The World Bank Environmental and Social Framework sets out the Bank's commitment to sustainable development, through a policy and a set of environmental and social standards designed to support Borrowers' projects, with the aim of ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity.
... Vea más + This framework converts aspirations and principles into practical, project-level applications within the context of the Bank's mandate as set out in its Articles of Agreement. It comprises: a) a vision for sustainable development, setting out the Bank's aspirations regarding environmental and social sustainability; b) the World Bank Environmental and Social Policy, setting out the mandatory requirements that apply to the Bank; c) the Environmental and Social Standards, together with their annexes, setting out the mandatory requirements that apply to the Borrowers and projects; d) the Environmental and Social Procedures, setting out requirements mandatory for both the Bank and the Borrower on how to implement the Policy and the Standards; and e) non-mandatory guidance and information tools, to support Bank and Borrower implementation of the Policy and the Standards.
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The Joint Ministerial Committee of the Boards of Governors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on the Transfer of Real Resources to Developing Countries, the Development Committee, held its eighty-ninth meeting on April 12, 2014, in the Preston Auditorium of the World Bank in Washington, DC.
... Vea más + The meeting consisted of a single session, preceded by an informal Ministerial-level lunch for Members only on the same day. Members circulated their written statements in advance and these are part of this document. Also included is a note by the International Monetary Fund Managing Director distributed ahead of the meeting. The meeting started at 3:15 p.m. with opening statements by Dr. Kim, President of the World Bank Group, and Ms. Christine Lagarde, Managing Director, International Monetary Fund, and ended at 5:30 p.m. It was chaired by Mr. Marek Belka, President, National Bank of Poland. The Agenda (Annex A) was adopted at the beginning of the meeting, followed by a discussion of the agenda topic: a paper entitled 'growth in the post-crisis global economy: policy challenges for developing countries'. In addition to the above discussion topic, a paper entitled 'progress report on mainstreaming disaster risk management in World Bank Group Operations' was submitted to the Committee as a background report. Ministers commented on these documents in their written statements to the Development Committee. The Communique (Annex B) was adopted at the end of the meeting and records the salient points and outcome of the Ministerial discussion.
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This paper proposes a method for estimating distribution functions that are associated with the nested errors in linear mixed models. The estimator incorporates Empirical Bayes prediction while making minimal assumptions about the shape of the error distributions.
... Vea más + The application presented in this paper is the small area estimation of poverty and inequality, although this denotes by no means the only application. Monte-Carlo simulations show that estimates of poverty and inequality can be severely biased when the non-normality of the errors is ignored. The bias can be as high as 2 to 3 percent on a poverty rate of 20 to 30 percent. Most of this bias is resolved when using the proposed estimator. The approach is applicable to both survey-to-census and survey-to-survey prediction.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6962 JUL 01, 2014
The paper assesses the impact of overall inequality, as well as inequality among the poor and among the rich, on the growth rates along various percentiles of the income distribution.
... Vea más + The analysis uses micro-census data from U.S. states covering the period from 1960 to 2010. The paper finds evidence that high levels of inequality reduce the income growth of the poor and, if anything, help the growth of the rich. When inequality is deconstructed into bottom and top inequality, the analysis finds that it is mostly top inequality that is holding back growth at the bottom.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6963 JUL 01, 2014
A large fraction of the total supply of paper is produced with technologies that have serious adverse consequences on the environment and cause significant health problems, such as cancer.
... Vea más + This paper reports on how Internet adoption affects paper consumption. The study used country-level panel data on Internet penetration and paper consumption disaggregated into various paper categories. The empirical strategy is to use fixed-effect models to study whether countries with faster Internet penetration growth have experienced faster declines in paper consumption. The analysis finds that Internet penetration significantly decreases aggregate paper consumption. Further, the estimates show that Internet growth reduces consumption for the paper categories that are more likely to be affected by the diffusion of the Internet (paper used to print newspapers and books and magazines), whereas the growth of the Internet does not have a statistically significant impact on a paper category unlikely to be affected by the Internet (such as sanitary paper).
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6965 JUL 01, 2014
This paper shows how Dutch disease effects may arise solely from a shift in demand following a natural resource discovery. The natural resource wealth increases the demand for non-tradable luxury services due to non-homothetic preferences.
... Vea más + Labor that could be used to develop other non-resource tradable sectors is pulled into these service sectors. As a result, manufactures and other tradable goods are more likely to be imported, and learning and productivity improvements accrue to the foreign exporters. However, once the natural resources diminish, there is less income to purchase the services and non-resource tradable goods. Thus, the temporary gain in purchasing power translates into long-term stagnation. As opposed to conventional models where income distribution has no effect on economic outcomes, an unequal distribution of the rents from resource wealth further intensifies the Dutch disease dynamics within this framework.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6966 JUL 01, 2014
Open Data initiatives are transforming how governments and other public institutions interact and provide services to their constituents. They increase transparency and value to citizens, reduce inefficiencies and barriers to information, enable data-driven applications that improve public service delivery, and provide public data that can stimulate innovative business opportunities.
... Vea más + As the gatekeepers of official statistics, National Statistics Offices (NSOs) produce many datasets that could typically comprise the foundation of an Open Data program. They may also have relationships with other data producing agencies in the national statistical system and have expertise in dealing with the many technical and data quality issues attendant in publishing data. In short, they are extremely well placed to make a valuable contribution to Open Data initiatives. Despite these advantages, NSOs do not always feature prominently in government-sponsored Open Data programs and they may be missing an important opportunity to expand the use and re-use of the data they produce. The goal of this working paper is to better understand the opportunities and challenges that Open Data presents to NSOs and to identify what steps and solutions are needed to enable NSOs to play a valuable role in national or sub-national Open Data initiatives.
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