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This synthesis report documents the implementation process, results and lessons learned under a three-year Technical Assistance (TA) program undertaken by the Water and Sanitation Program of the World Bank's Water Global Practice (WSP) in Cambodia between May 2013 and June 2016. It also presents recommendations for the government on key steps to accelerate service delivery at scale for Rural Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (RWSSH) and for the World Bank to strategically engage in the sector. For comprehensiveness, annexes are attached that include key supporting documentation, and resources and deliverables developed under this TA are also provided in the resource pack (the resource pack is linked to Box folder which is available upon request).

This paper examines the effect of finance on long-term economic growth using Bayesian model averaging to address model uncertainty in cross-country growth regressions. The literature largely focuses on financial indicators that assess the financial depth of banks and stock markets. These indicators are examined jointly with newly developed indicators that assess the stability and efficiency of financial markets. Once the finance-growth regressions are subjected to model uncertainty,the results suggest that commonly used indicators of financial development are not robustly related to long-term growth. However, the findings from the global sample indicate that one newly developed indicator -- the efficiency of financial intermediaries -- is robustly related to long-term growth.

Measuring poverty requires adjusting nominal consumption (or income) into a real value of consumption, across geographic areas and over time. To this end, data on consumer prices are used to construct a price index. There are a range of approaches to do this, from using the consumer price index, to survey-based unit values, which differ in the underlying sources of price data and methodologies for indexing. These different approaches can have large impacts on poverty measures and trends. Surprisingly little attention has been focused on this topic. This study reviews a range of issues and the evidence on how prices matter for measuring poverty, particularly in Africa. It draws on a wide literature, much from developed countries, and offers suggestions for future work in this area.

The World Bank Group has come a long way in supporting structural reforms in its member countries. The most remarkable feature of its long 35 years and continuing journey has been its ability to listen, learn and adjust over time. It learnt relatively quickly that reform ownership is a necessary requirement for countries to support and sustain reforms. At the same time, it realized that reform implementation critically depends on credible institutions and good governance, which are frequently missing in its member countries, particularly the low-income ones. It also noted that over time the structure of reforms for promoting growth and development evolves, reflecting both changes in internal country conditions and a changing global environment. These important realizations are reflected in the evolution of the World Bank Group's policies and practice for supporting structural reforms, and help sustain a culture of learning from experience.

The Lao economy is estimated to have expanded by around 7 percent in 2015, a slight moderation from 7.5 percent in 2014. Similar to the last decade, the resource sectors (hydropower and extractives) continued to make an important contribution to growth. Power generation got a boost from the commissioning of the first two blocks of the 1,878 MW Hongsa lignite power plant and an additional 250-300 MW of installed capacity in the hydro sector. Furthermore, despite lower global commodity prices, mining output still increased as metal prices remained above the mines' cost recovery levels. The revised State Budget Law, approved in December 2015, enhances the authority of the National Assembly in budget oversight and Ministry of Finance in budget management. In addition, with regards to anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing, the Government strengthened key regulations (including on forfeiture of assets, border declaration, penalties for non-compliant entities) recommended by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which helped remove Lao PDR from the FATF's list of 'jurisdictions not making sufficient progress'. The outlook will depend on the progress in the implementation of the recommendations and agreed measures. GDP is expected to expand at around 7 percent per annum as a healthy pipeline in the power sector keeps investments strong and increases electricity production and exports by almost 40 percent. Stabilization of growth rates in China and some acceleration in Vietnam and Thailand should increase demand for Lao PDR exports. On the other hand, some gradual fiscal consolidation is expected, largely through broadening the revenue base and efforts to improve efficiency in spending and should help strengthen the outlook for public debt sustainability and lower the risk of debt distress from its current level of moderate, but borderline to high.

This policy paper summarizes four corridor studies on bilateral social security agreements (BSSAs) between four European Union (EU) member and two non-member states, draws conclusions on their results, and offers recommendations. BSSAs between migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries are seen as the most important instrument to establish portability of social security benefits for internationally mobile workers. Yet, only about 23 percent of international migrants profit from BSSAs and their functioning has been little analyzed and even less assessed. The four corridors studied (Austria-Turkey, Germany-Turkey, Belgium-Morocco, and France-Morocco) were selected to allow for comparison of both similarities and differences in experiences. The evaluation of these corridors' BSSAs was undertaken against a methodological framework and three selected criteria: fairness for individuals, fiscal fairness for countries, and bureaucratic effectiveness for countries and migrant workers. The results suggest that the investigated BSSAs work and overall deliver reasonably well on individual fairness. The results on fiscal fairness are clouded by conceptual and empirical gaps. Bureaucratic effectiveness would profit from information and communication technology-based exchanges on both corridors once available.

This paper builds on recent research examining the impact of finance on growth, looking at the effect of the financial system on volatility in gross domestic product per capita and consumption per capita growth. It also examines the impact of credit on the composition of growth. The findings show that financial development smooths growth in gross domestic product and consumption per capita, but only up to a point. At high levels of credit, further credit is positively associated with volatility even after controlling for the quality of institutions and periods of financial crises. In large financial systems, finance may not help individuals smooth consumption volatility. The threshold at which finance's effect may be volatility enhancing may be lower than previously thought. In terms of the impact on growth, total credit (and credit to firms) has a nonlinear relationship, with rising credit supporting higher growth up to a point, beyond which the additional impact of finance on growth is negative. This can be explained by finance flowing into less productive activities (or drawing other resources into less productive activities). In addition, household credit is negatively related to manufacturing sector growth, although credit to firms has a positive relationship to manufacturing growth. This may be explained by the fact that much of household credit is used to finance the consumption (including imports) of goods and services broadly (not just manufacturing sector goods) or investment in housing.

This study examines trends in school dropout at the upper secondary education level across Latin America over the past two decades, and attempts to identify factors influencing these rates. The methodology contributes to the existing literature by employing repeated cross sections of data to track the life cycle path of representative groups of individuals belonging to a birth cohort, by constructing and analyzing a synthetic data base of household survey data from 18 countries. A key finding is that while upper secondary enrollment rates increased in the region, the proportion of upper secondary age youth dropping out of school has remained persistently high, despite relatively favorable macroeconomic conditions. Furthermore, the study traces the moment in the life cycle at which the majority of dropout takes place to reveal differences between countries. Finally, to explain the trends in upper secondary dropout rates, the study examines the impact of three groups of factors: (i) shifts in the cohort size and socioeconomic composition of the population eligible for entering upper secondary education; (b) the macroeconomic environment and labor market opportunities; and (c) the returns to schooling. A series of regressions shows that an important factor that may be driving higher dropout levels has been the higher numbers of students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds reaching the upper secondary level. In addition, high returns to education have been a pull factor into the schooling system, while, especially in countries where the majority of youth dropout early (prior to upper secondary education), the data confirm an apparent substitution effect due to the opportunity cost of forgoing employment opportunities. Overall, the findings confirm the importance of policy makers' focus on upper secondary education across Latin America and suggest implications for focusing the policy agenda.

This paper estimates the effects of peer benchmarking by institutional investors on asset prices. To identify trades purely due to peer benchmarking as separate from those based on fundamentals or private information, the paper exploits a natural experiment involving a change in a government imposed underperformance penalty applicable to Colombian pension funds. This change in regulation is orthogonal to stock fundamentals and only affects incentives to track peer portfolios allowing the authors to identify the component of demand due to peer benchmarking. The authors find that peer effects among pension fund managers generate excess in stock return volatility, with stocks exhibiting short-term abnormal returns followed by returns reversal in the subsequent quarter. Additionally, peer benchmarking produces an excess in comovement across stock returns beyond the correlation implied by fundamentals.

This is a book about directorship. More precisely, it's about nominee directors, who are nominated by IFC and other development finance institutions (DFIs) to the boards of investee companies to fulfill a dual mandate: first, they are expected to perform all the duties and tasks of a board member. Second, they are also charged with improving the corporate governance, sustainability, and ethical behavior of the investee company. This need exists because the empirical evidence indicates that in many developing countries it is nearly impossible to create long-term shareholder value without marked improvements in these areas. This book, based on sound research and real-life examples, offers not only a useful learning platform but also, the authors hope, an entertaining read. It focuses on directorship and leadership skills in the boardroom and does not attempt to cover the whole 'waterfront' on corporate governance issues. Many other publications (including some found on the IFC website) deal extensively with the structures, processes, and legal frameworks of corporate governance. The story emphasizes the learning and adapting that must go on for a nominee director to be effective in encouraging change and improvement on the board and in the company. It draws on specific situations to illustrate that IFC rules and instructions cannot always be perfectly followed: the nominee director is in the 'heat of the battle,' under time pressure, and confronted with dilemmas and uncertainty that only in hindsight can be structured and analyzed clearly. The target audience of the incredible adventures of Carla is nominee directors, especially those who are newly appointed or candidates who are considering taking on such a role. It aims to expose them to the challenges in the behavioral dimension of corporate governance and to help them learn, through Carla's experience, the actions and communications that can help them, or not help them, achieve the goals they are committed to.

This paper focuses on the impact of disasters on public expenditures, and how this impact might be valued. The impact may involve changes in the composition of spending, concurrently and over time. It may also involve changes in the level of spending and the profile of this over time. In the latter case, the associated financing must also be taken into account. The changes of interest are those that would take place under a given sovereign disaster risk financing and insurance strategy, as opposed to what would take place otherwise. The paper concludes with some suggestions toward an operational framework for addressing these questions.

For more than a decade, Africa has enjoyed a mineral boom. is the growth mostly happening in isolated places, sectors and periods? The approach adopted in this study is two-pronged. First, through case studies, including the results of fieldwork, mining's impacts are examined in a country-specific context for each of three countries, Ghana, Mali, and Tanzania; and second, a statistical analysis is used to test whether the indicators of welfare improve with proximity to a mine.

This paper is framed as a User's Guide to help city officials and city competitiveness practitioners in implementing interventions. This guide aims to support cities in identifying collaborative configurations of actors from the public and private sector along with the management approaches that can help leadership implement interventions to support the city economy.

This paper examines the implications of the terms-of-trade theory for the determinants of outcomes arising under the enforcement provisions of international agreements. Like original trade agreement negotiations, the paper models formal trade dispute negotiations as potentially addressing the terms-of-trade externality problem that governments implement import protection above the globally efficient level so as to shift some of the policys costs to trading partners. The approach is to extend earlier theoretical models of trade agreement accession negotiations to the setting of enforcement negotiations in order to guide the empirical assessment. The paper uses instrumental variables to estimate the model on trade volume outcomes from World Trade Organization (WTO) disputes over 1995–2009. The evidence is consistent with theoretical predictions that larger import volume outcomes are associated with products that have smaller increases in foreign exporter-received prices (terms-of-trade losses for the importer) as a result of the dispute, larger pre-dispute import volumes, larger import demand elasticities, and smaller foreign export supply elasticities. Dispute settlement outcome differences are also explained by variation in institutionally-motivated measures of retaliation capacity and the severity of the free-rider problem associated with foreign exporter concentration.

This study investigates the role of domestic and external shocks in business cycle fluctuations in Paraguay during 1991–2012. Time-series methods and a structural model-based approach are used to conduct an integrated analysis of business cycles. First, structural vector autoregression is used to assess the role played by external factors and domestic shocks in driving fluctuations in gross domestic product through impulse response functions and variance decompositions. The analysis finds that external shocks such as terms of trade, world interest rate and foreign demand account for over 50 percent of real gross domestic product fluctuations. Given Paraguay's strong dependence on agriculture, an analysis is also done for the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors separately. The analysis finds that non-agricultural gross domestic product is to a large extent driven by external shocks, which account for over 50 percent of its volatility. In contrast, the volatility in agricultural gross domestic product is primarily due to shocks to domestic variables, mainly shocks to agricultural output. A further difference between the sectors is that shocks to government consumption are more important for agricultural gross domestic product, while shocks to the domestic real interest rate play a larger role in the volatility of non-agricultural gross domestic product. Second, the paper investigates the sources of business cycle fluctuations through the lens of a neoclassical growth model with an agricultural and non-agricultural sector. The analysis finds some signs of improvements, as labor market distortions have declined, firms' access to credit improved, and agricultural efficiency rose over time. Nevertheless, challenges remain, as gaps in labor and capital returns between agriculture and non-agriculture remain large, efficiency in the non-agricultural sector shows no signs of improvement, and households' access to finance has deteriorated.