In January 2019, Uzbekistan started a new farm restructuring1. It is said to seek to optimize the use of farmland by increasing the size of farms producing wheat and cotton, reallocating land to more efficient farmers and even clusters, and improving crop rotation options. This is not the first...

Worldwide, Vocational Education and Training (VET) is receiving increasing attention, particularly as a potentially useful instrument to address high unemployment rates among youth. In 2016, the World Bank started providing technical assistance to the self government of Poland's Swietokrzyskie...

Little research attention has been paid to documenting and analyzing attempts of education systems moving quickly and at scale to provide online learning when all or many schools are closed. Related 'good practices' are considered rare, and on the whole, activities and initiatives of these sorts...

Despite being an upper middle income country, South Africa's high inequality and the long-lasting legacies of apartheid mean that the country is faced with numerous development challenges, many of which are characteristic of countries with much lower incomes. This paper focuses on social...

South Africa's social assistance system represents a major intervention by government in addressing the deprivation amongst the country's population. The system is extensive in terms of both the number of people it covers, directly and indirectly, as well as in terms of the amount of scarce...

South Africa is set to emerge from the crisis weaker than it had been going into it. However, this Economic Update argues that the reasons for low growth and high unemployment do not lie in the government's crisis response, which has generally been sound. Growth is expected to reach 4 percent in...

The South African financial system has weathered the shock of COVID-19 but faces growing risks emanating from a weak macroeconomic outlook. The pandemic crisis hit South Africa hard, with nonresident capital outflows accelerating and the domestic and global slowdown precipitating a6.4 percent...

The Southern African Customs Union (SACU) is the most unequal region in the world. While there has been some progress in recent years, inequality has remained almost stagnant in the most unequal countries. Using an innovative framework, this report provides a systematic and comprehensive...

Access to international markets plays a critical role in an economy's growth and development. Trade facilitation, the simplification, modernization, and harmonization of export and import processes has therefore emerged as an important issue for countries, as is reflected in the World Trade...