Publications

Accountability is rightly at the center of the conversation regarding how to improve governance systems, particularly health and education systems. But efforts to address accountability deficits often focus primarily on improving what can be counted and verified—what we term “accounting-based accountability.”

Internationally set goals and guidelines directly influ­ence the setting of health care priorities at the national level, affecting how limited resources are generated and allocated across health care needs. The Working Group on Incorporating Economics and Modelling in Global Health Goals and Guidelines has brought together disease specialists, policymakers, economists, and modelers from national governments, international organizations, and academic institutions across the globe to address these issues, to take stock of current approaches, and make recommendations for better practice.

The Kunming-Vientiane railway is an anchor investment of the Chinese government’s Belt and Road initiative. This case study will assess the rail project along four dimensions: economic implications; procurement arrangements; labor; and environmental and social safeguards. In each of these areas, evidence from the railway project suggests that Chinese policy and practice could be better aligned with the practices of other sources of multilateral and bilateral development finance.

Hailed as one of the largest publicly funded health insurance programs in the world, India’s “Modicare” has, since its launch a little more than six months ago, made universal healthcare coverage an election theme for the first time in the country’s history. 

Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) face severe economic challenges. Which policy and programmatic approaches will be most effective in supporting IDPs to overcome these challenges and make progress toward self-reliance depends in part on the urban-rural composition of IDP populations. By analysing the existing known locations of IDPs in developing countries and visualizing them in an interactive map, we show that there is large variation in urban-rural IDP compositions across countries.

The next pandemic is a matter of when, not if. Preparing for this inevitability requires that policymakers understand not just the science of limiting disease transmission or engineering a drug, but also the practical challenges of expanding a response strategy to a regional or global level. Achieving success at such scales is largely an issue of operational, strategic, and policy choices—areas of pandemic preparedness that remain underexplored.

As low- and middle-income countries shift away from donor support, their challenge will be finding a way to aggregate demand in order to achieve the benefits that the pooled purchasing arrangements of vertical health programs now provide. As a first step in tackling this challenge, much can be learned from a diverse group of pooled procurement initiatives that have developed over the past 40 years in high-, middle-, and low-income countries. This note reviews the rationale and functions of these initiatives, notes their potential benefits and barriers, and draws lessons regarding how best to incorporate pooled pharmaceutical purchasing models into the design and implementation of health financing reforms in countries in transition.

The report considers three different channels through which Basel III can affect financial stability and devel­opment in EMDEs: (1) effects on the volume, compo­sition, and stability of capital flows arising from the implementation of Basel III in advanced economies; (2) effects on financial stability and a level playing field from the adoption of the Basel framework by the home countries of affiliates of foreign banks operating in EMDEs; and (3) effects on financial stability, broad access to financial services, and deepening of local financial systems from the implementation of Basel III by EMDEs themselves.