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Building Seismic Resilience : A Review of the Croatian Regulatory Framework for Seismic Resilience
Get PDFRegulating seismic resilience is essential for Croatia to protect lives, minimize physical damage, and support sustainable development. Although earthquakes occur less frequently than other hazards, they pose significant risks to communities and infrastructure. Recent events have highlighted the urgent need for proactive seismic risk management. Croatia faces challenges due to its aging building stock, with many structures constructed before modern seismic codes were introduced. Compliance with current standards remains limited, and illegal construction further increases vulnerability. Strengthening resilience requires updated regulations, enforcement, and investment in retrofitting and risk-informed planning. Building safer infrastructure and ensuring adherence to seismic codes are critical to reducing cascading impacts across sectors and safeguarding long-term development gains
Public Expenditure Review in Health: Improving Health Spending to Reclaim and Maximize Health Gains in Botswana - FY 2017-2018-2020-2021
Get PDFBotswana’s health public expenditure review (PER) analyzes data on health financing and system performance with a view to enhancing the effectiveness, efficiency, equity, and sustainability of health expenditure in Botswana. The PER comprised an assessment of expenditures on health, including HIV/AIDS and nutrition, from FY 2017-2018 to FY 2020-2021 in Botswana and how this was linked to the desired quantity, quality, and distribution of health outputs and outcomes while optimizing available resources and moving to ever greater reliance on domestic resources. It examines public health expenditure, including on HIV/AIDS and nutrition, in Botswana and how this has been linked to the desired quantity, quality, and distribution of health outputs and outcomes, while optimizing available resources and moving to ever greater reliance on domestic resources
Satellite-Based Measures for Tracking Atmospheric CO₂ and CH₄ at National, Subnational, and Urban Scales
Get PDFA scalable method for estimating changes in local greenhouse gas emissions from satellite-based atmospheric composition measures is developed and applied in this paper. The analysis employs large panels of spatially-referenced, time-stamped atmospheric carbon dioxide observations from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 and methane observations from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P. The analysis computes monthly mean concentration anomalies, defined as deviations from global trends. Long- and short-term trend regressions were estimated for cells of high-resolution global grids, and cell-specific results meeting the classical significance test (p ≤ 0.05) were identified as positive or negative trends. These high-resolution findings were aggregated to generate performance scores for geographic areas of arbitrary scale. The global scalability of the approach was demonstrated with performance assessments for 242 countries and disputed areas, 3,242 provinces, 36,563 sub-provinces, 6,672 Functional Urban Areas, and 670 offshore oil and gas production zones. Regional illustrations were provided for 11 Southeast Asian countries, alongside a global overview organized by World Bank regions and income groups. Findings indicated that long-term carbon dioxide decreases outnumbered increases, but recent changes (2024–25) revealed a reversal. By contrast, methane displayed large net decreases in both long- and short-term measures. The results highlighted substantial variation across regions and income groups. Low-income countries showed the strongest movement toward reductions, yet their contributions remain overshadowed by high-income economies, where performance has been mixed. It is hoped that this methodology will inform global policy dialogue by enabling transparent and comparable emissions assessments. The approach also provides a practical tool for identifying emissions hotspots, supporting policy makers at the national and subnational levels in developing targeted mitigation strategies aligned with global climate objectives
An Exploration of Systemwide Flood Protection Standards for Coastal Polders in Bangladesh
Get PDFBangladesh has demonstrated how investment in coastal flood protection saves lives, reduces economic losses, and protects development gains. Yet, its cost effectiveness depends on the design standards, which are currently selected on a project-by-project basis. This is because at present, there is no law, policy, or agency guidance to guide or inform decisions on design standards for coastal polders in the country. To inform the discussion on appropriate flood protection standards for Bangladesh’s coastal polders, this paper investigates what these standards would look like if they were based on cost-benefit analyses. The analysis finds that implementing differentiated flood protection standards across the coastal polders can be a cost-effective strategy for further suppressing flood risks, reducing up to 27.5 percent of the total cost and flood risks (from US11 billion flood risk to US6.7 billion flood risk). This includes the substantial investment in bank protection needed (~US$5 billion), irrespective of the flood protection standards, to maintain the alignment of the present embankments around the coastal polders. Although the absolute values of the economically optimal protection levels are subject to considerable uncertainty, a sensitivity analysis confirms the robustness of the finding that there is considerable value in flood protection level differentiation. Flood protection standards are rarely based on economic considerations alone. They could also be informed by the desire to reduce life safety risk or combat poverty. It is recommended that the implications of applying different perspectives on the tolerability of risks to determine differentiated flood protection standards be carefully explored in consultation with stakeholders
Kingdom of Eswatini: Review of the Market for International Remittances
Get PDFThis report presents the findings and recommendations from a review of the market for international remittances of Eswatini based on the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) and World Bank General Principles for International Remittance Services . This review was undertaken through a World Bank mission that visited Eswatini from October 23 to 27, 2023; follow-up discussions with the authorities; and the validation of findings and recommendations through an industry workshop that was held on March 17, 2025 in Mbabane, Eswatini. The findings and recommendations of this report can serve as a basis to improve and further develop the market for remittance services in Eswatini and improve the safety and efficiency of remittance transactions
Legal Foundations for Just Transitions: Strengthening National Frameworks for Development
Get PDFJust transition is now a familiar concept and a cornerstone of global efforts to move towards a low carbon, climate-resilient economy. In the context of multilateral climate action, just transition was formally recognized through the 2015 Paris Agreement, whose preamble takes into account the imperatives of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development priorities. Since 2015, when the ILO Guidelines for a Just Transition towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies for All were published, the understanding and application of just transition has expanded in scope, increasingly reflecting principles that are people-centered, socially protective, human rights-based, inclusive of all stakeholders especially the vulnerable, equitable, fair, gender-responsive, beneficial, whole-of-economy, whole-of-society, with meaningful stakeholder input and participation, and socio-economic opportunities for entire populations, including Indigenous Peoples (IPs). The success of transition efforts hinges on well-designed and effective national legal frameworks and institutions that balance economic transformation with social and environmental protections. Without adequate legal frameworks and institutions, countries face significant risks including climate vulnerability, social disruption, legal liability and uncertainty, implementation gaps, economic inefficiency, governance failures, and human rights concerns. This report aims to provide an overview of the main elements that can be included in a national legal framework to ground just transition in rules that will contribute to making it equitable, legally coherent, effective, and durable in practice. It examines illustrative areas most relevant to operationalizing just transition, including labor standards and employment law, energy, critical minerals, agriculture, finance, and natural resources
The World Bank Sector Taxonomy: June 2025
Get PDFIn July 2024, a new Sector Taxonomy was launched for all IBRD/IDA (the Bank) lending operations and Advisory Services and Analytics (ASA) products, refreshing and building on the Sector Taxonomy structure that was launched in July 2016. Sector codes are aligned with World Bank Group priority areas, enabling a clear understanding of the Bank’s knowledge, financing, and expertise in reducing poverty and promoting sustainable development
Stress Testing Survey to Survey Imputation: Understanding When Poverty Predictions Can Fail
Get PDFAccurate and timely poverty measurement is central to development policy, yet the availability of up-to-date high-quality household survey data remains limited—particularly in countries where poverty is most concentrated. Survey-to-survey imputation has emerged as a practical response to this challenge, allowing practitioners to update poverty estimates using recent surveys that lack direct welfare measures by borrowing information from other comprehensive surveys. A critical review of the method is provided, revisiting its statistical underpinnings and testing its limitations through extensive model-based simulations. Through these simulations, the analysis demonstrates how violations of parameter stability, omitted variable bias, and shifts in survey design can introduce substantial errors—particularly when imputing across time or under economic and structural change. Results show that standard corrections such as re-weighting or covariate standardization may fail to eliminate these biases, especially when imputing across time or under structural change. The performance of alternative model specifications is also evaluated under various methods, including performance under heteroskedastic errors, non-normality. The findings offer practical guidance for practitioners on when survey-to-survey imputation is likely to succeed, when it should be reconsidered, and how to communicate its limitations transparently in the context of poverty monitoring and policy design
Industrial Energy Efficiency and Decarbonization (EE&D)
Get PDFPakistan’s industrial sector offers a significant and achievable opportunity for energy efficiency and decarbonization (EE&D), with the potential to substantially reduce energy demand, generate cost savings, and defer the need for new power generation capacity. Given that industry accounts for a substantial share of the country’s energy consumption, targeted EE&D interventions could include replacing inefficient equipment with market-ready or emerging efficient technologies and waste heat recovery, fuel switching (using clean sources of energy instead of fossil fuels), increasing electrification (converting high temperature range, gas-based processes to electricity generated from renewable resources for instance), increasing the use of distributed renewable energy as an alternative to grid-supplied electricity, process improvements, implementing circularity (increasing reuse through improved utilization of existing material stocks, remanufacturing, and recycling), and deploying carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) initiatives. In Pakistan, the most immediate opportunities for industrial EE&D include replacing inefficient equipment with efficient technologies and fuel-switching. The trend of increasing use of distributed renewables is already taking place in the country
Digital Trade Regulatory Readiness: A Global Database
Get PDFThe report presents the Digital Trade Regulatory Readiness (DTRR) database
compiled by a team of World Bank experts. The database offers novel information on laws and regulations on digital trade for 121 economies around the world,
out of which 95 are developing countries. The database reflects countries’ regulatory framework on specific matters directly relevant to digital trade, structure
on nine “regulatory areas” (i.e., i) electronic documents; ii) electronic signature &
digital ID; iii) paperless trade; iv) online consumer protection; v) data protection;
vi) artificial Intelligence; vii) cybersecurity & cybercrime; viii) cross-border data;
and ix) intermediary liability) distributed along three policy pillars, namely electronic transactions, trust-building regulation, and platform regulation. Altogether,
the DTRR offers more than 13,000 datapoints, including over 5,200 regulatory measures currently in effect. “Traceability,” a central feature of the DTRR, ensures the quality of the information, so that each of positive datapoints can be traced back to the specific provision, paragraph, and/or section number that supports them