This  World Bank’s Policy Research Working Paper Series introduces 6 papers published from March 1 to March 15 on various topics, including taxation, gender, and wildfire smokes.

Marcelo Buitron, Policy Research Working Paper team |

Blog featuring female leaders across the Pacific for the World Bank Pacific’s 2021 International Women’s Day campaign.

Yasmin Poole |

Illicit trade in tobacco products undermines global tobacco prevention and control interventions, particularly with respect to tobacco tax policy. From a public health perspective, illicit trade…

Sheila Dutta |

In November 2016, we published the “Practical Guide for Measuring Retail Payment Costs”, an innovative methodology that can be customized to country needs and circumstances, without losing the…

Holti Banka |

Among the 29 countries and economies of the East Asia and Pacific region, one finds some of the world’s most successful education systems. Seven out of the top 10 highest average scorers on…

Michael Crawford |

This blog post was co-authored by Franz Drees-Gross, Director, Transport and ICT Global Practice, and Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez, Senior Director, Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice.…

Franz Drees-Gross, Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez |

There is a lot that development practitioners don’t know about the Pacific Islands. When it comes to the laws of these small island nations scattered throughout the ocean separating Asia and the…

Katrin Schulz, Yasmin Bin-Humam, Nayda L. Almodóvar-Reteguis, Paula Tavares, Isabel Santagostino Recavarren |

Also available in: Français | العربية   A boat trip from Port Elizabeth to Kingstown, in the Caribbean country of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, is a one-hour trip that locals take several…

Valerie Lorena |

In PDF: Korean | Khmer Every time I learn of another natural disaster – the people killed and injured, homes destroyed, livelihoods lost – I know we must act to reduce the tragic impact instead of…

Axel van Trotsenburg |

Dots on the world map – they are coral atolls and volcanic islands spread across a vast swath of the Pacific Ocean with names as exotic as their turquoise water, white sand and tropical foliage.…

Axel van Trotsenburg |