This handbook has been developed to provide instruction on the design and implementation of incentives for resource-efficiency purposes. The target audience is World Bank staff and stakeholders who are supporting the implementation of a resource-efficiency program in a country on behalf of the...

Russia saw strong growth in 2021, with momentum weakening late in the year. Growth will slow as Russia battles COVID-19 and elevated inflation. Globally, environmental sustainability is becoming central to the economic agenda. The challenge for Russia is to fundamentally transform its economic...

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...

Limited access to finance, particularly bank credit, is a long-standing hurdle for Small and Medium Enterprise (SMEs), with varying severity of financing constraints across countries. SMEs face higher transaction costs and higher risk premiums since they are typically more opaque and have less...

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was living a learning crisis. Before the pandemic, 258 million children and youth of primary- and secondary-school age were out of school. And low schooling quality meant many who were in school learned too little. The Learning Poverty rate in low-and...

This retrospective examines how the World Bank's strategic use of climate-related trust funds has enabled it to play an outsized role in catalyzing climate action worldwide for nearly 30 years. By looking back at the history of climate and carbon finance, with a focus on the pioneering role of...

This study provides an early assessment of the impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) on e-commerce platforms and digital financial services, identifying the opportunities, good practices, and key challenges that have emerged in different regions. The focus of the study is to evaluate the impact of...

The global COVID-19 vaccination campaign, the largest public health initiative ever undertaken, presents challenges unprecedented in scale, speed and specificities, especially in low and middle-income countries. In November 2020, anticipating the availability of safe and effective vaccines for...

In the face of the global economic crisis caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the World Bank delivered the largest crisis response in its history. This evaluation assesses the Bank Group's early response to the economic crises caused by COVID-19, and examines interventions over the 15...

Following the magnitude (Mw) 7.8 Turkiye-Syria Earthquake on February 6, 2023 and the Mw 6.3 earthquake on February 20, 2023, the World Bank carried out a remote, desk-based assessment of the physical damages in Syria using the Global RApid post-disaster Damage Estimation (GRADE) methodology....