At the Millennium Summit, the world community pledged to promote gender equality and chose as a specific target the achievement of gender equity in primary and secondary education by the year 2005 in every country of the world. Based on the findings from a growing empirical literature that...

We focus on an issue that appears particularly relevant for fragile states and which has received little attention: social institutions related to gender inequality, defined as societal practices and legal norms that frame gender roles and the distribution of power between men and women in the...

This paper documents the additional spending that is required for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to achieve meaningful progress in SDGs by 2030. Benin and Rwanda are presented in detail through case studies. The main lessons are: i) average additional spending across SSA is significant, at 19 percent...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recently adopted by the United Nations represent an important step to identify shared global goals for development over the next two decades. Yet, the stated goals are not as straightforward and easy to interpret as they appear on the surface. Review of...

This paper presents a review of studies that estimate the cost of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Although the Sustainable Development Goals provide useful benchmarks for fiscal authorities and donors, typical cross-country costing exercises can be misleading, for a variety of...

The members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have been continuously involved in achieving a balanced outcome in the area of fisheries subsidies negotiations in 2018. The discussions have been ongoing and will continue in 2019. According to the 11th Ministerial Conference decision of the...

This paper explores the investments needed to achieve universal access to electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030, and the additional operation and maintenance costs these investments entail. It also explores the drivers of these costs, by exploring hundreds of scenarios that combine...

This paper provides an overview of research on out-of-pocket health expenditures, reviewing the various summary measures and the results of multi-country studies using these measures. The paper presents estimates for 146 countries from all World Bank income groups for all summary measures, along...