This engagement note provides education sector policymakers with an overview of the status of education across the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and offers insight into the World Bank's strategies and approaches to supporting education reform in the GCC region. While the Gulf...

The report is structured as follows. The next section introduces the theoretical notion of a 'virtual economy' and explains how it is distinct from other Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-related economic activities. The following sections describe in detail the main areas of the...

James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank Group, discussed the global knowledge partnership, which is central to the Bank's work. The digital revolution brings opportunity. Knowledge can be transferred from developed to developing countries, but also that developing countries can exchange...

This paper investigates, both theoretically and empirically, the role of factional competition and local accountability in explaining the enormous but puzzling county-level variations in development performance in Fujian province of China. When the Communist armies took over Fujian from the...

Robert B. Zoellick, President of the World Bank Group, spoke on the theme of modernizing multilateralism and learning from military history. As the world moves toward multiple poles of growth, the multilateral institutions will need to play a role in connecting developed and developing countries...

The world economy has experienced four global recessions over the past seven decades: in 1975, 1982, 1991, and 2009. During each of these episodes, annual real per capita global gross domestic product contracted, and this contraction was accompanied by weakening of other key indicators of global...

The paper offers an overview of some key conceptual aspects associated with the rise of global value chains (GVCs). It outlines a series of alternative interpretations and definitions of what the rise of GVCs entails, and it traces the implications of these alternative conceptualizations for the...

This paper attempts to quantify the impact of economic policy uncertainty on overall trade and trade linked to global value chains. Using new data on policy uncertainty for 18 countries and 24 years, it finds a statistically significant negative impact of policy uncertainty on overall trade...

This paper uses data on directional trade flows and Regional Trade Agreements (RTA) to i) estimate the effects of RTA on trade flows and ii) assess the importance of Global Value Chains for these effects. Based on a Difference-in- Difference identification strategy, we find that RTAs are...

The global economy has witnessed a decline in inflation and an increase in inflation synchronization since the early 1980s. This paper investigates the relationship between inflation synchronization and trade integration, and documents the strong link between inflation co-movement and Global...