The COVID-19 pandemic was a disaster. It led to at least 6 million deaths, caused tremendous economic and social disruption, and unwound decades of development gains in vulnerable lower-income countries. While health care workers played a critical role in saving people’s lives, they faced a much higher risk of infection and death, particularly in the […]
Climate change has the potential to erase much of the progress we have made to improve the lives of people experiencing poverty. Climate shocks and environmental degradation threaten livelihoods, food security, and infrastructure, increase violence, and can result in poorer life chances, especially for people in resource-constrained contexts. Last month, the World Bank’s Development Impact and Data Groups, together […]
Ambitious measures to protect the Amazon that saw deforestation fall by more than 70 percent after a 2004 peak have become less effective: since 2012, deforestation has been rising. How can this be reversed? A mix of complementary policies can address this complex problem. The expanding arc of deforestation has been fueled by local economic incentives, regional and […]
According to the 2023 World Bank Economic Update for Mali, entitled “Strengthening Financial Resilience of Pastoralists to Drought,” Mali’s economy showed signs of resilience despite ECOWAS sanctions, high food inflation, and parasite infestations affecting cotton production. GDP growth is estimated at 1.8% driven by the recovery of food agriculture and the resilience of the gold […]
Defying the trend toward deglobalization and economic fragmentation, African nations are uniting to form a free trade area. The project promises to offer the rest of the world a renewed message of hope on the benefits of removing – not erecting – barriers to free flows of goods, services, investment, and ideas across borders. The […]
The global pandemic of 2020-2022 had truly unprecedented consequences. Along with other crises, such as the war in Ukraine, it plunged the global economy into a steep slowdown that dealt the biggest setback to global poverty in decades. But global responses to the pandemic were equally unprecedented. During the crisis, countries employed toolkits that combined large fiscal, […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching effects on economies worldwide, with many countries experiencing negative GDP growth in 2020 and downgraded growth forecasts for 2021 and 2022. To mitigate the economic setbacks caused by the pandemic, developing countries sought financial assistance from international partners, which contributed to higher external debt levels. For example, between 2019 and […]
Societies and economies are experiencing deep and intertwined structural changes that may unsettle the perceptions European citizens have of their economic and employment security. Such labour-market perceptions are likely in turn to alter people’s political positions. For instance, those worried by labour-market competition may prefer greater social protection to compensate for the accrued risk, or […]
When the European Commission in April 2021 proposed an AI Act to establish harmonised EU-wide harmonised rules for artificial intelligence, the draft law might have seemed appropriate for the state of the art. But it did not anticipate OpenAI’s release of the ChatGPT chatbot, which has demonstrated that AI can generate text at a level […]
Credit information sharing is seen as a critical policy tool to overcome market frictions and inefficiencies. Examinging the change in the reporting threshold of Brazil’s public credit registry in 2012, this column documents an expansion in access to credit for newly included borrowers. While the additional lending comes primarily from new private bank-firm relationships, incumbent […]
