With the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), world leaders made a bold pledge in 2015 to leave no one behind on the path of development by 2030. Half-way to the target date, some 22 countries…

Samuel Kofi Tetteh Baah, Christoph Lakner, Umar Serajuddin |

This blog is a biweekly feature highlighting recent working papers from around the World Bank Group. It introduces four papers published from November 16 to November 30 on various topics,…

Marcelo Buitron, Policy Research Working Paper team |

Why are fertilizer prices so high, and what can countries in Central America do about this?

Luis Flores, Viviana Perego, Diego Arias |

Costa Rica lost the momentum for poverty reduction towards the end of the twentieth century. This makes Costa Rica an outlier in a region that conti…

Jacobus de Hoop, Agustin Arakaki |

Central America and the Dominican Republic have a good track record of economic growth. Between 1991 and 2019, Central America grew by an average of 4.5% per year, and the Dominican Republic by an…

Michel Kerf |

Ensuring better integration of refugees into host communities and longer-term investments in both refugees and their hosts.

Axel van Trotsenburg |

While camps are often crucial for the displaced populations in the immediate term, they are not a tenable option when displacement becomes prolonged.

Utz Pape, Ambika Sharma |

The TFSCB Administrative Unit at the Development Economic Data Group (DECDG) launched a new blog series “TFSCB: Statistics for a Better World” earlier this year to share the impacts of the World…

Sun Hwa Song, Masako Hiraga |

"The average length of time that refugees spend in camps is 17 years." This cruel statistic has been quoted many times, influencing our perception of refugee crises as never-ending…

Xavier Devictor, Quy-Toan Do |

For the first time in history, the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen below 10%. The world has never been as ambitious about development as it is today. After adopting the…

Sri Mulyani Indrawati |