Economics & Development

The Executive Directors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Boards of Directors of the International Finance Corporation and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency met on September 17, 2026, to consider strategic matters. The meeting, chaired by the Managing Director, Operations, brought together Executive Directors, Alternates, and senior officers and staff, including representatives from the World Bank Group Corporate Secretariat, Legal, and regional leadership. The Directors discussed the joint International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, International Finance Corporation, and Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency Country Partnership Framework for Thailand for the period fiscal year 2027 to fiscal year 2032, as outlined in documents R2026-0211, IFC/R2026-0311, and MIGA/R2026-0112 and related addenda. The session concluded with the adjournment recorded at 10:41 a.m.

The September 2026 update to the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP) incorporates new data, as well as revisions to the data underlying the global poverty estimates. This technical note documents these changes and explains the methodological reasons behind them. The PIP database has been extended to include four additional economy-years bringing coverage to more than 2,500 welfare distributions across 172 economies. Only one estimate from a previously published survey was revised in this round. Finally, given the availability of recent household survey data, global and regional poverty estimates are reported through 2024, with model-based nowcasts extending to 2026. The September 2026 PIP update presents the poverty and inequality data underlying the forthcoming World Bank’s Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2026.

This paper examines the prevalence and effectiveness of public sector reforms promoting performance-based incentives and greater autonomy in public administrations in Sub-Saharan Africa. Inspired by the New Public Management paradigm, these reforms have been widely adopted despite limited systematic evaluation of their results. The paper draws on data and information on the design, implementation, and performance of World Bank–financed public sector reform projects in Sub-Saharan Africa implemented between 2010 and 2023, complemented by four qualitative in-depth case studies. The analysis shows that over one-third of World Bank–financed public sector reform projects during this period included at least one New Public Management intervention. The performance of these interventions has, however, been uneven across contexts and reform types. Only 40 percent of the interventions were fully implemented. Performance varied considerably across reform types, with performance-based public financial management reforms performing comparatively better than agencification and performance-based pay reforms. The findings suggest that weaknesses in reform design—including insufficient attention to institutional capacity and implementation constraints as well as political economy dynamics—have contributed to these mixed outcomes. Case studies further show that New Public Management reforms are particularly difficult to sustain in fragile and neo-patrimonial contexts. The paper argues that the diffusion of New Public Management–inspired approaches has often outpaced the available evidence on their effectiveness and highlights the need for more context-sensitive and evidence-based approaches to public sector reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa.