Bangladesh has set up an ambitious target of attaining middle-income status by 2021. To achieve this objective, the economy needs to grow at a sustained rate of 7.5-8 percent annually and this would in turn require an increase in private investment to at least 26.6 percent of GDP from 22 percent...

Air transport plays an important role in fostering development, particularly in facilitating economic integration, generating trade, promoting tourism, and creating employment opportunities. It facilitates integration into the global economy and provides vital connectivity on a national,...

The lack of land connectivity among the Caribbean Island nations and the growing significance of the tourism sector as a key economic pillar have underscored the importance of improved air connectivity for economic growth and shared prosperity in the region. On average, tourism's contribution to...

The services sector has played an important role in the structural transformation of Poland, providing employment opportunities, and creating productivity growth. Close to 60 percent of employees now work in the services sector. Nevertheless, the sector's productivity lags that of other...

This study aims to provide guidance to the Government of Sierra Leone in how to translate investments in education into quality learning. It centers on teachers, the single most important predictor of the quality of an education system. Joyful, rigorous, and focused learning happens when...

This policy brief highlights the key messages for policy makers from the World Bank report "Seeing the Invisible: A Strategic Report on Groundwater Quality" (Ravenscroft and Lytton 2022a). This report and "A Practical Manual on Groundwater Quality Monitoring" (Ravenscroft and Lytton 2022b)...

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...

Myanmar exhibits poor health outcomes and lags regional peers. Myanmar's Human Capital Index (HCI) score is 0.47, compared to a regional average of 0.60. Every year, 2,000 pregnant women and 50,000 children die from preventable causes, and 29 percent of children under age 5 are stunted. While...