A set of case studies was prepared as part of the World Bank’s Water Global Practice initiative 'Wastewater. Shifting paradigms: from waste to resource' to document existing experiences in the water sector on the topic.
This paper uses household surveys from 89 countries to look at gender differences in poverty in the developing world. In the absence of individual-level poverty data, the paper looks at what can we learn in terms of
With the adoption of a Climate Change Action Plan, this brief outlines concrete actions for the World Bank, describing how it intends to scale up climate action, integrate climate change across its operations, and work more closely with others, through collective action and partnerships, to implement new and innovative solutions.
This paper develops the concept of ‘action space’ as the range of possible destinations to which a migrant can realistically move at a given point in time and, intimately linked to this, the set of possible livelihoods at destination.
With a population of 16 million, Karachi is the largest megacity in Pakistan. Despite being a large city that is home to many, it has seen a substantial decline in quality of life and economic competitiveness in recent decades.
Surface irrigation is a common pool resource characterized by asymmetric appropriation opportunities across upstream and downstream water users. Large canal systems are also predominantly managed by the state. This paper studies water allocation under an irrigation bureaucracy subject to corruption and rent-seeking.
Management of common-pool resources in the absence of individual pricing can lead to suboptimal allocation. In the context of irrigation schemes, this can create water scarcity even when there is sufficient water to meet the total requirements.
The European Union (EU) Regular Economic Report (RER), is an annual publication of the World Bank Group and covers economic developments, prospects, and economic policies in the European Union. The report finds that while growth is back on track, the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution is lagging behind in the EU’s recovery.
For a long time, the urbanization and development discourse has coincided with a focus on economic growth and big cities. Yet, much of the world's new urbanization is taking place in smaller urban entities (towns), and the composition of urbanization may well bear on the speed of poverty reduction.
This paper estimates the elasticity of elephant poaching with respect to prices. To identify the supply curve, the authors observe that ivory is a storable commodity and hence subject to Hotelling's no-arbitrage condition. The price of gold, one of many commodities used as stores of value, is thus used as an instrument for ivory prices.
