Policy Research Reports – serie

In 2013, the World Bank Group adopted two new goals to guide its work: ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. More specifically, the goals are to reduce extreme poverty in the world to less than 3 percent by 2030, and to foster income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population in each country. While poverty reduction has been a mainstay of the World Bank's mission for decades, the Bank has now set a specific goal and timetable, and for the first time, the Bank has explicitly included a goal linked to ensuring that growth is shared by all.The discussion until now has centered primarily on articulating the new goals. This report, the latest in World Bank's Policy Research Report series, goes beyond that and lays out their conceptual underpinnings, discusses their relative strengths and weaknesses by contrasting them with alternative indicators, and proposes empirical approaches and requirements to track progress towards the goals. The report makes clear that the challenges posed by the World Bank Group's new stance extend not just to the pursuit of these goals but, indeed, to their very definition and empirical content.The report also argues that an improved data infrastructure, consisting of many elements including the collection of more and better survey data, is critical to ensure that progress towards these goals can be measured, and policies to help achieve them can be identified and prioritized.

Too often, even reform leaders in countries fail to adopt and implement policies that they know are necessary for sustained economic development. They are encumbered by adverse political incentives, running the risk of losing office should they try to do the right thing. When technically sound policies are selected on paper, implementation through the public system can run into perverse norms of behaviour among public officials and citizens to extract private benefits from the public sector at the expense of the greater public interest.Making Politics Work for Development is about how to make politics work for economic development rather than against it. It focuses on research about two forces - citizens’ political engagement and transparency - that explain and hold the potential to improve political incentives and norms of behaviour in the public sector. The research shows that the confluence of transparency and political engagement can be a driving force for countries to transition toward better functioning public sector institutions, starting with their own initial and contextual conditions. To harness the potential of these forces, policy actors should target transparency to nourish the quality of political engagement so that citizens can hold leaders accountable for the public goods needed for development.

Migration presents a stark policy dilemma. Research repeatedly confirms that migrants, their families back home, and the countries that welcome them experience large economic and social gains. Easing immigration restrictions is one of the most effective tools for ending poverty and sharing prosperity across the globe. Yet, we see widespread opposition in destination countries, where migrants are depicted as the primary cause of many of their economic problems, from high unemployment to declining social services.Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets addresses this dilemma. In addition to providing comprehensive data and empirical analysis of migration patterns and their impact, the report argues for a series of policies that work with, rather than against, labour market forces. Policy makers should aim to ease short-run dislocations and adjustment costs so that the substantial long-term benefits are shared more evenly. Only then can we avoid draconian migration restrictions that will hurt everybody.Moving for Prosperity aims to inform and stimulate policy debate, facilitate further research, and identify prominent knowledge gaps. It demonstrates why existing income gaps, demographic differences, and rapidly declining transportation costs mean that global mobility will continue to be a key feature of our lives for generations to come. Its audience includes anyone interested in one of the most controversial policy debates of our time.

Just like nearly every aspect of human experience, crime, conflict, and violence have become increasingly global. Around the world, civil wars, of which there are more today than at any time since the end of World War II, displace greater numbers of people ever farther from their countries of origin. Transnational terrorism has reached a 50-year high, in terms of both its incidence and the number of reported fatalities. Cross-border criminal markets--illicit drugs, human trafficking, wildlife trade, and so forth--take a heavy toll on the many societies they affect.This Policy Research Report, Violence without Borders: The Internationalization of Crime and Conflict, offers a unified framework to take stock of the theoretical and empirical literature on crime, conflict, and violence and to discuss how the international community organizes itself to address security as a regional and global public good. The increasingly global effects of crime and conflict require an equally global response to violence.

This report argues that resilience to climate change will ultimately depend on the adaptation decisions of millions of individual households, farms, and firms. The report offers several broad principles to guide policy and proposes specific policy actions to build resilience.