Economics & Development

The Business Insolvency indicators of the Business Ready project provide a more balanced and nuanced view than the approach to measuring insolvency taken by the discontinued Doing Business project. Findings from Business Ready 2025 reveal key disparities in performance across and within economy income levels. While higher-income economies tend to score better, notable exceptions demonstrate that strong regulatory frameworks and institutional frameworks can enhance the business insolvency environments regardless of income. The data also highlights a widespread public services gap, where weak institutional and operational infrastructure for insolvency proceedings fails to leverage otherwise relatively stronger regulatory frameworks. Moreover, the ease with which firms can comply with regulations and use public services lag behind regulatory strength - resulting in an efficiency gap.

The objective of the Strengthening Government Capacity for Fiscal Reform Implementation Project for Ukraine is to enhance the Government's capacity to plan and finance recovery and reconstruction. The 30 million dollars Additional Financing (AF) from the URTF will establish the conditions necessary for the consolidation of the IT capacity under MoF and address urgent needs to strengthen cybersecurity, establish the foundational analytics and AI capabilities to exploit the value of PFM data, and ensure system reliability and business continuity across the PFM domain. The AF and Project restructuring will expand project component 4 to support Ukraine’s revised PFM IT Strategy, align with the Government’s Recovery and Reconstruction Plan, and support EU accession objectives. The AF will strengthen OPF’s capacity and finance: the IT transformation unit and the competence centers; preparation of IT systems consolidation; preparing the foundational infrastructure for a private cloud; creation of a Security Operations Center (SOC); development of data governance and responsible AI use frameworks and supporting protocols for all PFM Institutions; and the establishment of a centralized data warehouse, which will allow piloting advanced analytics. These investments will mitigate cybersecurity and operational risks across PFM institutions, increase fiscal resilience and EU accession readiness, and lay the groundwork for broader modernization to be supported in subsequent investment projects. In addition to the creation of these critical capabilities, the AF will support technical assessments of legacy systems at STS and SCS, to prepare for migration and modernization strategies and associated business process reengineering.

Economic growth is the key driver of poverty reduction. At the same time, economic growth still increases greenhouse gas emissions, which are expected to increase poverty in the future. To quantify the combined effect of these two mechanisms, this paper introduces emissions-adjusted poverty, a new measure that sums a country’s poverty with the future global poverty that the country’s emissions will create. The measure reaches zero when poverty is eliminated within a country and its emissions hit net-zero. Its key parameter is a human-centric analogue to the social cost of carbon, quantifying how current emissions raise future global poverty. The paper estimates that each kiloton of carbon dioxide emitted today adds two person-years of extreme poverty globally between now and 2100. Despite large uncertainties, the paper identifies two robust insights. For poor countries, poverty reduction from economic growth outweighs future global poverty added from the emissions associated with this growth, even with historical carbon intensities. In contrast, for many rich countries, the climate-related cost of growth outweighs the benefits unless the carbon intensity of growth falls. In all countries, the poverty gains from economic growth are larger with lower carbon intensities.