This engagement note provides a snapshot of financial development in the countries of the GulfCooperation Council (GCC), Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and identifies key areas of the financial sector reform agenda where the World Bank Group (WBG)...

Banking financial intermediation relative to the economy is low and declining. The depthof the Romanian banking sector is lagging both in terms of deposit and loan penetration. Cross-cutting factors such as poverty, rurality and informality form a set of constraints that still persist affecting...

This Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) comes at critical moment in Tunisia. Since the 2011 revolution and the promulgation of a new constitution in 2014, Tunisia has been navigating a difficult political transition. While there have been gains in poverty reduction, public trust in government...

The overarching objective of the Seoul Center for Finance and Innovation partnership was to improve and develop financial and private sectors in the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region by delivering better technical assistance and advisory services to EAP countries. To achieve this objective, the...

The Philippines increasingly emphasizes lifelong learning and skills mobility for labor productivity as an integral part of the country's growth strategy. The Philippine Development Plan 2017-2022 presents a series of activities to improve labor productivity through human capital investment....

This report presents a comprehensive diagnostic of the Palestinian Territories' workforce development (WfD) policies and institutions. The analysis is based on a World Bank research tool created under the Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) initiative and purposefully designed...

This report presents detailed findings of a teacher performance study in Lebanon, one of four studies carried out under the Research for Results (R4R) program, a partnership between the Lebanese Ministry of Education and Higher Education and Development Partners. The objective of the research...

Across the globe, the author see increasing interest in attracting, retaining, developing, and motivating great teachers. Student achievement has been found to correlate with economic and social progress. Recent studies have shown that teacher quality is the main school-based predictor of...

A new tool, SABER-teachers, aims to help fill this gap by collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, and disseminating comprehensive information on teacher policies in primary and secondary education systems around the world. SABER-Teachers is a core component of SABER (Systems Approach for Better...