development
The past 25 years have witnessed unprecedented changes around the world—many of them for the better.
Across the continents, many countries have embarked on a path of international integration, economic
reform, technological modernization, and democratic participation. Although challenges and inequalities
remain, economies that had been stagnant for decades are growing, people whose families had suffered
deprivation for generations are escaping poverty, and hundreds of millions are enjoying the benefits
of improved living standards and scientific and cultural sharing across nations. As the world changes,
a host of opportunities arise constantly. With them, however, appear old and new risks, from the
possibility of job loss and disease to the potential for social unrest and environmental damage.
If ignored, these risks can turn into crises that reverse hard-won gains and endanger the social
and economic reforms that produced these gains. The solution is not to reject change in order to
avoid risk but to prepare for the opportunities and risks that change entails. Managing risks
responsibly and effectively has the potential to bring about security and a means of progress
for people in developing countries and beyond.
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World Development Report 2013:
Jobs
Moving Jobs to the Center Stage
Recent world developments have put jobs at the center of the policy
debate. The global
financial crisis has resulted in massive job losses in both emerging
and industrial countries. In
the latter, there is concern about a jobless recovery; in the former, a
comeback cannot hide
workers’ vulnerability to shocks. Political upheavals in the Arab world
highlight the discontent
of educated youth whose employment opportunities fall far short of
expectations. The political
upheavals could boost transparency and accountability in the region,
but if jobs do not follow
they could lead to greater instability.
These developments create a sense of urgency, but they remind us that
jobs are the
cornerstone of economic and social development. Most development work
is related to jobs,
even if we, as development practitioners, do not always articulate it
in that way. We approach
jobs from different angles: infrastructure development, competition,
innovation policies, or skills
upgrading. But we tend to do so in silos.
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World
Development Report 2012. Gender Equality and Development
The lives of girls and women have changed dramatically
over the past
quarter century. The pace of change has been astonishing in some areas,
but in others, progress toward gender equality has been limited—even in
developed countries.
This year's World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development
argues that gender equality is a core development objective in its own
right. It is also smart economics. Greater gender equality can enhance
productivity, improve development outcomes for the next generation, and
make institutions more representative.
The Report also focuses on four priority areas for policy going
forward: (i) reducing excess female mortality and closing education
gaps where they remain, (ii) improving access to economic opportunities
for women (iii) increasing women's voice and agency in the household
and in society and (iv) limiting the reproduction of gender inequality
across generations.
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World Development Report 2011
Conflict,
Security, and Development
With more than 1.5 billion people
living in countries affected by conflict, the
World Development Report 2011 (WDR) looks into the changing nature of
violence
in the 21st century. Interstate and civil wars characterized violent
conflict in the
last century; more pronounced today is violence linked to local
disputes, political
repression, and organized crime. The Report underlines the negative
impact of
persistent conflict on a country’s or a region’s development prospects,
and notes
that no low-income, conflict-affected state has yet achieved a single
Millennium
Development Goal.
The risk of major violence is greatest when high levels of stress
combine with
weak and illegitimate national institutions. Societies are vulnerable
when their
institutions are unable to protect citizens from abuse, or to provide
equitable
access to justice and to economic opportunity. These vulnerabilities
are exacerbated
in countries with high youth unemployment, growing income inequality,
and perceptible injustice. Externally driven events such as
infiltration by foreign
combatants, the presence of trafficking networks, or economic shocks
add to the
stresses that can provoke violence.
The WDR 2011 draws on the experiences of countries that have
successfully
managed to transition away from repetitive violence, pointing to a
specific
need to prioritize actions that build confidence between states and
citizens,
and develop institutions that can provide security, justice, and jobs.
Government
capacity is central, but technical competence alone is insufficient:
institutions and
programs must be accountable to their citizens if they are to acquire
legitimacy.
Impunity, corruption, and human rights abuses undermine confidence
between
states and citizens and increase the risks of violence. Building
resilient institutions
occurs in multiple transitions over a generation, and does not mean
converging
on Western institutional models.
The WDR 2011 draws together lessons from national reformers escaping
from
repetitive cycles of violence. It advocates a greater focus on
continuous
preventive action, balancing a sometimes excessive concentration on
postconflict reconstruction. The Report is based on new research, case
studies,
and extensive consultations with leaders and other actors throughout
the
world. It proposes a toolkit of options for addressing violence that
can be
adapted to local contexts, as well as new directions for international
policy
intended to improve support for national reformers and to tackle
stresses that
emanate from global or regional trends beyond any one country’s
control.
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2010 Development and Climate
Change
Thirty years ago, half the developing
world lived in extreme poverty—today, a quarter. Now, a much smaller
share of children are malnourished and at risk of early death. And
access to modern infrastructure is much more widespread. Critical to
the progress: rapid economic growth driven by technological innovation
and institutional reform, particularly in today’s middle-income
countries, where per capita incomes have doubled. Yet the needs remain
enormous, with the number of hungry people having passed the billion
mark this year for the first time in history. With so many still in
poverty and hunger, growth and poverty alleviation remain the
overarching priority for developing countries.
Climate change only makes the challenge more complicated.
First, the impacts of a changing climate are already being felt, with
more droughts, more floods, more strong storms, and more heat
waves—taxing individuals, firms, and governments, drawing resources
away from development.
Second, continuing climate change, at current rates, will pose
increasingly severe challenges to development. By century’s end, it
could lead to warming of 5°C or more compared with preindustrial times
and to a vastly different world from today, with more extreme weather
events, many fewer species, and whole island nations submerged. Even
our best efforts are unlikely to stabilize temperatures at anything
less than 2°C above preindustrial temperatures, warming that will
require substantial adaptation.
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2009 Reshaping Economic Geography
Spatial Disparities and Development Policy
Economic growth will be unbalanced, but development still can be
inclusive—that is the message
of this year’s World Development Report. As economies grow from low to
high income,
production becomes more concentrated spatially. Some places—cities,
coastal areas, and connected
countries—are favored by producers. As countries develop, the most
successful ones also
institute policies that make living standards of people more uniform
across space. The way to get
both the immediate benefi ts of the concentration of production and the
long-term benefi ts of a
convergence in living standards is economic integration.
Although the problems of economic integration defy simple solutions,
the guiding principle
does not have to be complex. The policy mix should be calibrated to
match the diffi culty of the
development challenge, determined by the economic geography of places.
Today, policy discussions
about geographic disparities in development often start and end with a
consideration of
spatially targeted interventions. The Report reframes these debates to
include all instruments for
economic integration—institutions, infrastructure, and incentives. The
bedrock of integration
efforts should be spatially blind institutions. As the challenges posed
by geography become more
diffi cult, the response should include connective infrastructure. In
places where integration is
hardest, the policy response should be commensurately comprehensive:
institutions that unite,
infrastructure that connects, and interventions that target.
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2008 Agriculture for Development
– The latest World Development Report calls for greater investment in
agriculture in developing countries and warns that the sector must be
placed at
the center of the development agenda if the goals of halving extreme
poverty and
hunger by 2015 are to be realized.
Titled ‘Agriculture for Development’, the report
says the agricultural and rural sectors have suffered from neglect and
underinvestment over the past 20 years. While 75 percent of the world’s
poor
live in rural areas, a mere 4 percent of official development
assistance goes to
agriculture in developing countries. In Sub-Saharan Africa, a region
heavily
reliant on agriculture for overall growth, public spending for farming
is also
only 4 percent of total government spending and the sector is still
taxed at
relatively high levels.
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2007 Development and the next
generation
With
1.3 billion young people now living in the developing world-the
largest-ever youth group in history-the report says there has never
been a better time to invest in youth because they are healthier and
better educated than previous generations, and they will join the
workforce with fewer dependents because of changing demographics.
However, failure to seize this opportunity to train them more
effectively for the workplace, and to be active citizens, could lead to
widespread disillusionment and social tensions.
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2006 Equity and Development (final version)
Inequity
within countries: individuals and groups - Equity from a
global perspectivey - Why does equity matter? - Equity and well-being -
Inequality and investment - Equity, institutions, and the development
process - Leveling the economic and political playing fields - Human
capacities - Justice, land, and infrastructure - Markets and the
macroeconomy - Achieving greater global equity
- Selected World Development Indicators
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2006 Equity and Development (draft) |
2006 Equity and Development (outline) |
2005 Improving the investment
climate(final version)
The
Investment Climate, Growth, and Poverty - Confronting the
Underlying Challenges - Tackling a Broad Agenda - Delivering the Basics
- Stability and Security - Regulation and Taxation - Finance and
Infrastructure - Workers and Labor Markets - Going beyond the basics -
Selective Interventions - International Rules and Standards - How the
International Community Can Help
- Selected Indicators: Measuring the Investment Climate & Selected
World Development Indicators
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2005 Improving the investment
climate(draft) |
2004 Making Services work for
poor people
Services
can work for poor people but too often they fail - Governments
should make services work - The framework for service provision -
Clients and providers - Citizens and politicians - Policymakers and
providers - Basic education services - Health and nutrition services -
Drinking water, sanitation, and electricity - Public sector
underpinnings of service reform - Donors and service reform
- Selected World Development Indicators
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2003 Sustainable Development in
a dynamic economy
Achievements
and Challenges - Managing a Broader Portfolio of Assets -
Institutions for Sustainable Development - Improving Livelihoods on
Fragile Lands - Transforming Institutions on Agricultural Land -
Getting the Best from Cities - Strengthening National Coordination -
Global Problems and Local Concerns - Pathways to a Sustainable Future
- Selected World Development Indicators
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2002 Building Institutions for
Markets
Building
Institutions: Complement, Innovate, Connect, and Compete - Farmers -
Building more secure and transferable rural land institutions -
Governance of Firms - Financial Systems - Political Institutions and
Governance - The Judicial System - Competition - Regulation of
Infrastructure - Norms and Networks - The Media
- Selected World Development Indicators
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2000/2001 Attacking Poverty
The
Nature and Evolution of Poverty - Causes of Poverty and a Framework for
Action - Growth, Inequality, and Poverty - Making Markets Work Better
for Poor People - Expanding Poor People - Making State -Institutions
More Responsive to Poor People - Removing Social Barriers and Building
Social Institutions - Helping Poor People Manage Risk - Managing
-Economic Crises and Natural Disasters - Harnessing Global Forces for
Poor People - Reforming Development Cooperation to Attack Poverty
- Selected World Development Indicators
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1999 Entering the 21st Century
New
directions in development thinking - The changing world - The world
trading system: the road ahead - Developing countries and the global
financial - Protecting the global commons - Decentralization:
rethinking government - Dynamic cities as engines of growth - Making
cities livable - Case studies and recommendations - Selected Indicators
on Decentralization, Urbanization, and the Environment
- Selected World Development Indicators
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1998 Knowledge for Development
The
Power and Reach of Knowledge - Acquiring Knowledge - Absorbing
Knowledge - Communicating Knowledge - Information, Institutions, and
Incentives - Processing the Economy's Financial Information -
Increasing Our Knowledge of the Environment - Addressing Information
Problems That Hurt the Poor - What Can International Institutions Do? -
What Should Governments Do? - Appendix: International Statistics on
Knowledge
- Selected World Development Indicators
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1997 The state in a changing
world
The
evolving role of the state - Refocusing on the effectiveness of the
State - Securing the economic and social fundamentals - Fostering
markets: liberalization, regulation and industrial policy - Building
institutions for a capable public sector - Restraining arbitrary state
action and corruption - Bringing the state closer to people -
Facilitating international collective action - The challenge of
initiating and sustaining reforms - The agenda for change - Appendix:
selected indicators on public finance
- Selected World Development Indicators
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1997 The state in a changing world
(overview) |
1996 From plan to market
Understanding
transition - Patterns of reform, progress, and outcomes -
Liberalization, Stabilization, and growth - Property rights and
enterprise reform - People and transition - Legal institutions and the
rule of law - Building a financial system - Toward better and slimmer
government - Investing in people and growth - Transition and the world
economy - Conclusions, and the unfinished agenda
- Selected World Development Indicators
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1996 From plan to market. Selected World Development Indicators |
1995 English
PDF Workers in an Integrating World - World
Development Indicators |
1994 English
PDF Infrastructure for Development - World
Development Indicators |
1993 English
PDF Investing in Health - World Development
Indicators |
1992 English
PDF Development and the Environment - World
Development Indicators |
1991 The Challenge of Development
The world economy in transition - Paths to development - Investing in
people - The climate for enterprise - Integration with the global
economy - The macroeconomic foundation - Rethinking the state -
Priorities for action
- World Development Indicators
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1990 Poverty
Diverging
trends in the world economy - What do we know about the poor?
- Progress on poverty: lessons for the future - Promoting economic
opportunities for the poor - Delivering social services to the poor -
Transfers and safety nets - The 1980s: shocks, responses, and the poor
- International factors in reducing poverty - Prospects for the poor
- World Development Indicators
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1989 English
PDF Financial Systems and Development - World Development Indicators |
1988 English
PDF Opportunities and Risks in Managing the World Economy
- Public Finance in Development - World Development Indicators |
1987 English
PDF Barriers to Adjustment and Growth in the World Economy
- Industrialization and Foreign Trade - World Development Indicators |
1986 Agriculture
The
hesitant recovery and prospects for sustained growth - Trade and
pricing policies in world agriculture - Agricultural policies in
developing countries: exchange rates, prices, and taxation -
Agricultural policies in developing countries: marketing and
stabilization, subsidies, and policy reform - Agricultural policies in
industrial countries
- World Development Indicators
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1985 English
PDF International Capital and Economic Development
- World Development Indicators |
1984 English
PDF Recovery or Relapse in the World Economy?
- Population Change and Development Population Data Supplement
- World Development Indicators |
1983 English
PDF World Economic Recession and Prospects for Recovery
- Management in Development - World Development Indicators |
1982 English
PDF International Development Trends - Agriculture and Economic Development
- World Development Indicators |
1981 English
PDF National and International Adjustment - Annex World Development Indicators |
1980 English
PDF Part I Adjustment and growth in the 1980s -
Part II Poverty and human development - Annex World Development Indicators
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1979 The Development
Experience, 1950-75 - 2
Development
Prospects and International Policy Issues - Structural Change and
Development Policy - Urbanization: patterns and Policies - Approaches
to Poverty Alleviation - Growth and Equity: the Record - Sustaining
Economic Growth in a Changing World - Development in Primary Producing
Countries - Policies to Increase Productive Employment and Alleviate
Poverty
- Annex: World Development Indicators
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1978 The Development
Experience, 1950-75 - 1
The
Development Experience, 1950-75 - International Policy Issues -
Prospects for Growth and Alleviation of Poverty - Low Income Asia -
Sub-Saharan Africa - Development Priorities in the Middle Income
Developing Countries - Conclusions
- Annex: World Development Indicators
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Public Disclosure Authorized
Address to the U.N. Economic and Social Council by
Mr. Robert S. McNamara, President of the World Bank,
the International Finance Corporation, and the
International Development Association,
December 5, 1968: United Nations, N.Y.
Our common enterprise is to drive back poverty, to lift living standards and to enhance the dignity of man. At present, the best one can say is that
the prospects for.that enterprise are mixed. Only slow progress is being made toward enabling the less developed countries of the world to earn more in world trade. The availability of international finance for development programs still lags behind the growing ability of the poor countries of the world to put capital to good use.
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