Economics & Development

Экономическая история Узбекистана за последние семь лет представляет собой захватывающее описание переходного периода и реформ, но страна еще не получила полную экономическую отдачу от этих усилий. В этом отчете показано, как стимулировать более быстрый экономический рост за счет улучшения функционирования внутренних рынков и интеграции с международными рынками. В основе экономического успеха Узбекистана должен лежать полный жизни, динамичный и растущий частный сектор, который создает рабочие места и открывает новые экономические возможности. Для развития частного сектора необходимы два условия. Во-первых, интеграция внутренних рынков: государственная политика и вмешательство на рынках факторов производства, товарных рынках и государственной инфраструктуре имеют решающее значение для этой интеграции. Такая политика определяет производственный выбор предприятия — что, как и где производить — и распределение товаров внутри страны. Эти действия правительства должны быть тщательно продуманы, чтобы способствовать эффективному распределению ресурсов между предприятиями и отраслями, а также потоку товаров по всей стране. Во-вторых, интеграция с внешними рынками: когда торговые барьеры снижаются, а затраты минимизируются, отечественные предприятия могут получить многочисленные выгоды от более широкого доступа к внешним рынкам. Недавно открытые экспортные рынки могут предложить огромный потенциал для расширения при одновременном снижении затрат за счет эффекта масштаба. Доступ к более широкому спектру недорогих и качественных ресурсов может позволить работать более производительным и более конкурентоспособным фирмам, в то время как конкуренция из-за границы еще больше усиливает динамизм и инновации частного сектора.

Citywide Inclusive Sanitation (CWIS) aims to shift the urban sanitation paradigm to focus on the whole sanitation service chain and access for all, especially the poor, and promotes a range of solutions—both onsite and sewered, centralized or decentralized—tailored to the realities of the world's burgeoning cities. CWIS focuses on service provision and its enabling environment rather than on just building infrastructure. Where sewers are indeed used as part of a city’s response to urban sanitation, a reoccurring challenge is commonly found: despite their proximity to trunk sewerage infrastructure, too many households choose not to connect to the sewers for various social, economic, and/or related reasons. Fortunately, successful programs around the world have tackled this challenge and have managed to connect the unconnected using both conventional and nonconventional sewerage approaches. This guide documents those experiences and identifies key issues that require consideration and processes to be adopted when planning, designing, and implementing programs that focus on maximizing household connections to new or expanded sewerage networks and when undertaking post-investment activities to ensure that all households connect to existing sewerage networks. The guide focuses on households, but the outlined approach also applies to businesses, industries, and other nondomestic customers that discharge wastewater directly to the environment.

This report summarizes 24 Access to Information (AI) requests received by the World Bank in January 2025. The requests covered a broad spectrum of topics, including World Bank-financed projects, health and social development initiatives, environmental and climate-related programs, procurement and reporting requirements, historical publications, and institutional policies. Several requests sought documents, reports, and archival materials related to health, mining, poverty reduction, tourism, carbon finance, and development financing, while others focused on project evaluations, metadata, website services, and complaint mechanisms. The requests also reflected interest in World Bank operations across multiple countries, including Tanzania, Indonesia, Romania, India, Brazil, El Salvador, and Liberia, demonstrating continued demand for access to development information, research publications, and project-related records.

FY24, spanning July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024, marked the first year of implementation of the second DDP strategy cycle, DDP 2.0. The Partnership’s nascent portfolio consisted, as of June 30, 2024, of 27 operational, knowledge, and convening grants (the DDP grant portfolio). Activities supported by the FY24 DDP grant portfolio, along with lending operations approved in FY24 and informed by DDP grants, benefited 38 countries. DDP funded a total of 37 reports, including flagship publications, diagnostics, policy notes, and research papers, which were disseminated through 34 events. Activities supported by DDP grants engaged a total of 240 stakeholders, and 21 trainings and workshops were delivered to key counterparts. A total of 2,100 individuals participated in training events, workshops and dissemination events. Deliverables funded by DDP grants informed 10 policies, regulations, laws and strategies as well as 12 key WBG strategy documents. DDP client-facing grants were instrumental in supporting policy and regulatory reforms that created or expanded telecommunications markets by improving competition, enhancing regulatory practices, and addressing market failures causing high prices and otherwise limiting access to mobile and fixed broadband. In FY24, DDP grants supported the adoption of eight reforms. Cumulatively, DDP-supported deliverables informed a total of seven lending operations approved by the World Bank Boad of Directors in FY24 across three regions, including three DPFs and four IPFs, with a total financing of $627 million.

Ghana’s education system comprises basic (that is, kindergarten, primary, and lower secondary), secondary (that is, upper general secondary/technical/vocational), and tertiary levels, as well as complementary or non-formal education. The Ministry of Education (MoE) provides policy guidance and systemic oversight with its Education Strategic Plan (ESP), which sets out medium- and long-term goals, objectives, and targets. The Ghana Education Service (GES) is the MoE’s implementing agency at the pre-tertiary levels. The Council for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (CTVET) sets out policy for and provides oversight of technical and vocational education and training (TVET), while the Ghana TVET Services (GTVETS) oversees implementation of TVET at the pre-tertiary level. The Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) provides oversight for tertiary institutions, including technical universities. Basic and secondary public education is free for all beneficiaries, while public tertiary education is tuition-free but entails other fees.

Understanding the fiscal policy stance as it relates to the business cycle and whether an economy is in recession or overheating is critical for policymakers to effectively support output stabilization. Smoothing fluctuations in the business cycle is one of the main purposes of fiscal policy. Countercyclical or a-cyclical fiscal policies attenuate the amplitude of business cycle fluctuations by lowering taxes or increasing expenditure in downturns, thereby increasing aggregate demand (and vice versa in upturns). When the fiscal policy stance is procyclical, this tends to amplify the business cycle, with expansionary fiscal policy during economic upswings and fiscal retrenchment adopted during economic contractions. This guidance note provides a step-by-step guide to conducting a standardized and rigorous assessment of the cyclicality of fiscal policy. Section 2, presents a brief conceptual overview and review of common approaches that are used to undertake cyclicality analysis, complemented by references to key literature. Section 3 presents a step-by-step approach to implementing cyclicality analysis, discussing multiple options and the tools that have been developed to streamline this analysis. Section 4 provides a practical application using the PFR Visualization Tool. Section 5 concludes with relevant policy implications.

To ensure a comprehensive discussion of teacher policies, this report uses the SABER (Systems Approach for Better Education Results) Teachers Framework, a World Bank conceptual framework designed to help assess the quality of teacher policies. The report seeks to identify actionable priorities for strengthening PNG’s education system as it relates to its teachers. This report also draws on findings from a recent Country Economic Memorandum, Budget Brief 2023, the May 2024 Papua New Guinea Economic Updated: Invest in Your Children as well as “Fixing the Foundation”, a regional World Bank report. This report contains a wide range of recommendations across each of the eight policy lever areas and these will be discussed at length throughout the report.