Trade can dramatically improve women's lives, creating new jobs, enhancing consumer choices, and increasing women's bargaining power in society. It can also lead to job losses and a concentration of work in low-skilled employment. Given the complexity and specificity of the relationship between...

This report zooms into what lies behind the success or failure of teacher policies: how teachers experience these policies, and how systems scale and sustain these policies. The report argues that for policies to be successful, they need to be designed and implemented with careful consideration...

The internationalization of the Ecuadorian economy is necessary if the country is to successfully adopt a development model led by the private-sector. The Ecuadorian government is seeking to accelerate growth and sustain social progress by giving greater prominence to the private sector; it does...

The Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) crisis is unique and requires tough policy choices for managing the public sector wage bill to best achieve the difficult balance between fiscal consolidation, protection of lives and livelihoods, service delivery, and job restoration. In the emergency phase, the...

The outbreak was declared a pandemic by the WHO on March 11 and the epicenter of the crisis has moved from China and Korea to the US and Western Europe. Infections are also increasing at a rapid pace in WBG client countries, with large uncertainty about the extent to which many countries are...

The welfare and economic growth of Azerbaijan's development trajectory based on fossil fuel extraction has come at the expense of the environment, other non-oil industries, and human capital growth. Due to its lack of economic diversification, the country is highly vulnerable to transition...

The growth and impacts of plastic pollution have emerged as a major environmental challenge globally. Plastic pollution has a wide range of impacts on public health, ecosystems, biodiversity, and economies and can occur during each stage of the plastic lifecycle, from extraction of raw...