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Better Investment Outcomes in Viet Nam through Increased Public Investment Management Efficiency
No full textViet Nam’s long-term goal is to attain high-income status by 2045. Achieving a modern, industrialized and resilient economy with higher living standards will depend on well-designed government policy interventions, combined with well targeted, efficient and effective public expenditures. Among the latter, public investment will play a critical part in creating the environment for wealth creation and
social welfare improvements. However, it will not just be the volume of public investment that counts but also the quality, and this will become more important as time goes by. As diagnostic studies have shown, the quality of public investment is currently compromised by fragmentation, duplication and inefficiency. Overcoming these difficulties will be a major challenge in meeting Viet Nam’s development aspirations, which forms the broader context for the current Technical Report. In addressing the challenge of improving the quality of public investment, the Technical Report homes in on four potential hurdles that will need to be overcome: i) a complex and overlapping legal and regulatory framework for public investment management; ii) inefficiencies in managing the portfolio of
ongoing and planned investment projects through the medium-term investment plan; iii) the absence of a standardised methods and documents for assessing project quality prior to a funding decision; and iv) obstacles to mobilising official development assistance (ODA) in a timely way. The analysis in the Technical Report seeks to examine these four hurdles in depth and propose solutions
Strategic Review of Long-Term Care Services in Poland
No full textPoland has experienced a powerful demographic shift, driven predominantly by increased life expectancy, a sizable baby boomer generation nearing retirement, and persistently low birth rates. Poland is characterized by demographic and spatial disparities, where life expectancy differs significantly by gender and region, and age-informed income disparities are observed as older people face above-average poverty risks. In Poland, long-term care (LTC) is mostly provided informally – about 80 percent of the total, with formal care accounting for the remaining 20 percent – and the burden on informal and formal care services is set to increase. This report constitutes one of the products prepared by the World Bank at the request of the Ministers two Funduszy i Polityki Regionalej (MFiPR); it is situated in a broader program of policy reform and informed by an LTC vision document that outlines sweeping aspirations for Poland to achieve in relation to its obligations to its aging population
Enhancing Education Quality in the Western Balkans Based on Insights from the PIRLS 2021 and PISA 2022 Studies
No full textWestern Balkan countries are
consistent participants in international learning
assessments like the Program for International Student
Assessment (PISA) and Progress in International Reading
Literacy (PIRLS). This publication provides an analysis of
the recently published data of the PISA 2022 and PIRLS 2021
studies. This study identified four key areas where the
performance of Western Balkan education systems can be
improved. They include: (a) duration of learning in schools,
(b) teaching practices, (c) school preparedness, and (d) use
of smartphones in schools induced by COVID-related school
closures that serve as a major distractor from learning.
Based on the analysis, the publication provides policy
options and recommendations on advancing the education
systems of Western Balkan countries to improve learning
outcomes that are critically important for the future
well-being of students and the economic development of these countries
The Impact of Ethiopia’s Direct Seed Marketing Approach on Smallholders’ Seed Purchases and Productivity
No full textSeveral factors contribute to the limited use of improved seed varieties in Ethiopia. Among those, on the supply side, is the restricted availability of seeds in the volume, quality, and timeliness required by farmers, partly due to inadequate public and private investment in the sector. Beginning in 2011, the Government of Ethiopia introduced a novel experiment—the direct seed marketing approach—to reduce some of the centralized, state-run attributes of the country’s seed market and rationalize the use of public resources. Direct seed marketing was designed to incentivize private and public seed producers to sell directly to farmers rather than through the state apparatus. This study is the first quantitative evaluation of the impact of direct seed marketing on indicators of a healthy seed system: access to quality seeds and farm-level productivity. Using a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences approach suitable to handling variation in treatment timing, the study finds that direct seed marketing led to an increase of 15 percentage points in the proportion of farmers purchasing maize seed, an increase of 45 percent in the quantity of maize seed purchased per hectare, and an increase of 18 percent in maize yield. However, there are differences across crops, with the effects of direct seed marketing on wheat seed purchases and yields being statistically insignificant. These crop-specific differences in performance are likely explained by differences in the reproductive biology of maize (particularly maize hybrids) and wheat, which tend to incentivize commercial activity in hybrid maize seed markets more than in self-pollinating wheat or open-pollinated maize markets. These differences suggest a need for nuanced policy responses, institutional arrangements, and market development strategies to accelerate the adoption of improved varieties
Ethiopia Poverty and Equity Assessment
No full textEthiopia has seen many changes since
2016, which until now, has been the reference year for data
about the level and pattern of poverty in the country. The
narrative around poverty was that years of high growth
resulted in a significant reduction in poverty, but by less
than expected because growth was uneven between rural and
urban areas which received most of the gains from growth and
there was a slow shift of labor from agriculture into the
fast-growing segments of the economy. Since 2016, GDP per
capita growth has decelerated—to 4.6 percent during
2016-2022 compared to nearly 7.4 percent during
2010-2016—not least because of multiple crises, including a
global pandemic, droughts, locust infestation, conflict, and
market shocks. This Poverty and Equity Assessment (PEA)
updates the understanding of poverty and inequality in the
country, using new data collected from 2021. This data was
collected amidst security concerns, which posed challenges
during the data collection process. Despite these
challenges, data quality checks have verified that the
collected information is reliable and representative of the
country, excluding areas that were inaccessible, such as
Tigray. The PEA updates statistics on poverty rates,
inequality, the poverty profile, and identifies the drivers
of these trends (Part 1). It provides an in-depth
understanding of the key drivers of poverty in the country
(Part 2) and charts the course for reducing poverty in the
years to come (Part 3). Below are some high-level messages
drawn from the analysis presented in the seven chapters of
the report. Additional details are accessible in background
papers accompanying the report
Design of Partial Population Experiments with an Application to Spillovers in Tax Compliance
No full textThis paper develops a framework to
analyze partial population experiments, a generalization of
the cluster experimental design where clusters are assigned
to different treatment intensities. The framework allows for
heterogeneity in cluster sizes and outcome distributions.
The paper studies the large-sample behavior of OLS
estimators and cluster-robust variance estimators and shows
that (i) ignoring cluster heterogeneity may result in
severely underpowered experiments and (ii) the
cluster-robust variance estimator may be upward-biased when
clusters are heterogeneous. The paper derives formulas for
power, minimum detectable effects, and optimal cluster
assignment probabilities. All the results apply to cluster
experiments, a particular case of the framework. The paper
sets up a potential outcomes framework to interpret the OLS
estimands as causal effects. It implements the methods in a
large-scale experiment to estimate the direct and spillover
effects of a communication campaign on property tax
compliance. The analysis reveals an increase in tax
compliance among individuals directly targeted with the
mailing, as well as compliance spillovers on untreated
individuals in clusters with a high proportion of treated taxpayers
Protecting People, Fish and Food
No full textThis Handbook is for practitioners working in the social protection or fisheries sectors searching for innovative ways to promote sustainable fisheries and reduce human vulnerability. Amid a global decline in fish stocks, countries face challenges in reforming policies and implementing fisheries management measures that tend to impose short- to medium-term socioeconomic costs on fisheries workers. Given their role in managing risks through protecting people against shocks and transitions, as well as promoting better job opportunities, Social Protection and Jobs (SPJ) interventions have untapped potential to facilitate difficult fisheries reforms and management measures to promote sustainable and productive fisheries, with benefits for nature, climate, and people—including provision of food and nutrition. Focusing on the role of SPJ in the small-scale fisheries (SSF) sector, the Handbook offers practical knowledge to advance this agenda at the country level. It summarizes key concepts, challenges, and opportunities for SPJ to support productive and sustainable fisheries, how to collect and analyze data required to leverage these opportunities, and priorities moving forward
Linking Personal and Corporate Taxes
No full textThis note examines the effective income tax rates of top earners in Honduras,
using a novel approach that links personal and corporate income tax data.
This comprehensive income measure, achieved through collaboration with
the Honduras Tax Authority (SAR), reveals a crucial link between the design of
personal and corporate income taxes. The findings indicate that over 50% of total
comprehensive income for the top 0.05% of earners comes from undistributed
corporate profits, while distributed capital income accounts for less than 15%.
The effective tax rate (ETR) for the top 0.01% of earners hovers around 25%,
which is relatively flat compared to the significant drop observed in high-income
countries. This is attributed to Honduras’s flat corporate income tax rate of 25%
aligning with the highest marginal rate for personal income
Labor History and Contribution Density in the Pension System of the Dominican Republic
No full textThis paper estimates the proportion of workers who would meet the required contribution periods to access a contributory retirement pension in the Dominican Republic. Using microdata from labor histories, the paper proposes a survival model to estimate the hazard rates of entering and exiting the contributory state in the pension system. Furthermore, a Monte Carlo simulation is performed to project contributory histories. The results suggest that the transition rates are relatively high, averaging a probability of exiting the contributory (non-contributory) state of 7 percent (6 percent). Moreover, the hazard rate of transitioning to a different state is negatively associated with the worker’s duration in the current state. These effects are conditioned to the age and income level of the worker. Finally, a simulation of new labor histories estimates that slightly more than 20 percent of the workers would meet the requirement of 30 years of contributions by age 60, and this percentage would exceed 40 percent if the required years of contributions were reduced to 20
Evidence of a Non-Linear Relationship Driven by Crises
No full textA large body of literature studies the relationship between corruption and economic outcomes, including government revenue mobilization, but there is little evidence on how this relationship changes during times of crisis. Using a comprehensive panel dataset covering up to 194 countries in the period 1996 to 2020, we find evidence of a negative link between corruption and revenue that is amplified in times of crisis. The amplification appears to be driven by countries with lower average income levels, non-democratic governments, and higher natural resource dependency. Our findings are helpful in assessing different views of corruption offered in the literature. Overall, we find our results to be more consistent with a rent seeking view of corruption whereby, in times of crisis, corruption becomes more pervasive and government revenue declines. In contrast, we find no empirical support for the view that crises represent times of social improvement associated with increases in revenues