This paper presents the main findings of the 2017 survey on national development banks that the World Bank conducted in collaboration with the World Federation of Development Financing Institutions. Sixty-four development banks from different parts of the world, mainly from middle-income...

Sao Tome and Principe (STP), a small island nation of 215,000 people in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of Central Africa, is in many ways a country of great untapped wealth. One of Africa's least known countries, its striking volcanic landscape is home to virgin rainforests with rich...

Systematic Country Diagnostics (SCDs) analyze the most critical constraints and opportunities to ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity in a sustainable manner. The first SCD for Egypt was published in 2015. A lot has happened since then, so this SCD Update takes advantage of a...

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) reported over 30 million Coronavirus (COVID-19) cases and around 960,000 deaths as of May 2021. Official tracking data shows that Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina have the highest number of reported cases throughout LAC, which in turn is the region with among...

This country economic memorandum aims to support Niger's efforts to walk on a path conducive to a resilient and sustainable economic growth. It does so by attempting to answer the following five questions, each of which constitutes a separate chapter: (i) what were the salient structural...

Global growth is projected to be slightly faster in 2020 than the post-crisis low registered last year. While growth could be stronger if reduced trade tensions lead to a sustained reduction in uncertainty, the balance of risks to the outlook is to the downside. Growth in emerging market and...

Reforms spurred by accession to the European Union (EU) boosted productivity and integrated Romania into the EU economic space. Gross domestic product per capita rose from 30 percent of the EU average in 1995 to 59 percent in 2016. Today, over 70 percent of the country's exports go to the EU,...

One of the key objectives of this first SCD of the Republic of Congo is to serve as an essential input to the Country Partnership Framework. The SCD is not intended to carry out substantial new analytical work, but rather to draw upon and synthesize the existing evidence. A substantial amount of...

The objective of this report is to present a snapshot of the welfare landscape in Djibouti that will help stakeholders understand poverty's determinants. Exploiting data from the 2017 household expenditure survey, as well as administrative and geospatial data, it provides a detailed analysis of...