Growth in Asia and the Pacific outperformed expectations in late 2023, reaching 5.0 percent for the year. Inflation has continued to decline, albeit at varying speeds: some economies are still seeing sustained price pressures, while others are facing deflationary risks.In 2024, growth is projected to slow modestly to 4.5 percent. …
The Congo Basin is made up of six countries: Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. The Congo Basin’s forests, being the second largest ‘lungs’ of the world after the Amazonian forests, have an area of about …
In 2020, the dual shock posed by stringent non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to contain the COVID-19 pandemic and the severe fall in hydrocarbon revenues added to Algeria’s economic woes. While the Algerian economy showed signs of recovery during the second half of 2020, firms and workers have been deeply affected by …
The paper examines climate mitigation strategies to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century, focusing on smoothing macroeconomic costs in the short- to medium-term—the horizon relevant for policymakers. It explores a comprehensive policy package, which complements carbon pricing with an initial green fiscal stimulus, consisting of green public investment and subsidies to …
The new IEA report examines how cities can be a key to a net-zero emissions future as digitalisation opens up a range of new opportunities. More than 50% of the world’s population currently lives in cities, and that figure is expected to increase to almost 70% by 2050. Cities generate …
The Covid-19 pandemic crisis and the security situation continue to undermine the Nigerien economy, wiping out years of hard-won gains in poverty reduction. A number of fiscal policy options are, however, available to help the country enhance public expenditure efficiency and increase its GDP by up to 2%. These are …
The 2021 edition of the Commodities and Development Report explores how technological development and innovation can help commodity-dependent developing countries (CDDCs) achieve economic diversification and value addition. The report, entitled "Escaping from the commodity dependence trap through technology and innovation", highlights that most developing countries are commodity dependent and that …
Faced with myriad options, Sub-Saharan Africa policy makers struggle to prioritize actions. Commonly used modeling approaches perform poorly in data scare conditions or focus intently on tools at hand. Policies, by consequence, report ‘wish lists’, making them a challenge to implement given resource constraints. Here, we evaluate the potential of …
With less than 10 years until the 2030 deadline for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), governments need to step up their efforts to meet global food security and environmental targets, according to a new report by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the …
Global resource use could double by 2050, representing an opportunity for tropical timber producers, according to a study published by ITTO. It forecasts that tropical industrial roundwood production will increase substantially by mid-century but says the sector needs a boost if it is to maximize its contribution to carbon-neutral production. …
As the South African economy emerges from the downturn induced by COVID-19, policy makers are concerned with recovery, reconstruction, and transformation. This paper focuses on the recovery from the severely depressed levels of economic activity that occurred in April 2020. However, before considering the period after the economic trough of …
This paper reconstructs the full welfare distributions from household surveys of 160 countries, covering 96.5 percent of the global population, to estimate the pandemic-induced increases in global poverty and provide information on the potential short-term effects of income-support programmes on mitigating such increases. Crucially, the analysis performs a large-scale simulation …
As the South African economy emerges from the downturn induced by COVID-19, policy makers are concerned with recovery, reconstruction, and transformation. This paper focuses on the recovery from the severely depressed levels of economic activity that occurred in April 2020. However, before considering the period after the economic trough of …
Somalia has a triple challenge of low levels of labor force participation, low productivity, and high levels of poverty. Economic growth in Somalia has been low, subject to shocks; and thus, insufficient for job creation. Shocks to the economy have contributed to forced displacement, a dominance of jobs outside of …
Greening the energy sector would directly reduce emissions, thereby supporting a sustainable and environmentally sound development pathway for the country. Increased renewable energy deployment would also have a direct contribution towards the country’s economic growth and energy sector security as well as contributing to local value creation, including employment opportunities …
The Economic Case for Nature is part of a series of papers by the World Bank that lays out the economic rationale for investing in nature and recognizes how economies rely on nature for services that are largely underpriced. This report presents a first-of-its-kind integrated ecosystem-economy modelling exercise to assess …
The crash in international tourism due to the coronavirus pandemic could cause a loss of more than $4 trillion to the global GDP for the years 2020 and 2021, according to an UNCTAD report. The estimated loss has been caused by the pandemic’s direct impact on tourism and its ripple …
An estimated US$724 billion in GDP is exposed to the impact of extreme sea-level rise and coastal flooding in seven major cities in Asia by 2030, according to a new report from Greenpeace East Asia. Within this decade, coastal cities in Asia are at high risk from rising sea levels …
Malawi was affected by a severe second wave of COVID-19 (coronavirus) cases starting in the last weeks of 2020. As a result, the Government declared a second 'State of National Disaster' and announced increased social distancing measures. Case numbers peaked in January and gradually subsided through April, when restrictions were …
ierra Leone’s economy is projected to recover from the COVID-19 contraction with real GDP expected to rebound by 3.0 percent in 2021, an upward revision of 0.8 percentage point relative to the 2020 forecast, according to the new World Bank Sierra Leone Economic Update. The growth rebound reflects the expected …
In 2020 the Nigerian economy shrank by 1.8%, its deepest decline since 1983. The COVID-19 crisis drove the economic slowdown; the external context was marked by capital outflows, intensified risk aversion, low oil prices, and shrinking foreign remittances. The Nigeria Development Update Resilience through Reforms states that reforms implemented by …
