With slowing global growth and increasing uncertainty clouding the global economic prospects,the Europe and Central Asia region faces a more challenging context than previously envisioned.Growth in the emerging markets and developing economies in the region slowed in 2018 and isprojected to...

In 2018, the World Bank launched the Human Capital Index (HCI), which is designed to highlight how improvements in current health and education outcomes will shape the productivity of the next generation of workers. The HCI measures the amount of human capital that a child born today can expect...

The Eastern Europe and Central Asia region has the world's fastestgrowing HIV epidemic. Although still concentrated, the epidemic has diversified, affecting several key populations in many countries. This change has increased the number of people in need, the ways the epidemic can spread, and...

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit human capital directly in Europe and Central Asia, adversely affecting both education and health. School closures may lead to learning losses equivalent to a third to a full year of schooling, and they are likely to exacerbate inequalities, by disproportionately...

The objective of this study is to assess the impact of the East-West Highway improvement program on Georgia's ability to access international markets. As highlighted extensively in the literature, improving transport infrastructure and the efficiency of the logistics sector can help countries...

This report is organized in four sections. Section one provides an overview of the context in which many ECA cities consolidated. This section includes a review of the key factors that shaped the urban systems of ECA, including a discussion of the implication of urbanizing under planned...

The objective of this report is to identify policies, financing and delivery mechanisms with the view of scaling-up thermal retrofit of existing residential and public buildings in Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland, and Romania. These two segments of the building sector are critical to national goals...

This paper shows that as the educational composition in the fifty-five to sixty-four year-old age bracket improved between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s, the effective retirement age rose rapidly in the Central and Eastern European region. This increase was fast enough to keep life...

John. J. McCloy, President of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, discussed the U.S. announcement of the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan). This ambitious plan must be economically successful. The inherent strengths of Europe give reasonable assurance of the...

FinTech has tremendous potential in the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region, given its high mobile phone and internet access levels and scope for increased use of digital payments. However, there are major regional differences between high-income and middle-income countries regarding access to...