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Restructuring as a Reflex for Outcomes
Full text linkThis paper examines whether project restructuring improves World Bank project performance. Using panel data on Implementation Status and Results ratings, it combines two-way fixed effects with the PanelMatch estimator to address concerns that restructurings are endogenously timed. Restructurings consistently raise Implementation Status and Results ratings, and these gains persist across successive reporting cycles. Timing and scope both matter: early restructurings generate durable improvements, while late interventions yield shorter-lived boosts bounded by project horizons. Level I restructurings produce larger effects than Level II adjustments. These patterns show that adaptation works best when it is timely and substantive. More broadly, restructuring should be viewed not as a reactive correction but as an ordinary mechanism of adaptive management—a structured learning process that transforms performance signals into actionable design updates, reinforcing institutional flexibility and credible mid-course correction
Who You Text Matters : Gendered Effects of Text Message Framing and Social Influence on Youth Training Enrollment
Full text linkThis study evaluates a randomized trial in Côte d’Ivoire, implemented by the Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL), which tested whether varying the content and recipient of SMS reminders can increase enrollment among young people who had pre-registered for a skills training program. Messages sent only to young people had no effect. However, when both youth and a nominated contact - often a parent or spouse - received reminders, enrollment shifted in ways that were strongly gendered: the same message can encourage young women while discouraging young men, and male contacts exerted greater influence over decisions than female contacts. Message framing also mattered. Emphasizing long-term career benefits reduced enrollment among men, while highlighting that the program was free discouraged participation among both genders. The only positive effect occurred when career-focused messages were sent to women and their male contacts. These findings underscore the importance of trust, perceived credibility, and social dynamics in shaping program take-up, highlighting the need for careful diagnostic work and context-aware communication strategies when engaging youth and their networks
How Much Do Commodity Exporters Share Risk?
Full text linkCommodity-exporting countries face important challenges in shielding their economies from commodity price volatility. In an ideal world, a country would buy and sell foreign assets to insure itself against volatility caused by the destabilizing economic impact of gross domestic product fluctuations over time. The literature on the topic, which has mainly focused on risk sharing across advanced economies, has found a puzzlingly low amount of risk sharing. Using a sample of 110 countries between 1995 and 2019, this paper finds that commodity exporters share 46 percent of their risk as a group internationally, significantly more so than non-commodity exporters, which share about 33 percent of their risk. The greater the volatility of commodity terms of trade, the more a country shares risk internationally. Consequently, energy and metals exporters share risk more than agricultural exporters. Government saving is the main risk-sharing mechanism in commodity-exporting and non-exporting countries, although it is more important for commodity exporters. Commodity-exporting countries are also more likely to smooth gross domestic product fluctuations through net purchases of assets abroad, while non-commodity exporters tend to self-insure through procyclical domestic investment
Emerging Successes in Accelerating Agricultural Productivity Growth in West Africa
Full text linkThis paper examines agriculture growth performance in 20 countries in West and Central Africa over 2001–23. Most countries in the region continued to depend on land expansion to raise agricultural output. However, two countries in West Africa, Ghana and Senegal, stand apart. Over these two decades, Ghana and Senegal achieved rapid improvements in yields for a wide range of crops and agro-ecological zones. Agricultural labor productivity and total factor productivity also grew at rates comparable to those of the rest of the world. The paper investigates policy choices that may have contributed to accelerating and sustaining productivity growth. Compared to other countries in the region, Ghana and Senegal deepened rural infrastructure, invested significantly more in agricultural research, extension, and development, and expanded access to financial services. These factors helped achieve wider adoption of improved inputs and technologies and stimulate new economic activity along commodity value chains
Assessing the Welfare Impact of Tariff Liberalization for Women: Data and Analytical Framework
No full textThis paper presents a dataset and an analytical framework to study the welfare effects of tariff changes on women. The data is an extension of the Household Impacts of Tariffs (HIT) dataset, which contains harmonized household survey data for 54 low and lower middle-income countries. It includes highly disaggregated information on household budget and income shares for 53 agricultural products, wage labor income, non-farm enterprise sales and transfers as well as spending on manufacturing and services for each percentile of the real income distribution. The Household Impact of Trade for Women (HIT_W) data presented here differentiates expenditure and income shares for households with male heads, households with female heads, and households with different female demographic compositions. The analytical framework delivers formulas that can be used to measure the impacts of changes in tariffs on household real incom
Moving beyond Time Poverty: Measuring Women’s and Men’s Time-Use Agency
No full textEconomic research on time use has traditionally focused on the total time individuals spend across different activities. However, less is known about time-use agency, or the ability to make strategic choices on allocating one’s time. This paper presents the findings from a novel, representative time-use study in Malawi, where men’s and women’s self-reported time use—collected continuously via a pictorial smartphone app—was complemented with a time-use agency survey module to quantitatively measure their ability to reallocate their time flexibly. The analysis reveals that women are 20 percentage points more likely than men to report inflexibility on being able to adjust the timing of activities across nearly all activity domains, including agriculture, unpaid domestic work, transport, leisure, and personal care. Women spend a significantly higher share of total daily time in the domains they report as non-flexible, while men are more likely to report non-flexibility in leisure on its own, or in combination with other daily activities. The share of non-flexible daily time is negatively associated with women’s desire for additional paid hours and their probability to look for work. Among women, intrahousehold differences (women’s minus men’s) in the share of non-flexible daily time are also associated with lower share of time in leisure, higher likelihood of being underweight, and weaker land rights. Overall, time-use flexibility (agency) captures a dimension of inequality that is empirically distinct from time poverty or total work burdens, with particularly strong relevance for women’s work and wellbeing
Coverage or Intensity of Support? Adaptive Social Protection to Reduce Disaster-Related Poverty
No full textDisasters due to natural hazards pose a significant threat to people’s well-being and increase the risk of poverty, particularly in vulnerable populations. This paper provides a novel global estimate of poverty due to disasters, showing that 25.6 million people are at risk of poverty due to disasters, 12.7 million thereof facing extreme poverty. Disaster-related consumption losses amount to 1,143 billion. Adaptive social protection aims to mitigate these risks by integrating social protection, disaster risk management, and climate adaptation to enhance disaster resilience. Yet, given limited resources, finding the right balance between coverage (the breadth of the population reached by the measure) and intensity (the extent to which each beneficiary is supported) of policy measures is challenging. The paper systematically analyzes this trade-off for various adaptive social protection measures across 131 countries. Total benefits are usually largest for the scenarios with the most extensive coverage and intensity, but the optimal expansion path differs between measures and by country income groups. The results suggest that prioritizing a measure’s intensity while focusing on lower-income populations is generally the most effective approach to reduce socio-economic disaster impacts. While this pattern holds across all income groups, lower-income countries benefit more strongly from early coverage increases than higher-income countries
Artificial Intelligence Strategy: The Independent Evaluation Group’s Journey of Discovery
No full textThe Independent Evaluation Group’s (IEG) Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategy marks an important milestone in its journey of continuous experimentation, learning, and adaptation to integrate AI in evaluation. It reaffirms IEG's commitment to scale up the use of AI, deliberately and ambitiously, and its vision to set a global benchmark for producing and brokering high-quality, AI-enabled evaluative evidence. The strategy aims to create broader ownership of this effort and a more consistent adoption of these innovative practices across IEG units and teams. It also offers IEG's partners and stakeholders clarity on the strategy's ambitious and the IEG will pursue to achieve them. The strategy proposes a novel way of IEG's adoption of AI that places practical ethics, peer governance principles, and adherence to strong values at its core. It underscores that IEG's use of AI must be anchored in the fundamental principles of high-quality evaluation, ensuring that quality and rigor are never compromised. The AI strategy reflects both the explicit and the tacit knowledge accrued during years of trial and error, exploration, and collective learning across a range of applications. It builds on strong networks and renewed ways of working together in interdisciplinary teams, with data scientists and analysts playing an increasingly pivotal role
Guide for Road Safety Assessments for Urban Railway Crossings and Stations
No full textThis guide explains that safety is not just about the trains themselves, but also about
how people get to and from stations . Problems often come from poor sidewalks,
missing sign age, bad lighting, and busy roads near stations. Children, older adults, and people with disabilities are especially at risk. In some locations, crossings lack proper barriers or signals, increasing the chance of road crashes. Reliable data on crashes is also often missing, making it difficult to pinpoint where the greatest problems lie
Viet Nam Macro Monitoring
Full text linkReal GDP growth accelerated to 8 percent in 2025, supported by strong exports and higher public investment. Exports reached record levels, led by high-tech and electronics shipments to the US. However, with booming intermediate trade lifting overall imports to record highs, net exports have begun to drag on overall growth in
contrast to previous years. Rising FDI inflows and public investment disbursements boosted manufacturing and construction activity. Although generally resilient, consumer spending on durable goods has slowed amid cautious sentiment related to a weak housing sector. Inflation is below target, helped by lower global energy
prices. Despite rapid credit growth, financial conditions have tightened at the margin amid persistent exchange rate pressures and slow deposit growth that pushed banks to mobilize longer-term funding, including via bond issuance. Viet Nam has embarked on a major reform push, the first since the Doi Moi wave in the mid-1980s. In
addition to significant institutional consolidation and merging of provinces, several major public finance, tax and business environment reforms have been enacted in the past year with momentum expected to hold through 2026. The government plans to invest VND 8,500 trillion (about US$ 400bn) between 2026-30