The world is faced with challenges in all three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental. For instance, more than 1 billion people are still living in extreme poverty, income inequality within and among many countries has been rising and, at the same time,...

This IEG evaluation brings a fresh perspective to the debate by assessing the development effectiveness of the Bank's recent work. It presents evidence -- including views from the client countries themselves -- about the outcomes of the Bank's support to individual countries over the past 12...

Home to almost 500 million people, roughly half of whom earn less than a dollar a day, fragile states, until recently known in the World Bank as Low-Income Countries Under Stress (LICUS), have attracted increasing attention. The Bank identified 25 such countries in fiscal 2005 based on their...

This evaluation provides an early-stage assessment of the Sustainable Development Finance Policy (SDFP) of the International Development Association (IDA), which went into effect July 1, 2020. A steep rise in debt vulnerabilities in IDA-eligible countries over the past decade highlighted...