The paper investigates determinants of civic participation in local budget processes in rural areas in the Kyrgyz Republic by using data from the Life in Kyrgyzstan survey, conducted in 2012.
... Vea más + The analysis of the data suggests that although civic awareness and interest in local budget processes is relatively high, the participation rate in local budgeting processes is low. The paper also shows that interest, awareness, and participation are positively associated with the age, education, employment, risk-taking attitudes, trust, and social capital of respondents. The paper documents that unawareness and lack of participation are largely related to being female, of non-Kyrgyz ethnic origin, inactive in the labor market, recent internal migrants, and residents of communities with poor infrastructure.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS7154 JAN 01, 2015
IAD is an independent and objective assurance and advisory function designed to add value to the World Bank Group (WBG) by improving the operations of WBGs entities.
... Vea más + It assists the Bank Group in accomplishing its objectives by bringing a systematic and disciplined approach to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of the organizations governance, risk management, and control processes. IAD also focuses on raising awareness of risks and controls, providing advice to management in developing control solutions, and monitoring the implementation of managements corrective actions to mitigate risks and strengthen controls. IADs work is carried out in accordance with the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA)s International Professional Practices Framework.
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The Amazon rainforest, the world's largest and most biodiverse, represents a global public good of which 15 percent has already been lost. The worldwide value of preserving the remaining forest is today unknown.
... Vea más + A "Delphi" exercise was conducted involving more than 200 environmental valuation experts from 36 countries, who were asked to predict the outcome of a survey to elicit willingness to pay for Amazon forest preservation among their own countries' populations. Expert judgments of average willingness-to-pay levels, per household per year, to fund a plan to protect all of the current Amazon rainforest up to 2050, range from $4 to $36 in 12 Asian countries, to near $100 in Canada, Germany, and Norway, with other high-income countries in between. Somewhat lower willingness-to-pay values were found for a less strict plan that allows a 12 percent further rainforest area reduction. The elasticity of experts' willingness-to-pay assessments with respect to own-country per capita income is slightly below but not significantly different from unity when results are pooled across countries and income is adjusted for purchasing power parity.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS7143 DEC 01, 2014
Incorporating qualitative methods into the evaluation of development programs has become increasingly popular in recent years, both for the distinctive insights such approaches can bring in their own right and because of their capacity to complement the strengths -- and where necessary correct some of the weaknesses -- of quantitative approaches.
... Vea más + Some initial work deploying mixed methods has been undertaken in the assessment of investment climate reforms, but considerable room for expansion exists. This paper summarizes some of the key principles and practices underpinning mixed methods evaluations in development, highlight some notable examples of how such work has been conducted (and the particular contributions it has made), and offers some guidelines for those seeking to increase the sophistication and utility of qualitative methods in the evaluation of investment climate reforms.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS7145 DEC 01, 2014
The World Bank conducted this study of the potential for Open Transport Data in St. Petersburg as part of the preparations for the Improvement of Urban Transport Systems Project in Russia.
... Vea más + It is principally intended for use by the St. Petersburg transportation authorities, the Federal Ministry of Transport and the Project Implementation Unit in considering and implementing open data as part of the new systems being developed as part of the Project. There are already good examples of transport information systems in St. Petersburg. Most of this information is not currently available for external use, but in the cases where it has been made available, for instance by the Agency 'Organizer of Transportation' for real-time bus information; this has been welcomed and well-used by citizens and authorities, despite some current limitations. Within the St. Petersburg component of Improvement of Urban Transport Systems Project there are plans for more transport information systems, including parking information, traffic management and passenger information systems. The conclusion of this report is that the social, economic and environmental benefits of the St. Petersburg project would be enhanced by the greater availability and use by travelers and others of the information collected by these planned systems. Making the information available as Open Transport Data and allowing it to be used for development of innovative third-party applications would be a relatively easy and cost-effective way of leveraging the planned investment to ensure that the information reached the largest number of travelers. Doing so will maximize the desired behavioral changes that drive the benefits and improve the overall return on investment.
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Although there is a general agreement in the literature of the importance of social-emotional skills for labor market success, there is little consensus on the specific skills that should be acquired or how and when to teach them.
... Vea más + The psychology, economics, policy research, and program implementation literatures all touch on these issues, but they are not sufficiently integrated to provide policy direction. The objective of this paper is to provide a coherent framework and related policies and programs that bridge the psychology, economics, and education literature, specifically that related to skills employers value, non-cognitive skills that predict positive labor market outcomes, and skills targeted by psycho-educational prevention and intervention programs. The paper uses as its base a list of social-emotional skills that employers value, classifies these into eight subgroups (summarized by PRACTICE), then uses the psychology literature -- drawing from the concepts of psycho-social and neuro-biological readiness and age-appropriate contexts -- to map the age and context in which each skill subset is developed. The paper uses examples of successful interventions to illustrate the pedagogical process. The paper concludes that the social-emotional skills employers value can be effectively taught when aligned with the optimal stage for each skill development, middle childhood is the optimal stage for development of PRACTICE skills, and a broad international evidence base on effective program interventions at the right stage can guide policy makers to incorporate social-emotional learning into their school curriculum.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS7123 NOV 01, 2014
The term quot;open dataquot; is generally understood to be data that are made available to the public free of charge, without registration or restrictive licenses, for any purpose whatsoever (including commercial purposes), in electronic, machine-readable formats that ensure data are easy to find, download and use.
... Vea más + National Statistics Offices (NSOs) have the potential to play a pivotal role in the implementation of open data initiatives. As producers and curators of data, the objective of making high quality data more accessible and usable is consistent with their guiding principles. NSOs indicate, in research conducted in support of this report, that one of the difficulties they encounter is that the technology they use to publish - or electronically distribute - data for public use is not compatible with open formats. They also indicate that common software packages used for open data portals do not accommodate the data formats and metadata they produce. Two key concerns related to data dissemination products are addresses: (1) Can such products designed primarily for NSOs satisfy requirements for an open data initiative?; and (2) Can such products designed primarily for open data satisfy the requirements of NSOs? Furthermore, data reuse, both by data experts and the public at large, is key to creating new opportunities and benefits from government data. The following recommendations are made to improve the overall utility of data publication platforms to NSOs and the open data community: improve technical documentation; ensure public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and endpoints are interoperable; presentation of metadata and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) must conform to W3C standards; natural language search and metadata faceting should be standard; structural metadata and hypercube support are core NSO requirements; dashboards and visualisations are necessary for user engagement; and develop data engagement tools for improving data-quality and reuse.
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An Enterprise Survey is a firm-level survey of a representative sample of an economys private sector. The surveys cover a broad range of business environment topics including access to finance, competition, corruption, crime, gender, infrastructure, innovation, labor, performance measures, and trade.
... Vea más + The World Bank has collected this data from face-to-face interviews with top managers and business owners in over 130,000 companies in more than 135 economies.
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This document is prepared for the South Sudan National DDR Commission (NDDRC) by the World Banks Transitional Demobilization and Reintegration Program (TDRP).
... Vea más + The goal of the document is to provide guidance to users of NDDRCs Information Counselling and Referral System (ICRS) and step by step instructions to perform common tasks. The expected users of the system are ICRS caseworkers, registration operators, monitoring and evaluation staff, field staff, DDR commission managers, supervisors, and information and technology staff. The overall aim of an ICRS is to provide vital briefing, orientation, casework, counselling, and referral for ex-combatants throughout the DDR process in support of their return to civilian life. This process should start as soon as possible during demobilization and continues throughout the reintegration process. This manual refers exclusively to the ICRS data infrastructure system including the software and database which is developed to strengthen the service delivery to ex-combatants and the DDR program overall by securely and accessibly capturing and sharing information as needed by various users. This document intends to be one stop reference to using the ICRS system and is to be kept up to date with the evolution of the ICRS itself.
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Knowledge, learning, and innovation are one of eight objectives that will be monitored in the Bankapos;s new strategy. The independent evaluation group (IEG) is conducting a program of learning and results evaluations to promote a better understanding of how the World Bank acquires, captures, and transfers knowledge and learning in its lending operations, and what scope there is for improving.
... Vea más + The objective of the program is to delineate attributes of effective learning in World Bank lending. These attributes refer to learning into lending (inputs into project design); learning while lending (feedback and modifications of design and implementation while the project is underway); and learning from lending (lessons from the project that were transmitted to other projects). The evaluation program will assess how the Bank can become better at generating, accessing, and using learning and knowledge in its lending operations. It acknowledges the importance of the feedback from knowledge to learning and from learning back to enhanced knowledge. The report is organized as follows: chapter one gives approach and context. Chapter two explores two essential aspects of learning - knowledge exploitation and knowledge exploration and the factors influencing them. Chapter three examines the contribution of mentoring. Chapter four addresses the extent to which incentives, leadership, and culture are aligned to promote learning in lending. Chapter five considers the implications of the reportapos;s findings, for the Bankapos;s change process, for IEG, and for the design of the second evaluation in IEGapos;s learning and results series.
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Support for economic reforms has often shown puzzling dynamics: many reforms that began successfully lost public support. This paper shows that learning dynamics can rationalize this paradox because the process of revealing reform outcomes is an example of sampling without replacement.
... Vea más + This concept challenges the conventional wisdom that one should begin by revealing reform winners. It may also lead to situations in which reforms that enjoy both ex ante and ex post majority support will still not come to completion. The framework can be used to explain why gradual reforms worked well in China (where successes in Special Economic Zones facilitated further reform), whereas this was much less the case for Latin American and Central and Eastern European countries.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6973 JUL 01, 2014
Individualsapos; lives are filled with decisions. Until recently, most economists have assumed that people choose among objective, well-understood options.
... Vea más + As a result, economists and policy makers have paid very little attention to the decision-making process itself. Yet recent advances in the behavioral sciences challenge the simple apos;rationalapos; view of human decision making in which individuals have boundless ability to process information and make optimal decisions given their fixed preferences. It is now clear that what individuals perceive as their apos;choicesapos; is subjective and malleable. Possibly irrelevant factors, such as default options, can have powerful effects on choice. A societyapos;s historical legacy may have persistent effects on how alternative choices are interpreted and valued. The social relationships and social norms in a community may make some choices apos;thinkableapos; or apos;imaginable,apos; whereas others that are also feasible are not. In short, economics has paid insufficient attention to the psychological, social, and cultural underpinnings of decision making. This report enlarges our understanding of decision making with the aim of expanding policymakersapos; toolkits and improving the effectiveness of standard policies. By recognizing that individuals have limited capacities to process information, that they use mental short cuts and mental models to interpret and evaluate their choices, and that individual have social preferences, the report provides an enriched view of human decision making that has significant implications for the scope, design, and implementation of development policy.
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This guide offers a comprehensive understanding of the design and implementation of an Open Cities mapping project for both practitioners in the field and those interested in a higher-level understanding of the process.
... Vea más + The guideapos;s content is based on experience in implementing the initial Open Cities projects in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka as well as on previous mapping project experience. Where relevant, it provides relevant examples from those projects in the text and full case studies at the end of guide. The Open Cities Project launched its efforts in three cities: Batticaloa, Sri Lanka; Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Kathmandu, Nepal. These cities were chosen for: 1) their high levels of disaster risk; 2) the presence of World Bank-lending activities related to urban planning and disaster management that would benefit from access to better data; and 3) the willingness of government counterparts to participate in and help guide the interventions. Chapter 2, quot;Project Design and Preparation,quot; covers how a project design process begins: by identifying partners, clarifying a projectapos;s objectives and scope, assembling a team of managers and mappers, and assessing the necessary resources for mapping. Chapter 3, quot;Getting Started,quot; then describes the steps after the initial planning stage: how to locate an appropriate workspace, assess equipment costs, and prepare staff training. Chapter 4, quot;Implementation and Supervision,quot; takes a practical look at data collection techniques from both the organizational and technical perspectives. It also addresses common challenges and mechanisms for quality control and reporting. Finally, chapter 5 examines the lessons learned from previous Open Cities projects and considers future improvements to the overall project design.
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Documento de trabajo 91832 JUL 01, 2014
Forni, Marc; Haack, Jeff; Soden, Robert; York, Dustin; Sommerville, Ryan; Deparday, Vivien