The World Bank Group has come a long way in supporting structural reforms in its member countries. The most remarkable feature of its long 35 years and continuing journey has been its ability to listen, learn and adjust over time. It learnt relatively quickly that reform ownership is a necessary...

Top-down economic models, such as computable general equilibrium models, are the common tools to assess the economic impacts of climate change policies. However, these models are incapable of representing the detailed technological characteristics of the sources of greenhouse gas emissions. The...

This paper analyzes analyze the impact of deregulatory reforms in India during the 1990s, which eliminated compulsory industrial licensing, on manufacturing firms' investment decisions. The paper finds an economically and statistically significant positive effect of delicensing on investment. It...

This report is an output of the Better Regulation for Growth Program between the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and IC, the Investment Climate Advisory Services of the World Bank Group. The reports identifies a set of minimum...

The effect of structural reforms on growth in Europe and Central Asia is assessed by looking separately at each supply-side channel: capital, labor, and productivity, with the last estimated using the stochastic frontier approach. By controlling for the interaction with the economic cycle, the...

Tobacco taxes are considered an effective policy tool to reduce tobacco consumption and produce long-run benefits that outweigh the costs associated with a price increase. Through this policy, some of the most adverse effects and economic costs of smoking can be reduced, including shorter life...

A model of Covid-19 transmission among locations within a country has been developed that is (1) implementable anywhere spatially-disaggregated Covid-19 infection data are available; (2) scalable for locations of different sizes, from individual regions to countries of continental scale; (3)...

This paper uses the 2010/11 Income and Expenditure Survey for South Africa to analyze the progressivity of the main tax and social spending programs and quantify their impact on poverty and inequality. The paper also assesses the redistributive effectiveness of fiscal interventions given the...

It is increasingly recognized that young people are central to issues of crime and violence in South Africa. While research, policy and programming have historically focused on children and adults, there is a growing emphasis on youth as both victims and perpetrators of violence. This report...

Under increasing budget pressure, Morocco carried out an extensive set of subsidy reforms in 2014 and is planning for further reforms for 2015-2017, which will eliminate most consumers' subsidies. This paper evaluates (ex post) the 2014 reforms and simulates (ex ante) the impact on household...