We revisit the relevance of the World Bank's Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA)against growth performance, with attention to possible biases arising from qualitative andquantitative changes in the CPIA methodology. The CPIA, introduced in the late 1970s, had aseries of extensive...

The Global Monitoring Report 2015/2016: Development Goals in an Era of Demographic Change details the progress toward the global development goals and examines the impact of demographic change on achieving these goals. Part I examines global development progress, the unfinished development...

The operations policy on Development Policy Lending (DPL), approved by the Board in August 2004, requires that the Bank systematically analyze whether specific country policies supported by an operation are likely to have "significant effects" on the country's environment, forests, and other...

What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...

This paper presents a review of studies that estimate the cost of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Although the Sustainable Development Goals provide useful benchmarks for fiscal authorities and donors, typical cross-country costing exercises can be misleading, for a variety of...

The World Bank Group (WBG) has focused on reducing the environmental impacts of its internal operations and improving corporate environmental practices since 2002, when the WBG President announced WBG's commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The objective of this document is to...

Rural accessibility is the only metric used in the Sustainable Development Goals to track progress toward better transport services in low- and middle-income countries. This paper estimates the rural accessibility index, defined as the proportion of the rural population who live within 2...

Cabo Verde's economic achievements over the last thirty years have been spectacular and are unprecedented on the African continent. These achievements are remarkable given the unique challenges the country faces due to its small size, lack of scale for production of goods and delivery of...

This poverty assessment focuses on the evolution of poverty and other social indicators in Ethiopia between 2010-11 and 2015-2016 (henceforth referred to as 2011 and 2016). Using data from a variety of sources, mainly the twinned household living standards surveys (HCES and WMS), the Ethiopia...