Development Research Group

This research program focuses on understanding the role of the financial and private sectors in promoting economic development, and reducing poverty and identifying policies to improve their effectiveness. Learn more ›
 

This research program studies the determinants of macroeconomic outcomes (especially growth), how those outcomes are linked to institutions and resource allocation at the micro level, and the role of governments in raising and allocating resources. Learn more ›
 

This research program conducts research across a wide range of topics that broadly covers issues related to improving the wellbeing of people, particularly less well-off individuals, with the aim of enhancing sustainable, upward economic and social mobility. Learn more ›
 

Lasting poverty reduction requires sustainable natural resource management as well as infrastructure development. This research program encompasses energy, environment, land, agriculture, water, climate change, biodiversity, and urbanization. Learn more ›
 

This research program seeks to better understand the role of international trade in goods and services, foreign direct investment, and migration in economic development. Learn more ›

Finance and Private Sector Development

This research program focuses on understanding the role of the financial and private sectors in promoting economic development, and reducing poverty and identifying policies to improve their effectiveness.

Big Questions

• What makes firms grow, especially SMEs in low- and middle-income countries?
• How can financial services and providers promote household welfare and firm growth in low- and middle-income countries?
• What are the links between finance and private sector development and climate (policies)?

Workstream Highlights

Private Sector Development:

• Training and consulting to promote firm growth (personal initiative training; insourcing skills, outsourcing services; youth (un)employment)
• Investment readiness
• SME finance
• Agricultural innovation and productivity

Financial Sector:

• Climate finance (sustainability-linked financial instruments, climate policy, bank regulation)
• Financial inclusion (measurement; product innovation)
• Safeguards (consumer protection; information disclosure)
• Shocks and government interventions in credit markets
• Capital market development and trading behavior

Cross-cutting:

• Scaling up/Digital Delivery
  • Online training; Digital financial services
  • Gender impacts of digital wage/remittance payments

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Human Development

Human development is at the core of the World Bank’s strategy to improve people’s lives and support sustainable development. This research program spans education, health, social protection, and labor.

Big Questions

• How can public policy improve human capital to increase productivity and wellbeing for all?
• Which key reforms can improve the delivery of services (health, education, social protection, tax collection)—and how do they do so?
• What are the impacts of labor market policies, including those linked to key transitions such as from school to work and from work to retirement?
• How can we innovate methods and measurement related to human development?
• What policies related to gender norms, marriage markets, fertility, and labor market participation can improve gender equality?

Workstream Highlights

Strengthening Health Systems:

• Financial incentives (performance-based financing or cash transfers) to improve health services
• Strategies to improve clinical delivery
• Improving access to reproductive health care
• Psychosocial support to improve mental health in Fragility, Conflict & Violence (FCV) settings

Gender:

• Gender social norms, intimate partner violence
• Marriage markets, fertility decisions
• Women’s labor force participation and discrimination

Digitalization to Improve Service Delivery:

• Digitalization to improve tax collection
• Online tutoring and parenting programs
• Digital platforms to improve vocational training, apprenticeships, and job matching
• Using AI to better match service providers with clients (e.g. mediators to court cases)

Education and Skills: 

• Early childhood interventions
• Strategies to promote attendance and performance, including cash transfers and targeted instruction
• Addressing violent behaviors and promoting the wellbeing of school-aged chilren
• School-to-work transition, including apprenticehips and the role of aspirations

Labor Markets:

• Movement of labor from agricultural to non-agricultural employment, internal migration and its impacts on households and communities
• Poverty traps, household risk-coping and risk-management behavior, long-term effects of shocks to employment
• Evaluation of active labor market programs
• Pension design and reforms, elder care

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Macroeconomics & Growth

This research program studies the determinants of macroeconomic outcomes (especially growth), how those outcomes are linked to institutions and resource allocation at the micro level, and the role of governments in raising and allocating resources.

Big Questions

• What are the determinants of macroeconomic outcomes (especially growth)? How are those outcomes linked to institutions and resource allocation at the micro level?
• What is the role of the government in raising and allocating resources? What should the government do over the long run and in response to shocks?

Workstream Highlights

Long-Term Growth Model (LTGM):

• Identify what growth rates are feasible and which drivers (e.g., investment, total factor productivity) can be used to accelerate it
• Applied in 50+ countries; key input to Country Economic Memoranda, plus Systematic Country Diagnostics, Country Climate and Development Reports, vision documents, and regional reports
• Webpage with Excel tools and manual

Middle-income Growth Challenges:

• Assess how preservation forces and distortions limit allocative efficiency, investment, imitation, and innovation
• Assess how firm dynamics differ across countries and during periods of growth accelerations
• Assess how norms, neighborhoods, and networks affect education, labor markets, talent allocation, and growth

Global Tax Lab:

• Identify and capture the highest-value opportunities for domestic resource mobilization
• 15 long-term country partnerships to build capacity to exploit administrative data
• Core input to Public Finance Reviews (PFRs); dissemination of insights through World Bank Tax Conference

Government Spending Policies, Regulations, and Public Institutions:

• Strengthen local governments for energy access projects to structurally transform Africa's economies
• Impact water policy dialogue to address the economics necessary for implementing engineering solutions
• Build state capacity for coalescing political support to pursue sound public policies (e.g., fuel subsidy reform)

Sectoral Development and Competitiveness Strategy:

• Select sectors to target for firm- and market-level interventions in World Bank Group projects
• Use revealed comparative advantage measured in export data to target most productive sectors
• Develop web tool (component of "EFI360") to identify sector-specific opportunities in TCD 2.0 and CPSD 2.0

Firm Financing in Capital Markets (jointly with IFC):

• Identify which firms and countries have increased capital market financing, with aggregate consequences
• Quantify increased role of domestic markets in private resource mobilization, investment, and growth 
• Flagship report, plus market benchmarking tool and (possibly) estimates of borrowing costs across countries

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Poverty and Inequality

This research program aims to improve current data and methods of poverty and inequality analysis, and use it to better understand the effectiveness of specific policies to reduce poverty and inequality.

Big Questions

• What are the next generation “bread and butter” poverty and inequality measures?
• How should social protection programs and systems be designed to best alleviate poverty and tackle multidimensional needs?
• How can we leverage investments in state capacity, adaptive implementation, and bottom-up citizen engagement to improve public goods provision, make development interventions more effective, and reduce poverty and inequality?
• What are the key policy issues related to cross-border mobility, forced displacement, and Fragility, Conflict & Violence (FCV)?

Workstream Highlights

Next Generation Poverty and Inequality Measures:

• Developing “prosperity gap” as a new measure of “shared prosperity”
• Improving multidimensional poverty measurement (aggregating different measures of wellbeing; combining absolute and relative income poverty)
• Small area estimation and imputation of poverty and inequality when data are scant
• Innovations in alternative measurement of wellbeing: narrative text as data, applicability of biometric measures

Social Protection, Social Inclusion, and Poverty:

• Cash transfers
• Short- and long-term value added of case management systems
• Heterogeneity of social protection service delivery effectiveness
• Social protection systems in middle-/high-income countries

Migration and Integration:

• Follow-on and operationalization of World Development Report 2023
• Integration of migrant populations

Welfare Impacts of Interventions at Critical Points in the Life Cycle:

• Nutrition-sensitive programs targeted to households with pregnant women and young children
• Supply side investment and performance pay for nutrition services
• Dedicated early life stimulation
• Reaching adolescents with critical services

Building Leadership Skills among Civil Servants:

• Proof of concept implementation to transition Cambodia’s public administrators from “royal officers” (the literal translation of ‘public administrators’ in Khmer) into problem-solving civil servants (delivered to all 800 of Cambodia’s top-level career civil servants, across five cohorts)

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Sustainability and Infrastructure

Lasting poverty reduction requires sustainable natural resource management as well as infrastructure development. This research program encompasses energy, environment, land, agriculture, water, climate change, biodiversity, and urbanization.

Big Questions

• What are effective policies and instruments for expanding energy access and decarbonizing development?
• What is the burden of climate change and air pollution in developing countries?
• What are the best ways to build resilience?
• How can land title and property registry reform improve development?
• What transportation infrastructure has the greatest impact on mobility, connectivity, and markets?
• How can we best value, protect, and benefit from natural resource wealth?

Workstream Highlights

Climate Change and Air Pollution Implications for Poverty, Growth, and Inequality:

• Air pollution drag on productivity and growth in South Asia
• Distributional impacts of anthropogenic air pollution in developing countries
• Weather shocks in early childhood affect human capital formation in Ethiopia
• Impact of changes in temperature and precipitation on yield for major crops in Ukraine

Clean Energy, Access, and Growth:

• Improving the credibility of impact evaluation for public investments in energy access
• Customizing energy sector and macroeconomic models to evaluate renewable energy investments and decarbonized growth pathways

Carbon Pricing and Fossil Fuel Subsidy Reforms:

• Framework for measuring total carbon pricing to better track trends in carbon cost alignment in energy prices
• Assessing the efficacy and distributional implications of carbon pricing policies and energy price reforms
• Understanding developing country exposure to carbon border adjustment measures and global climate policies
• Unintended consequences of fuel subsidies on water and fisheries resources

Improving Resilience:

• Research and engagement on investments, technologies, and market reforms to equip farmers, households, and markets to improve productivity and adapt to shocks and to a changing climate
• Mobilizing spatial data to identify targeted interventions to reduce vulnerability to natural disasters, mitigate exposure to pollution, improve urbanization, and harness nature-based solutions

Urban Transportation Infrastructure:

• Value of bridges in Bangladesh
• Cape Town transportation and urban development simulation tool
• Electrification and road provision complementarities in Brazil

Sustainable Land Use:

• Land titling and institutional reforms for property markets
• Improving collection of land and property taxes
• Private management of public parks

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Trade and International Integration

This research program seeks to better understand the role of international trade in goods and services, foreign direct investment, and migration in economic development.

Big Questions

• What are the drivers of trade, foreign direct investment, and migration?
• How does international integration shape development and environmental outcomes in countries at different income levels?
• How do shocks such as climate change, conflict, and geopolitical fragmentation impact globalization and development?
• How can national, regional, and multilateral policies promote sustainable development?

Workstream Highlights

Importer and Exporter Dynamics:

• Identify determinants of export success
• Help enact policies promoting competitiveness in export and import markets

Firm Upgrading:

• Identify the drivers of innovation and technology adoption
• Evolving shape of global production networks
• Assess how these impact development outcomes

Distributional Impacts of Globalization and Protectionism:

• Welfare consequences of trade and productivity shocks (e.g. climate change)
• Assess how these vary across space, the income distribution, and industries

Illicit Financial Flows:

• Help customs agencies detect customs fraud
• Identify and assess the effectiveness of remedial measures

Migration:

• Identify key migration corridors
• Assess which policies best promote migrant and refugee integration

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