In 2015 the international community agreed on a set of ambitious sustainable development goals (SDGs) for the global society, to be achieved by 2030. One of the lessons that the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG s) has highlighted is the importance of a systematic approach to identify and sequence development interventions—policies, programs, and projects—to achieve such goals at a meaningful scale. The Chinese approach to development, which consists of identifying a problem and long-term goal, testing alternative solutions, and then implementing those that are promising in a sustained manner, learning and adapting as one proceeds—Deng Xiaoping’s “crossing the river by feeling the stones”—is an approach that holds promise for successful achievement of the SDGs.

Having observed the Chinese way, then World Bank Group President James Wolfensohn in 2004, together with the Chinese government, convened a major international conference in Shanghai on scaling up successful development interventions, and in 2005 the World Bank Group (WBG ) published the results of the conference, including an assessment of the Chinese approach. (Moreno-Dodson 2005). Some ten years later, the WBG once again is addressing the question of how to support scaling up of successful development interventions, at a time when the challenge and opportunity of scaling up have become a widely recognized issue for many development institutions and experts.

Since traditional private and public service providers frequently do not reach the poorest people in developing countries, social enterprises can play an important role in providing key services to those at the “base of the pyramid.”

In parallel with the recognition that scaling up matters, the development community is now also focusing on social enterprises (SEs), a new set of actors falling between the traditionally recognized public and private sectors. We adopt here the World Bank’s definition of “social enterprises” as a social-mission-led organization that provides sustainable services to Base of the Pyramid (BoP) populations. This is broadly in line with other existing definitions for the sector and reflects the World Bank’s primary interest in social enterprises as a mechanism for supporting service delivery for the poor. Although social enterprises can adopt various organizational forms—business, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and community-based organizations are all forms commonly adopted by social enterprises—they differ from private providers principally by combining three features: operating with a social purpose, adhering to business principles, and aiming for financial sustainability. Since traditional private and public service providers frequently do not reach the poorest people in developing countries, social enterprises can play an important role in providing key services to those at the “base of the pyramid.” (Figure 1)

Figure 1. Role of SE sector in public service provision

Social enterprises often start at the initiative of a visionary entrepreneur who sees a significant social need, whether in education, health, sanitation, or microfinance, and who responds by developing an innovative way to address the perceived need, usually by setting up an NGO, or a for-profit enterprise. Social enterprises and their innovations generally start small. When successful, they face an important challenge: how to expand their operations and innovations to meet the social need at a larger scale. 

Development partner organizations—donors, for short—have recognized the contribution that social enterprises can make to find and implement innovative ways to meet the social service needs of people at the base of the pyramid, and they have started to explore how they can support social enterprises in responding to these needs at a meaningful scale. 

The purpose of this paper is to present a menu of approaches for addressing the challenge of scaling up social enterprise innovations, based on a review of the literature on scaling up and on social enterprises. The paper does not aim to offer specific recommendations for entrepreneurs or blueprints and guidelines for the development agencies. The range of settings, problems, and solutions is too wide to permit that. Rather, the paper provides an overview of ways to think about and approach the scaling up of social enterprise innovations. Where possible, the paper also refers to specific tools that can be helpful in implementing the proposed approaches. 

Note that we talk about scaling up social enterprise innovations, not about social enterprises. This is because it is the innovations and how they are scaled up that matter. An innovation may be scaled up by the social enterprise where it originated, by handoff to a public agency for implementation at a larger scale, or by other private enterprises, small or large. 

This paper is structured in three parts: Part I presents a general approach to scaling up development interventions. This helps establish basic definitions and concepts. Part II considers approaches for the scaling up of social enterprise innovations. Part III provides a summary of the main conclusions and lessons from experience. A postscript draws out implications for external aid donors. Examples from actual practice are used to exemplify the approaches and are summarized in Annex boxes.

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In the past decade, a remarkable shift has occurred in the development landscape. Specifically, acknowledgment of the central role of the private sector in contributing to, even driving, economic growth and global development has grown rapidly. The data on financial flows are dramatic, indicating reversal of the relative roles of official development assistance and private financial flows. This shift is also reflected in the way development is framed and discussed, never more starkly than in the Addis Abba Action Agenda and the new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which the SDGs follow, focused on official development assistance. In contrast, while the new set of global goals does not ignore the role of official development assistance, they reorient attention to the role of the business sector (and mobilizing host country resources).

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been in the vanguard of donors in recognizing the important role of the private sector to development, most notably via the agency’s launch in 2001 of a program targeted on public-private partnerships (PPPs) and the estimated 1,600 USAID PPPs initiated since then. This paper provides a quantitative and qualitative presentation of USAID’s public-private partnerships and business sector participation in those PPPs. The analysis offered here is based on USAID’s PPP data set covering 2001-2014 and interviews with executives of 17 U.S. corporations that have engaged in PPPs with USAID.

The genesis of this paper is the considerable discussion by USAID and the international development community about USAID’s PPPs, but the dearth of information on what these partnerships entail. USAID’s 2014 release (updated in 2015) of a data set describing nearly 1,500 USAID PPPs since 2001 offers an opportunity to analyze the nature of those PPPs.

On a conceptual level, public-private partnerships are a win-win, even a win-win-win, as they often involve three types of organizations: a public agency, a for-profit business, and a nonprofit entity. PPPs use public resources to leverage private resources and expertise to advance a public purpose. In turn, non-public sectors—both businesses and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—use their funds and expertise to leverage government resources, clout, and experience to advance their own objectives, consistent with a PPP’s overall public purpose. The data from the USAID data set confirm this conceptual mutual reinforcement of public and private goals.

The goal is to utilize USAID’s recently released data set to draw conclusions on the nature of PPPs, the level of business sector engagement, and, utilizing interviews, to describe corporate perspectives on partnership with USAID.

The arguments regarding “why” PPPs are an important instrument of development are well established. This paper presents data on the “what”: what kinds of PPPs have been implemented and in what countries, sectors, and income contexts. There are other research and publications on the “how” of partnership construction and implementation. What remains missing are hard data and analysis, beyond the anecdotal, as to whether PPPs make a difference—in short, is the trouble of forming these sometimes complex alliances worth the impact that results from them?

The goal of this paper is not to provide commentary on impact since those data are not currently available on a broad scale. Similarly, this paper does not recommend replicable models or case studies (which can be found elsewhere), though these are important and can help new entrants to join and grow the field. Rather, the goal is to utilize USAID’s recently released data set to draw conclusions on the nature of PPPs, the level of business sector engagement, and, utilizing interviews, to describe corporate perspectives on partnership with USAID.

The decision to target this research on business sector partners’ engagement in PPPs—rather than on the civil society, foundation, or public partners—is based on several factors. First, USAID’s references to its PPPs tend to focus on the business sector partners, sometimes to the exclusion of other types of partners; we want to understand the role of the partners that USAID identifies as so important to PPP composition. Second, in recent years much has been written and discussed about corporate shared value, and we want to assess the extent to which shared value plays a role in USAID’s PPPs in practice.

The paper is divided into five sections. Section I is a consolidation of the principal data and findings of the research. Section II provides an in-depth “data picture” of USAID PPPs drawn from quantitative analysis of the USAID PPP data set and is primarily descriptive of PPPs to date. Section III moves beyond description and provides analysis of PPPs and business sector alignment. It contains the results of coding certain relevant fields in the data set to mine for information on the presence of business partners, commercial interests (i.e., shared value), and business sector partner expertise in PPPs. Section IV summarizes findings from a series of interviews of corporate executives on partnering with USAID. Section V presents recommendations for USAID’s partnership-making.

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The Addis Ababa Action Agenda reaffirms the central role of development banks in providing concessional and non-concessional long-term financing, countercyclical financing, guarantees and leverage, policy advice, capacity building, and other support to the post-2015 agenda. "We recognize the significant potential of multilateral development banks and other international development banks in financing sustainable development and providing know-how. … We stress that development banks should make optimal use of their resources and balance sheets, consistent with maintaining their financial integrity, and should update and develop their policies in support of the post-2015 development agenda, including the sustainable development goals (SDGs)."

This paper argues that the Addis Action plan and the SDGs represent a milestone in the changed thinking about the role of the multilateral development banks (MDBs) and the World Bank Group (WBG) in particular. By elaborating on a universal agenda for sustainable development, rather than a narrow focus on reducing poverty, the scope and ambition of support needed by low and middle-income countries has widened substantially. This paper looks at how the WBG might respond to these new challenges.

The SDGs cover a far broader scope than the Millennium Development Goals, and represent, in many ways, a validation of what the WBG has been doing for many years. The Addis Ababa Action Agenda for the third U.N. financing for development conference shows why:

• It puts the responsibility for development squarely on countries themselves; "Cohesive nationally owned sustainable development strategies, supported by integrated national financing frameworks, will be at the heart of our efforts." The role of development agencies, in this view, is to support country-led processes, not replace them. This favors organizations like the World Bank Group with country-based operational structures and strong country presence, compared to, for example, vertical funds that have a global thematic focus but weaker country footprints.
   
• It gives prominence to "blended finance" and the leveraging of grants and other support with money raised on private capital markets. The Bank has always done this, with particular success in partnering with the Global Environment Facility (GEF), various climate trust funds, the Global Partnership for Education, and the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program.
   
• It calls for multifaceted interventions. The WBG’s credits and loans have typically been accompanied by capacity building, technical assistance, evaluation, policy reform, and other elements of a package of interventions that are needed to have an impact. This is now recognized as how development must be done.
   
• It promotes risk-mitigation mechanisms; the WBG’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) is the largest provider of these instruments in the world and is expressly recognized in the Addis document; the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) too has the ability to provide guarantees, although actual use of this instrument has been limited.
   
• It brings private business to the center of development; “foreign direct investment [is a] vital complement to national development efforts.” The International Finance Corporation (IFC) is by far the largest official lender to private business; IBRD and International Development Association (IDA) provide help with improving the investment climate.
   
• It emphasizes the importance of delivery of public social services (“a new global social compact”), infrastructure, sound policies and institutions, and good governance, all areas that the WBG has emphasized for some time.
   
• It recognizes that “countries in conflict and post-conflict situations also need special attention.” The WBG was one of the earliest development organizations to specifically focus on this issue, applying recommendations of a 2002 Task Force report.

Internally, the WBG has reorganized itself into global practices that match well with the SDGs, and has articulated “Twin Goals” to end poverty by 2030 and to boost shared prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of the population in each country. These goals in turn resonate with the ambition of the SDGs to end poverty and hunger and to promote peaceful and inclusive societies.

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The agendas of accelerating sustainable development and eradicating poverty and that of climate change are deeply intertwined. Growth strategies that fail to tackle poverty and/or climate change will prove to be unsustainable, and vice versa. A common denominator to the success of both agendas is infrastructure development. Infrastructure is an essential component of growth, development, poverty reduction, and environmental sustainability.

The world is in the midst of a historic structural transformation, with developing countries becoming the major drivers of global savings, investment, and growth, and with it driving the largest wave of urbanization in world history. At the same time, the next 15 years will also be crucial for arresting the growing carbon footprint of the global economy and its impact on the climate system.

A major expansion of investment in modern, clean, and efficient infrastructure will be essential to attaining the growth and sustainable development objectives that the world is setting for itself. Over the coming 15 years, the world will need to invest around $90 trillion in sustainable infrastructure assets, more than twice the current stock of global public capital. Unlike the past century the bulk of these investment needs will be in the developing world and, unlike the past two decades, the biggest increment will be in countries other than China.

Getting these investments right will be critical to whether or not the world locks itself into a high- or low-carbon growth trajectory over the next 15 years. There is powerful evidence that investing in lowcarbon growth can lead to greater prosperity than a high-carbon pathway.

At present, however, the world is not investing what is needed to bridge the infrastructure gap and the investments that are being made are often not sustainable. The world appears to be caught in a vicious cycle of low investment and low growth and there is a persistence of infrastructure deficits despite an enormous available pool of global savings. At the same time, the underlying growth trajectories are not consistent with a 2 degree climate target. And climate change is already having a significant impact, especially on vulnerable countries and populations.

The current infrastructure investment and financing model needs to be transformed fast if it is to enable the quantity and quality of growth that the world economy needs.

Yet there are major opportunities that can be exploited to chart a different course. The growth potential of developing countries can be harnessed to boost their own development and global growth and demand. Long-term interest rates are at record lows and there are major untapped sources of finance. Technology change offers prospects for breakthroughs on development and climate outcomes (smart cities, distributed solar power). And there is growing recognition of the importance of decarbonization and new commitments to it by advanced countries as well as developing countries.

The current infrastructure investment and financing model needs to be transformed fast if it is to enable the quantity and quality of growth that the world economy needs. The urgency of action cannot be overemphasized. Given the already high level of emissions, the next 15 years will be a crucial period and the decisions taken will have an enduring impact on both development and climate outcomes. The forthcoming U.N. Conference on Financing for Development at Addis Ababa in July provides a historic opportunity to reach consensus on a new global compact on sustainable infrastructure. To this end, the paper proposes six critical areas for action:

First, there is a need for national authorities to clearly articulate their development strategies on sustainable infrastructure. These strategies need to address the still considerable opportunity for improvements in national policy in key infrastructure sectors, such as urban development, transport, and energy. There is a need for stronger institutional structures for investment planning and for building a pipeline of projects that take into account environmental sustainability from the outset, and greater capacity to engage with the private sector.

Second, the G-20 can play an important leadership role in taking the actions needed to bridge the infrastructure gap and in incorporating climate risk and sustainable development factors more explicitly in infrastructure development strategies. The G-20 can do this through their own actions and investment strategies and by supporting global collective actions such as the development of norms for sustainable procurement and unlocking both public and private pools of finance. The Global Infrastructure Forum proposed in the draft Addis Accord can build on the G-20 and other initiatives to create a global platform for knowledge exchange and action.

Third, the capacity of development banks to invest in infrastructure and agricultural productivity needs to be substantially augmented in order for them to pioneer and support changes needed for better infrastructure. In our view, MDBs will need to increase their infrastructure lending five-fold over the next decade, from around $30-40 billion per year to over $200 billion, in order to help meet overall infrastructure financing requirements. Several MDBs have taken steps and are actively considering options to enhance their role and capacity. The establishment of new institutions and mechanisms also creates the opportunity for greater flexibility and scale. Nevertheless, a more systematic review of the role of MDBs and needed changes could help strengthen their individual and collective roles and garner support from shareholders and other stakeholders.

Fourth, central banks and financial regulators could take further steps to support the redeployment of private investment capital from high- to low-carbon, better infrastructure. We already see progressive action from the Bank of England and the French government. Market-developed standards for instruments such as green bonds could also increase the liquidity of better infrastructure assets.

Fifth, the official community (G-20, OECD, and other relevant institutions) working with institutional investors could lay out the set of policy, regulatory, and other actions needed to increase their infrastructure asset holdings from $3-4 trillion to $10-15 trillion over the next 15 years. This could include publishing project pipelines, standardizing contracts, providing government-backed guarantees for investments in sustainable infrastructure, and making longer-term policy commitments in terms of tax treatment of infrastructure investments. “Impact capital”—capital that is willing to take lower ex ante returns in exchange for significant reductions in policy risk is growing rapidly and could make a significant contribution.

Sixth, over the coming year the international community should agree on the amounts of concessional financing needed to meet the SDGs, how to mobilize this financing and how best to deploy it to support the economic, social, and environmental goals embodied in the SDGs. ODA can play a critically important role in crowding in other financing and in enhancing the viability of infrastructure projects. Beyond ODA, targeted climate finance, when combined with the much larger pools of private and non-concessional public financing, could offset additional upfront costs of low-carbon investments in both low- and lower-middle income countries and help build more resilient infrastructure and help adapt to climate change. The Green Climate Fund (GCF) is a first possible step around which such a new approach can be built.

We know the main elements of the transformation agenda, although many details have to be worked out. They are entirely compatible with both sustainable development and climate goals. The aim is not to put in place complex and burdensome structures but responsive and flexible mechanisms capable of learning and bringing about real change. Working together across the Financing for Development, SDG, G-20, and UNFCCC processes, there is an opportunity to drive real change over the next 12 months.

Achieving better infrastructure outcomes will require concerted actions on many fronts. But moving from a business-as-usual approach to better infrastructure can dramatically affect global outcomes on both development and climate.

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Educating a girl is one of the best investments her family, community, and country can make. We know that a good quality education can be life-changing for girls, boys, young women, and men, helping them develop to their full potential and putting them on a path for success in their life. We also know that educating a girl in particular can kick-start a virtuous circle of development. More educated girls, for example, marry later, have healthier children, earn more money that they invest back into their families and communities, and play more active roles in leading their communities and countries.

Over the last 25 years, there have been large gains in girls’ education, and we as a global community can congratulate ourselves for the real progress that has been made. This demonstrates that with shared goals and collective action—among governments, international organizations, civil society, media, and the private sector—we can change the educational prospects for girls around the world.

Despite this progress, our research shows that there are hotspots in the world where girls are not getting a quality education. While there certainly are places where boys are behind, we have focused on understanding how and where across the world girls are behind. The message is that many countries have work to do to improve girls’ education, whether related to the gender gap in primary or secondary enrollment or learning. There are about 80 countries where progress on girls’ education has stalled. These countries are not meeting the education Millennium Development Goals. They are stuck in an education bog—still struggling to enroll all girls and boys in primary school and close the gender gaps between boys and girls at both the primary and secondary levels. 

Quality learning is important for the future lives of girls and boys, but it is also an especially important ingredient in the virtuous circle of development that comes from girls’ education.

There are an additional 30 countries that have successfully enrolled girls and boys in primary and secondary education but are trapped in low-quality learning. They are struggling to ensure that girls and boys master foundational skills such as basic literacy, numeracy, and science concepts. Quality learning is important for the future lives of girls and boys, but it is also an especially important ingredient in the virtuous circle of development that comes from girls’ education. Finally, there are another 30 countries where children are successfully enrolled and learning. However, girls are behind boys in math. In some ways, we can think of girls in these countries bumping up against an educational glass ceiling.

In this report, we review in detail the progress in girls’ education, the work that remains to be done, and strategies for success. Governments, international development agencies, and civil society organizations have supported a variety of programs that have made a difference in both large and small ways. There are valuable lessons to learn from them—but more progress is needed, especially in the poorest countries and among the disadvantaged populations in most countries. Ultimately we recommend renewed collective action for advancing girls’ education in hotspots around the world, especially in the 80 countries where progress on girls’ education has stalled. We recognize the powerful contribution that girls and women themselves can make to achieve this. Our first recommendation is to lean in with girls’ and women’s leadership by investing in two initiatives that could go to scale in a short time frame and rally support from a range of actors, especially civil society and the private sector. The first initiative aims to build strong girl and women leaders by cultivating their skills and capacities to be agents of their own lives. The second initiative aims to put girls and women at the center of a data revolution on gender, one that would fill the critical information gaps about their status, what support they need to succeed, and which interventions have been the most and the least effective. Throughout the world today, it is possible to put mobile technology to work catalyzing a major girl-generated big data initiative.

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The past two decades in China brought unprecedented rates of economic growth, development, and poverty reduction. Indeed, much of the reduction in the world’s extreme poverty rates during that time can be explained by the millions of people in China who exited poverty. GDP per capita and household consumption increased fourfold between the years 1990 and 2005.1 China jumped 10 places forward on the Human Development Index from 2008 until 2013, moving up to 93 of 187 countries, and life expectancy climbed to 75.3 years, compared to 67 years in 1980.

Yet during the same period, life satisfaction levels in China demonstrated very different trends—in particular dropping precipitously in the initial stages of rapid growth and then recovering somewhat thereafter. The drops in life satisfaction were accompanied by increases in the suicide rate and in incidence of mental illness. China had one of the highest suicide rates in the world in 1990s: approximately 23.2 suicides per 100,000 people per year from 1995 to 1999 (with the rate gradually falling to 7.8 per 100,000 by 2012). Mental health disorders, on the other hand, increased as suicide rates fell (perhaps because more individuals sought treatment). The annual growth rate of inpatients admitted into mental health hospitals was 13.4 percent from 2007 to 2012 (reaching 1.2 million people). Outpatient visits increased at a similar rate—12.4 percent (reaching a magnitude of 27 million outpatient visits in 2011).

Is this an anomaly? Is there something unique about China’s life satisfaction and well-being more generally? Or is it China’s growth trajectory? While income metrics provide us with one story of China’s progress, well-being metrics—including measures of mental health—are telling us a very different story. What explains the discrepancy?

Surely each country has a unique trajectory, and China’s economic boom occurred as centrally planned macroeconomic management was being replaced by free market principles and accompanying changes in social welfare and other institutions (although not political ones). Yet China’s unhappy growth story also fits into a broader set of progress paradoxes related to rapid change and development in countries around the world. While change associated with economic progress usually brings increases in well-being levels over time, in the short term it is often associated with drops in life satisfaction and other dimensions of well-being. Changes in the pace and nature of economic growth tend to bring increases in insecurity (as rewards to different skill sets change) and in inequality (as there are winners and losers in the process).

Years ago we found that upwardly mobile respondents in growing developing economies reported lower levels of satisfaction with their lives than very poor respondents with no change in their income levels.

These latter trends were particularly stark in the case of China due to the dismantling of traditional safety nets as millions migrated from rural to urban areas in search of new opportunities. In addition, although not the focus of this paper, many other transition economies made concurrent transitions to political democracy, but China did not. In general, political freedom is positively associated with well-being in countries around the world. What clearly stands out in China’s case, though, is the rapid nature of economic growth and poverty reduction on the one hand, and trends in life satisfaction going in the opposite direction (at least in the initial growth years) on the other. 

Indeed, one of the early findings—and paradoxes—in the well-being literature, which is particularly relevant to China, is that of “happy peasants and frustrated achievers.” Years ago we found that upwardly mobile respondents in growing developing economies reported lower levels of satisfaction with their lives than very poor respondents with no change in their income levels. Part of the trend is explained by the raised expectations and access to new information that come with upward mobility. We found that our frustrated respondents were more concerned about income inequality than were their non-frustrated counterparts at equivalent income levels. Part of the explanation could be reverse causality, as more frustrated, unhappy respondents may be more likely to seek change and to better their situation. Our more recent work on the well-being of migrants is suggestive along these lines. We find potential migrants from Latin America (and in some transition economies) are wealthier and more educated than the average, but also less happy and more critical of their economic situations prior to migrating. They then tend to make modest gains in well-being once they actually migrate.

In this paper we take advantage of a new national-level well-being survey for China that has detailed information about health (reports of chronic and acute health problems, as well as anxiety and depression), sufficiency in rest, frequency of leisure activities, education, income, marital status, formal household registration (hukou), and housing status in addition to life satisfaction to explore channels that might be driving China’s progress paradox. Our work is distinct from previous studies of life satisfaction in China in its exploration of the relationships between mental health/life satisfaction and physical health (chronic disease) and also time use (sufficiency in rest or frequency of leisure activities). We build on detailed work by one of the authors—Graham—on life satisfaction trends around the world, progress paradoxes, the links between happiness and health, and the detailed knowledge of and work on China’s economy and public institutions by the others —Zhou and Zhang.

We find that the standard determinants of well-being are the same for China as they are for most countries around the world. At the same time, China stands out in that unhappiness and reported mental health problems are highest among the cohorts who either have or are positioned to benefit from the transition and related growth—a clear progress paradox. These are urban residents, the more educated, those who work in the private sector, and those who report to have insufficient leisure time and rest. We hope that our findings contribute new insights to the extensive work that has already been done on life satisfaction in China, from the perspective of the linkages between well-being and mental health in particular.

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Economic development is often tied to the evolution of local industry. One way to assess a country’s emergence as a major player in the global economy is by examining the ability of its domestic firms to compete on the global market. Public procurement—the purchase of goods, works, and services by governments—represents a significant portion of this market, making up an estimated average of 15 to 30 percent of a country’s GDP. Procurement in the developing world is especially noteworthy, since large projects are often partially or wholly financed by external donors such as the World Bank and other international financial institutions (IFIs), which encourage developing country governments to internationally advertise the goods, works, or services they require and to select the most competitive bid they receive. Yet the role of IFI-funded procurement in the emergence of global markets, particularly for and among developing countries, is seldom a topic of empirical study, despite its linkages to global growth.

This paper takes a first step toward evaluating the connection between a country’s or a region’s economic development trajectory and its domestic firms’ competitiveness by examining IFI-funded procurement contracts. Using data from 1995 to 2013 for World Bank-financed civil works and goods contracts, we consider the theory that international competition in developing-world procurement has become a key instrument through which local industry has advanced in some countries and regions and a main indicator of where it has lagged in others. Notably, we find evidence of a “civil works lag” in sub-Saharan Africa, whereby local competitiveness in the construction industry has developed more slowly there than in other regions. It is our hope that this preliminary study will direct attention to the critical issues raised by international procurement trends and encourage increased analysis of IFI-funded contracts data. 

We proceed in four sections: Section I presents the history of IFI-funded international procurement and a theoretical framework to guide the rest of the paper. Section II presents the data and macro and regional trends. Section III poses the question of civil works in Africa. Section IV summarizes key findings and recommendations.

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Background

Although the progress of the last decade in the disclosure of aid information has been unprecedented, the ultimate impact of that disclosure is dependent on the specific type of information being disclosed and its accessibility by those who can make use of it. What is evident is that there remains a critical gap, especially when it comes to the timely and accessible disclosure of information during project implementation. If the donor community is sincere in wanting to effectively engage stakeholders, not just during project preparation but throughout the project’s implementation, then it is essential that this gap be filled. Until this is addressed, the promise and potential of transparency and its impact on the governance of aid remain unfulfilled. 

There has been significant progress in transparency and the accessibility of aid information with regard to the upstream aspects of project design, including project identification, project appraisal, and safeguards. There has also been progress in the reporting of what aid projects have achieved and their impacts after completion. What is still less evident, though, is the transparency of information during the course of project implementation. This critical period—when even the best designed projects can go wrong—has been a relative foundling in terms of available timely information on how a project is progressing, what changes have been made to contract terms and amounts, and whether projects are being executed in accordance with their design and safeguard specifications, leaving a major governance gap in monitoring aid. 

The underlying thesis is that, by better targeting the type and format of information required by local stakeholders during implementation, donor agencies and recipient governments will have a greater chance of ensuring the realization and quality of results and successfully adapting to problems and changing conditions on the ground.

Moreover, this lack of attention to the disclosure of implementation information is occurring despite the growing evidence that civil society, armed with the necessary project information, can have a substantive impact on effective implementation and results. The purpose of this paper is to review the disclosure practices of a selection of international finance institutions (IFIs) and bilateral donor agencies regarding project implementation information, assess the level of transparency in terms of type of information and accessibility of that information, and recommend criteria for judging the performance of donor agencies on this important factor. The underlying thesis is that, by better targeting the type and format of information required by local stakeholders during implementation, donor agencies and recipient governments will have a greater chance of ensuring the realization and quality of results and successfully adapting to problems and changing conditions on the ground.

Approach

To set the framework for reviewing and assessing the reporting practices of the donors, we first identify the key information that is required for effective monitoring of project implementation by local stakeholders. It is assumed that this stakeholder would be interested in information at the level of the specific investment or activity such as the building of a road or the supply of textbooks to a local school or medicines to a local dispensary. Given the range of agencies involved in aid financing, including the IFIs, bilateral government agencies, other multilaterals such as the United Nations agencies, and philanthropic organizations, we narrowed our targeted agencies to those that provide aid to governments and that fund substantial investment projects with multiyear implementation. Within that group we focused on four of the IFIs (World Bank, IDB, AsDB, and AfDB), given the similar and comparable nature of their policies and investment practices for concessional and non-concessional loans, credits, and grants. In addition we identified a number of bilateral donors (DFID, USAID, and MCC) to understand the broader applicability of the assessment and to identify different the approaches of bilateral aid agencies.

The next challenge was to select investment projects from these agencies that would offer a good basis on which to judge the disclosure practices. We excluded policy or budget support aid as these do not involve investment in specific physical outputs. It was important to include a number of larger infrastructure projects given the scale of issues that these projects raise during implementation, but we also selected projects in the human development sector. These desk reviews and web searches were supplemented by interviews with several of the agencies as well as the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) secretariat and Publish What You Fund.

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1. Girls' education as a force multiplier

Girls’ education functions as a force multiplier in international development, yielding economic and social returns at the individual, family and societal levels. Educated mothers are less likely to die of complications related to pregnancy, and their children experience lower rates of mortality and malnutrition. As a result of improvements in education for women of reproductive age, an estimated 2.1 million children’s lives were saved between 1990 and 2009. 

Education is associated with increased contraception use; less underage premarital sex; lower HIV/AIDS risks; and reduced child marriage, early births, and fertility rates. Educating girls also yields intergenerational benefits because the children of educated mothers tend to be healthier and better-educated themselves.

Educating girls also contributes to economic growth—increasing a girl’s secondary education by one year over the average raises her future income by 10 to 20 percent.

In addition to its health benefits, education can augment women’s labor force participation and earning potential. This can lead to reduced poverty, greater political participation by women, and women’s increased agency and assertion of their rights at the household and community levels. Educating girls also contributes to economic growth—increasing a girl’s secondary education by one year over the average raises her future income by 10 to 20 percent. 

Girls’ and boys’ right to education is widely accepted in international human rights law, and thus has been enshrined in numerous conventions—including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women sets forth a norm for the fair and equal treatment of women. International humanitarian law protects all children’s right to education during armed conflict. 

The social and economic benefits of education also illustrate the clear business case for schooling, based on returns from investments in education. For example, a recent report showed that for a typical company in India, an investment of $1 in a child’s education today will return $53 in value to the employer by the time the individual enters the workforce.

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Morocco has so far been a success story in the Arab world. It has followed a gradual approach to political reforms and democratization, which led to the adoption of a new constitution and the holding of free parliamentary elections in 2011. At the same time, economic growth averaged 4.5 percent between 2000 and 2010, reached 5.0 percent in 2011, 2.7 percent in 2012, and 4.4 percent in 2013. That is, Morocco has avoided the political upheavals and economic meltdowns that plagued other Arab Countries in Transition (ACTs). Maintaining this record of success will require continued political and economic reforms.

On the economic side, the focus needs to be on enhancing inclusiveness and ensuring that the benefits of growth are widely shared. More than 40 percent of Moroccans live in rural areas and depend, directly or indirectly, on agriculture for their livelihood. They also happen to be much poorer than those living in urban areas. And, rural poverty is three times higher than urban poverty. Experience from around the world indicates that as Morocco continues to grow, more and more people will migrate from the countryside to cities. Hence, an inclusive growth strategy needs to include investments in urban infrastructure as well as programs to increase urban employment.

At the same time, more needs to be done to increase rural living standards, reduce regional income differentials and lower the rate of rural-urban migration, while concomitantly increasing agricultural production and enhancing Morocco’s food and nutrition security. The Government of Morocco is implementing a rural development strategy with two pillars: the first pillar focuses on large modern farms, and the second pillar focuses on smallholder and family farming.

This paper argues that the twin goals of inclusive growth and food security would be best achieved by emphasizing the importance of the second pillar, and by adopting an approach that includes: (i) increasing food reserves and using financial markets for risk reduction, (ii) improving the linkage of smallholders and family farmers to markets and help them increase domestic food production while raising their incomes, and (iii) supporting the development of independent producer organizations that provide voice for smallholders and also help them gain better access to input and output markets.

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This paper discusses the importance of services exports for the U.S. economy. In this context, the paper analyzes how export promotion agencies (EPAs) can use the Internet to grow services exports by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The first part of this paper discusses how engaging in international trade benefits services SMEs and the U.S. economy. Part 2 provides an overview of the barriers faced by SME service firms in using the Internet to go global and analyzes the different ways that SMEs use the Internet, from reaching consumers globally, communicating with suppliers, to becoming part of global supply chains. Based on interviews and an online survey with export promotion agencies (EPAs) in the U.S. and select other countries, Part 3 describes how EPAs are engaging service SMEs and assisting them in using the Internet to become international traders. Part 4 draws on the experiences of EPA support for SME services exporters and recommends how to scale up some of these approaches in ways that would have a broader impact on SME services exports. The paper concludes with thoughts on future research.

Part 1: International trade and the impact of the Internet on SME services exports

The important of services and SMEs of the U.S. economy

Reducing barriers to international trade produces a range of economic benefits. At the macroeconomic level, international trade leads to lower prices for consumers as tariff rates and other barriers are removed. Trade also forces domestic businesses to compete with imports, increasing overall productivity in the economy, supporting higher wages and increasing overall welfare. In addition, SMEs that export have higher employment, are more productive, pay higher wages, and are more capital and skill-intensive. As more productive firms become exporters, less productive firms exit the industry, leading to a reallocation of resources to productive firms and raising average industry productivity. Engaging in international trade also exposes firms to uncertainty and risk, which catalyzes learning and requires adjustments that produce more productive and innovative firms. For instance, the challenge of being in a foreign market requires innovation to adapt business operations and to tailor services for the market to address cultural, language and regulatory differences.

Data shows that most firms do not export and those that do are larger than average. In the United States, the top 1 percent of firms—large multinationals—account for 90 percent of U.S. trade but only 15 percent of employment. In contrast, SMEs are the main drivers of jobs growth in the U.S., accounting for 63 percent of net new private sector jobs since 2002, and 60 percent of net job gains since the end of the recession. In addition, 37 percent of these jobs created by SMEs were in high-tech industries. SMEs are also more innovative than larger firms, producing 16 times more patents per employee than large firms.

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In the developing world, more than 200 million children under the age of five years are at risk of not reaching their full human potential because they suffer from the negative consequences of poverty, nutritional deficiencies and inadequate learning opportunities. Given these risks, there is a strong case for early childhood development (ECD) interventions in nutrition, health, education and social protection, which can produce long-lasting benefits throughout the life cycle. The results from the 2012 round of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)—an international, large-scale assessment that measures 15-year-olds’ performance in mathematics, reading and science literacy—demonstrate the benefits of ECD: Students in the countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) who had the benefit of being enrolled for more than one year in preprimary school scored 53 points higher in mathematics (the equivalent of more than one year of schooling), compared with students who had not attended preprimary school. Although there is much evidence that ECD programs have a great impact and are less costly than educational interventions later in life, very few ECD initiatives are being scaled up in developing countries. For example, in 2010, only 15 percent of children in low-income countries—compared with 48 percent worldwide—were enrolled in preprimary education programs. Furthermore, even though the literature points to larger beneficial effects of ECD for poorer children, within developing countries, disadvantaged families are even less likely to be among those enrolled in ECD programs. For instance, in Ghana, children from wealthy families are four times more likely than children from poor households to be enrolled in preschool programs.

One of the major barriers to scaling up ECD interventions is financing. In order to address financing issues, both policymakers and practitioners need a better understanding of what is currently being spent on ECD interventions, what high-quality interventions cost, and what outcomes these interventions can produce. If stakeholder groups are made more aware of the costs of ECD interventions, they may be able to support decisionmaking on investments in ECD, to better estimate gaps in financing, and to work toward securing stable funding for scaling up service provision and for quality enhancement. One of the weakest areas of ECD policy planning is in the realm of financial planning.6 Good data are scarce on ECD spending and the costs of ECD interventions that are useful for program budgeting and planning; but these data are valuable for a number of reasons, including the fact that they support analyses of what different inputs cost and thus can facilitate considering various alternative modalities for service delivery. In this paper, we focus on what data are available to gain a clearer picture of what is being spent on ECD and what it costs to deliver basic ECD interventions in developing countries.

ECD interventions come in many varieties, and therefore we first define the package of ECD interventions that have been deemed essential. Then we outline a framework for better understanding ECD financing, which combines a top-down approach analyzing expenditures and a bottom-up approach analyzing the costs of delivering individual interventions. We comment on the general methodological issues stemming from these approaches and the limitations of the data that have been produced. Next, we delve into the available data and discuss the different funding sources and financing mechanisms that countries utilize to deliver ECD services and what patterns exist in spending. We provide a brief overview of how many public and private resources in both developed and developing countries are invested in young children, and in which specific subsectors. Although these data on spending illustrate the flows and help us understand how much is being allocated and by whom, the data are limited, and this top-down approach still leaves us with many unanswered questions. Therefore, we turn our attention to the actual costs of individual ECD interventions, which help us further understand what ECD spending can “buy” in different countries. We identify some trends in the actual costs of delivering these services, although there are a number of methodological issues vis-à-vis costing and the services delivered, which lead to wide variations between and within countries and make it difficult to compare programs over time.

Finally, we look at a number of initiatives that are currently under way to collect better data on ECD costs and expenditures, which will be useful for countries in planning programs and identifying funding sources. These initiatives are sponsored by organizations such as UNICEF, Save the Children, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Given the gaps in the available data that we identify and the interventions currently under way, we conclude with recommendations for increasing the knowledge base in this area for use in policymaking and planning.

     

 

 

Over the past decade, the Millennium Development Goals (hereafter MDGs or "Goals") have become a central framework in organizing global health efforts. Many developing countries have made significant progress toward the official targets, including Goal 4, which is to achieve a two-thirds reduction in under-5 mortality rates (U5MR) by 2015 compared to 1990. According to the United Nations’ latest estimates, the developing world’s 2013 aggregate U5MR had declined 40 percent since 2000, and 50 percent since 1990.

But progress toward the Goals is not the same as progress because of the Goals. Nor can the mere setting of targets be considered the full scope of what might be called the "MDG agenda." The broader agenda includes policy, organizational, and advocacy efforts to mobilize targeted resources in the practical pursuit of goals. It also includes the consolidation of common global reference points across diverse public, private, and non-profit actors, which might in turn have prompted incremental efforts toward results. As Manning (2009) has pointed out, "it is intrinsically difficult to distinguish the impact of the MDG framework itself from the strands of thinking that helped to create it."

Although causal pathways are difficult to discern in aggregate, one highly correlated trend since the launch of the MDGs is a significant expansion in global health budgets. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (2014) estimates that total development assistance for health nearly tripled, from U.S. $10.9 billion in 2000 to more than $30 billion in each of 2011, 2012 and 2013 (all in constant $2011). These resources have helped to launch and expand important new international institutions, including the GAVI Alliance, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the U.S. presidential initiatives for both AIDS and malaria, all of which have helped to expand dramatically the country-level coverage of preventive and therapeutic health interventions.

Skeptics tend to question the MDGs based on four categories of critiques. One focuses on shortfalls in results. Many countries are not on course to achieve individual Goals, either because policy efforts or resources are inadequate. A second criticizes the establishment of political targets considered too ambitious to begin with. A third asserts that the developing world was making advances prior to the establishment of the MDGs, so the Goals should not be given credit for progress that would have been made in any case. A fourth argues that global aggregates might reflect success, but these are driven by results in the most populous developing countries, China and India, which made progress independently of the MDGs.

As of the end of 2013, at least 7.5 million more children’s lives have been saved compared to the trajectory of progress as of 2001. The majority of these lives have been saved in sub-Saharan Africa.

With these questions in mind, and as the international community considers the next generation of intergovernmental targets beyond the 2015 deadline, it is an appropriate juncture to examine the overarching "macro" hypothesis that the establishment of the MDGs and related efforts to support their achievement have been associated with accelerated progress on intended development outcomes. This paper does so with specific focus on MDG 4 for reducing under-5 mortality. The analysis focuses only on discerning long-term variations in outcomes that coincide with the establishment of the Goals. This is distinct from an investigation of "micro" hypotheses regarding how the MDGs might have been linked to variations in U5MR outcomes within countries.

The results are striking. They show that the period since the establishment of the MDGs has seen unprecedented rates of progress among the poorest countries, even when they are not on a path to achieve the formal MDG targets. As of the end of 2013, at least 7.5 million more children’s lives have been saved compared to the trajectory of progress as of 2001. The majority of these lives have been saved in sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, the period since the turn of the millennium appears to show convergent rates of progress across developing regions. At a minimum, the period from 2002 to 2012 was the first to show a clear break in the previous long-run trend whereby countries with higher U5MR saw systematically slower rates of U5MR decline.

The paper is divided into ten sections. Following this introduction, the second section describes the core hypotheses used to test MDG performance. The third section describes the data used in the analysis. The fourth section describes key methodological assumptions, including the definition of pre-MDG reference periods and the distinction between On Track versus Off Track countries at the outset of the MDG period. The fifth section describes the results for the three key tests of MDG performance, including variations by region and country income group. Section 6 then considers whether U5MR reduction trends have been subject to deeper structural shifts. Section 7 presents longer-term regression results evaluating trends over more than five decades. The results suggest a structural change in global trends since the onset of the MDGs, so Section 8 estimates the number of children’s lives saved that could be plausibly linked to the MDGs. Section 9 considers future implications for new targets to 2030. A final section concludes.

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Agriculture’s role in the process of economic growth has framed a central question in development economics for several decades. While arguments differ regarding the specific mechanisms through which agricultural productivity increases might contribute to structural change in the economy, it has long been theorized that advances in the agricultural sector can promote shifts in labor to higher productivity sectors that offer higher real incomes. 

Empirical work in more recent years has helped inform the conceptual arguments and underscored the long-term growth and poverty reduction benefits from agriculture, especially for the most extreme forms of poverty. At the same time, recent evidence has also underscored the role of the manufacturing sector in driving structural change and long-term convergence in incomes across countries. This and other evidence regarding agriculture’s relatively low value added per worker compared to other sectors has prompted some researchers to narrow the number of developing countries in which agriculture is recommended as a priority sector for investment in light of higher prospective growth returns in non-agricultural sectors. These debates present a first-order concern for understanding why some countries have not experienced long-term economic progress and what to do about it. If agriculture can play a central and somewhat predictable role within the poorest countries, then it is a natural candidate for targeted public investment.

The theoretical and empirical literature regarding structural change is vast, yet identifying the causal role of agricultural productivity is challenging because relevant indicators of structural change trend together in the process of development; impacts on labor force structure are likely to occur after a lag; and statistical identification is not amenable to microstyle experiments. Our contribution in this paper is to focus on the role of agricultural inputs as drivers of higher yields and subsequent economic transformation, using the unique economic geography of fertilizer production in our identification strategy. Large-scale nitrogen fertilizer production occurs in a limited number of countries around the world, owing partly to the fact that the Haber-Bosch process requires natural gas. Transporting this fertilizer to each country’s agricultural heartland generates cross-sectional variation due to economic geography, akin to Redding and Venables' model of “supplier access” to intermediate goods, which is estimated to affect income per capita. Our identification strategy exploits this variation in supplier access as well as temporal variation in the global fertilizer price to generate a novel instrument for fertilizer use. To our knowledge this is the first application of economic geography towards causally identifying the relationship between agriculture and structural change.

Our paper builds on the insights of Lagakos and Waugh, which highlight the gaps in understanding of cross-country variations in agricultural productivity. A variety of studies have estimated sources of total factor productivity (TFP) in agriculture in the poorest countries, including in sub-Saharan Africa, but agriculture is such an input-intensive sector that TFP assessments only provide one piece of the overarching crop sector puzzle. Our econometric strategy proceeds in two parts. First, we empirically assess the inputs that contributed to increased productivity in staple agriculture, as proxied by cereal yields per hectare, during the latter decades of the 20th century. Using cross-country panel data, this forms a macro-level physical production function for yield increases. We find evidence for fertilizer, modern variety seeds and water as key inputs to yield growth, controlling for other factors such as human capital and land-labor ratios. Second, we deploy our novel instrument to examine the causal link between changes in cereal yields and aggregate economic outcomes, including gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, labor share in agriculture, and non-agricultural value added per worker. We find evidence that increases in cereal yields have both direct and indirect positive effects on economy-wide outcomes. The results are particularly pertinent when considering economic growth prospects for countries where a majority of the labor force still works in agriculture.

The next section of this paper motivates the empirical work, drawing from the many contributions in the literature towards understanding structural change. Section 3 presents empirical models both for estimating the physical production function for cereal yields and for estimating the effect of yield increases on economic growth, labor share in agriculture, and non-agricultural value added per worker. Section 4 describes the data, Section 5 presents the results, and Section 6 concludes.

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There is burgeoning literature on well-being around the world, much of which finds consistent patterns in its determinants in countries and cultures around the world. Many of these patterns are predictable: Income matters to individual well-being, but after a certain point other things such as the incomes of others also start to matter. Health is essential to well-being, and stable partnerships, stable marriages and social relationships also play a role. Women are typically happier than men, except in contexts where their rights are severely compromised. And because these patterns are so consistent across diverse countries and cultures, scholars in the field can control for these factors and explore the well-being effects of phenomena that vary more, such as inflation and unemployment rates, crime and corruption, smoking, drinking, exercising, and the nature of public goods, among others. There is also nascent literature on the causal properties of well-being, which finds that happier people are, for the most part, healthier and more productive.

Within this broader frame, we undertook the first extensive survey of well-being in Mongolia, a remote and unique context where citizens had recently experienced a dramatic transition in the nature of their economy and political system. A primary question was whether the basic patterns in the determinants of well-being trends would hold in Mongolia—landlocked between China and Russia, the least densely populated country in the world, with a rich history and nomadic heritage, and full of sharp contrasts. For all of these reasons, one could expect that well-being trends there might diverge from the usual patterns that we find elsewhere.

Because of the detailed and disaggregated nature of the data that we were able to collect, we were also able to explore additional questions for which larger-scale, less fine grained data sets do not allow. In particular, we focused on the well-being effects of average community- level income and of average community-level happiness, and how these varied depending on where in the income distribution respondents were, as well as where in the well-being distribution respondents were. As is increasingly common in the literature, we analyzed two distinct dimensions of well-being—hedonic and evaluative—separately, comparing our findings across these dimensions in Mongolia to those that we have based on worldwide data.

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A decade of reform of U.S. development assistance programs has brought significant and important improvement in the nature and delivery of U.S. assistance. But the 21st century world is witnessing constant change in development. More developing countries are ascending to middle income status and gaining the capability, resources, and desire to finance and direct their own development. The rapid expansion of private capital flows, remittances, and domestic resources has significantly reduced the relative role of donor assistance in financing development. Donors are becoming more numerous and varied. There is growing recognition that the private sector, both nationally and internationally, is an indispensable component of sustainable development.

With donor assistance serving as an ever smaller share of the development equation but remaining important for some countries and sectors and an important tool of U.S. international engagement, the U.S. government must fully implement suggested and already begun reforms. This paper catalogues the principal aid initiatives of the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama (anyone well versed in Bush and Obama initiatives might bypass or skim this section), presents the rationale for aid reform, identifies eight key elements of aid reform, assesses the Bush and Obama initiatives according to those eight elements, and proposes a focused reform agenda for the next several years.

This paper reports on and evaluates Bush and Obama administration aid initiatives only as to their impact on the aid reform agenda, not as to their broader impact. This paper deals only with development assistance as that has been the principal target of aid reform efforts. It does not cover humanitarian assistance, military assistance, or development-type assistance that is provided by the Department of Defense. It also does not address the large assistance programs to front-line states like Afghanistan and Iraq, where aid has been driven principally by political and security objectives rather than development objectives.

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China’s rapidly increasing investment, trade and loans in Latin America may be entrenching high-carbon development pathways in the region, a trend scarcely mentioned in policy circles. High-carbon activities include the extraction of fossil fuels and other natural resources, expansion of large-scale agriculture and the energy-intensive stages of processing natural resources into intermediate goods. This paper addresses three examples, including Chinese investments in Venezuela’s oil sector and a Costa Rican oil refinery, and Chinese investment in and purchases of Brazilian soybeans. We pose the question of whether there is a tie between China’s role in opening up vast resources in Latin America and the way those nations make national climate policy and how they behave at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations. We focus on the period between the 2009 Copenhagen round of negotiations and the run-up to the Paris negotiations scheduled for 2015, when the UNFCCC will attempt to finalize a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol.

China and Latin America have a critical role to play to ensure progress is made before the 2015 deadline, since they together account for approximately 40 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. Several Latin American nations are world leaders in having reached high levels of human development while emitting very low levels of greenhouse gases. Several have publically committed to ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. Staying on or moving to low-carbon pathways is critical for these countries, but substantial Chinese investments in natural resources and commodities—when combined with those of other nations and firms—run the risk of taking the region in an unsustainable direction.

China and Latin America have a critical role to play to ensure progress is made before the 2015 deadline, since they together account for approximately 40 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions.

Chinese investments and imports of Latin American commodities may be strengthening the relative power of political and commercial domestic constituencies and of “dirty” ministries (e.g. ministries of mining, agriculture or energy) vis-à-vis environmental and climate change ministries and departments. These “cleaner” ministries are traditionally weak and marginalized actors in the region. China may thus be inadvertently undermining Latin American countries’ attempts to promote climate change policies by reinforcing and strengthening actors within those countries and governments that do not prioritize climate change and who have often seen environmental efforts as an impediment to economic growth.

China has stated that it is interested in cooperating with Latin America on combating climate change, but official bilateral or multilateral exchanges on the issue outside of the UNFCCC negotiations have been limited. Both China and Latin America could benefit substantially by refocusing on opportunities for low-carbon growth such as renewable energy. China’s growing influence in global renewable energy markets presents excellent opportunities to invest in clean energy in Latin America.

China and Latin American countries could launch a climate change initiative through the newly created China-CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) Forum, focused on financing the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, forestry, energy and transport, as well as sharing technology and strategies for adapting to climate impacts. Chinese-Latin American relations should also mainstream environmental protection and low-carbon sustainable growth into their partnership, to avoid pushing countries in the region towards high-carbon pathways.

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Regional disparities and inequality between the rural and the urban areas in Tunisia have been persistently large and perceived as a big injustice. The main regions that did not receive an equitable share from the country’s economic growth, as compared to the coastal regions that are highly urbanized, are the predominantly rural western regions. Their youth often have to migrate to the cities to look for work and most of them end up with low-paying and frustrating jobs in the informal sector. The more educated among them face a very uncertain outlook and the highest rate of unemployment. This bias is strongest for female workers and university graduates living in the poor rural regions. The purpose of this paper is to study the underlying causes and factors of these disparities and to discuss policies and measures that may allow these regions to benefit from faster and more inclusive growth.

Regional disparities do not mean that Tunisia’s rural regions remain totally backwards or that nothing has been achieved in the poorer regions. Actually, over the previous five decades various governmental programs and projects were implemented in these regions—in particular in the area of education. But the government efforts in the western regions were much less substantive than they were in the rest of the country, and little was done to develop modern non-agricultural economic activities. Moreover, while the democratization of education was not successful in ensuring job growth, it was critical in raising the level of awareness about regional disparities and the urban/rural economic gap.

Inadequate government investment is not the only factor responsible for Tunisia’s rural poverty. The scarcity of natural resources (mainly water), the distribution of land and the limited access to financial resources are among the other important structural economic constraints facing agricultural development.

Two regions are studied in more detail, namely Sidi Bouzid in the midwest and Le Kef in the northwest. We also give an overview of best international practices and the literature on economic development, with a focus on the case of South Korea and Taiwan in order to draw relevant lessons.

We argue that, while it is possible to boost productivity and income for the rural population in Tunisia’s poor regions, improving productivity in agriculture is part of the solution. However, it cannot ensure a decent livelihood for all of Tunisia’s rural population, in particular for the impoverished Tunisians that own small farms or are almost landless. Regional development requires major structural reforms and strategies and comprehensive government-initiated programs operated within a holistic framework that combines public and private interventions. In the case of some regions with limited resources, such as Sidi Bouzid, this will not be sufficient; inevitably, rural to urban exodus and migration to other regions will continue. Politically, this may be hard to accept and to include in political agendas.

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Jordan is in the eye of the Arab cyclone. It remains stable while surrounded by chaotic political situations in Syria, Iraq, Palestine and the Sinai Peninsula. Jordan has not experienced the massive demonstrations aimed at regime change that have been seen elsewhere in the region, and its relative stability has enabled it to cash in on the geopolitical services it provides. These services include: hosting refugees from Palestine, Iraq or Syria; remaining a reliable ally for many international powers; featuring a strong army that plays a stabilizing role in the region; serving as an intermediary when neighboring countries need a host or a dealmaker; and providing qualified Jordanian workers to fill open vacancies for companies and countries, especially in the Gulf.

The current stability in Jordan matches well its historic capacity to resist and adapt to shocks. However, the contemporary situation of the labor market reveals that the weaknesses observed in the countries having experienced revolutions (e.g., Tunisia and Egypt) are also present in Jordan; labor market participation is low with very few women active, and the unemployment rate of educated young people is worrisome. Both the number of Jordanians working abroad and the number of migrant workers in Jordan show the discrepancy between demand and supply of labor in Jordan. This could become problematic, since the economic situation has been worsening, notably with fewer public jobs available. Hence there is a need for international donors to keep supporting Jordan in a difficult regional environment, for the government of Jordan to wittily manage the balance between Transjordanians and West Bankers in the near future and for new workers to alter their expectations in searching for opportunities outside the public sector.

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This paper aims to find effective policy options that can support the development of more attractive jobs in Egypt’s private sector and lead to job creation and inclusive growth. Egypt is facing a marked “youth bulge” and therefore has a high rate of youth unemployment, particularly among the highly educated.

The paper uses a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to elicit job preferences among youth, and analyzes survey data collected from engineering students at 10 universities in six cities in Egypt during the period of July through October 2013. For a comparative analysis, the survey was also conducted at eight universities in five cities in Indonesia, which is one of the nations in Asia with a Muslim-majority population that faces the same demographic issue. The findings of this research will contribute to building a foundation for designing youth employment policies in Egypt. The most obvious findings to emerge from this study are that: the public-private sector wage differentials must be narrowed; better benefits must accompany private sector employment (particularly support for continuing education, upgrading qualifications, and health insurance); and good IT infrastructure matters. Taken together, these steps could significantly contribute to an increase in the rates of a private sector employment among young Egyptian job seekers, even in the case of continued high public sector wages.

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