Renewable energy and energy efficiency projects continue to perform strongly in the World Bank Group (WBG) energy portfolio and are increasingly being mainstreamed in the WBG's energy lending. In fiscal 2007 a total of US$1,433 million supported 63 renewable energy and energy efficiency projects...

This policy note is a summary of the findings of a joint study of the Energy Research Institute of the National Development and Reform Commission, and the World Bank. The policy note is organized as follows: the next section, 'in the shadow of king coal,' provides a brief history of the...

The challenge for the development community is to exploit the links between energy and poverty to combat global poverty. The human scale of this challenge is huge. Today, 1.6 billion people lack access to electricity and 2.4 billion rely on traditional biomass for cooking and heating. Indoor air...

A Development Emergency: the title of this year's Global Monitoring Report, the sixth in an annual series, could not be more apt. The global economic crisis, the most severe since the Great Depression, is rapidly turning into a human and development crisis. No region is immune. The poor...

The Global Monitoring Report 2014/2015: Ending Poverty and Sharing Prosperity was written jointly by the World Bank Group (WBG) and the International Monetary Fund, with substantive inputs from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This year's report details, for the first...