China's Belt and Road Initiative aims to improve connectivity between China and more than 70 countries through infrastructure investment and regional cooperation. The initiative has the potential to accelerate significantly the rate of economic integration and development in the region, as trade...

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...

This study uses loan-level data on syndicated lending to a large sample of developing countries between 1993 and 2017 to estimate the mobilization effects of multilateral development banks (MDBs), that is, their ability to crowd-in capital from private creditors. Controlling for a large set of...

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...

This paper explores the investments needed to achieve universal access to electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030, and the additional operation and maintenance costs these investments entail. It also explores the drivers of these costs, by exploring hundreds of scenarios that combine...

This paper provides an overview of research on out-of-pocket health expenditures, reviewing the various summary measures and the results of multi-country studies using these measures. The paper presents estimates for 146 countries from all World Bank income groups for all summary measures, along...

The Sustainable Development Goals recently adopted by the United Nations represent an important step to identify shared global goals for development over the next two decades. Yet, the stated goals are not as straightforward and easy to interpret as they appear on the surface. Review of the...

The paper deals with the economics of sustainability associated with the transformation of energy markets. It emphasizes the interrelations between technical changes and energy markets and how in turn the resulting transformations alter the sustainability of economic systems that are dependent...

Groundwater currently provides 98 percent of all the drinking water supply in Bangladesh. Groundwater is found throughout Bangladesh but its quality (that is, arsenic and salinity contamination) and quantity (that is, water storage depletion) vary across hydrological environments, posing unique...