The global economy got off to a bumpy start this year, but growth in 2015 and 2016 looks to be broadly on track. Projections for developing countries in 2014 have been down downgraded by 0.5 percentage points to 4.8 percent mainly reflecting weak first quarter growth in the US due to weather and...

High-income economies appear to be finally turning the corner, contributing to a projected acceleration in global growth from 2.4 percent in 2013 to 3.2 percent this year, 3.4 percent in 2015, and 3.5 percent in 2016. Overall, growth in developing countries is projected to pick up modestly from...

The global economy appears to be transitioning toward a more stable period. Although acute risks have diminished, real-side activity remains sluggish †“ especially in high-income Europe. Most developing countries have fully recovered from the crisis. Although growth is slower than during the...

Using data from the International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities, this paper on the water sector in pourashavas (municipalities) in Bangladesh provides an analysis of the trends in the water sector development over 2010-16. The main purpose of the paper is to examine the...

Adequate water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in health care facilities plays a critical role in ensuring improved health care utilization and reducing disease burden due to reinfection. WASH in health facilities is now gaining momentum with the new SDG targets that governments have vowed to...

This paper studies the effects of global and domestic inflation shocks on core price inflation in 105 countries between 1970 and 2016, by using a heterogeneous panel vector-autoregressive model. The methodology allows accounting for differences across groups of countries (advanced economies,...

This paper summarizes the World Bank's approach to identifying parameters for key equations in its macro structural model for countries where short sample sizes or major structural changes render traditional time-series approaches infeasible or yield unstable estimates. To identify parameters...