Ideas to Action:

Independent research for global prosperity

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Cover of Working Paper 554
October 12, 2020

Is the World Bank’s COVID Crisis Lending Big Enough, Fast Enough? New Evidence on Loan Disbursements

We compile a new data set, combining official sources with transaction-level records scraped from the World Bank website, spanning all commitments, disbursements, and payments on all World Bank loans from before the 2008-09 Global Financial Crisis through August 2020, allowing us to compare the Bank’s COVID response to the last comparable global crisis. We find that lending has indeed accelerated in 2020, but the Bank appears to be on track to fulfill only half of its own target of $160 billion in new lending by June 2021.

An image of the cover of a paper on DAC debt rules
October 7, 2020

New DAC Rules on Debt Relief – A Poor Measure of Donor Effort

The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) recently produced a long-awaited set of rules for how debt relief on loans should be scored as Official Development Assistance (ODA). Unfortunately, the rules suffer from a number of statistical problems and the DAC needs to take these rules back to the drawing board, or lose credibility.

Cover of working paper 552
October 5, 2020

An Analysis of Clinical Knowledge, Absenteeism, and Availability of Resources for Maternal and Child Health: A Cross-Sectional Quality of Care Study in 10 African Countries

Our findings highlight the need to boost the knowledge of health care workers to achieve greater care readiness. Training programs have shown mixed results, so systems may need to adopt a combination of competency-based pre-service and in-service training for health care providers (with evaluation to ensure the effectiveness of the training), and hiring practices that ensure the most prepared workers enter the systems. We conclude that in settings where clinical knowledge is poor, improving drug availability or reducing health workers’ absenteeism would only modestly increase the average care readiness that meets minimum quality standards.

Laura Di Giorgio , David Evans , Magnus Lindelow , Son Nam Nguyen , Jakob Svensson , Waly Wane and Anna Welander Tärneberg
A cover image of a COVID-19 vaccine prediction paper
October 1, 2020

COVID-19 Vaccine Predictions: Using Mathematical Modelling and Expert Opinions to Estimate Timelines and Probabilities of Success of COVID-19 Vaccines

We collected publicly available information, interviewed experts, and used our diverse range of expertise to analyse and model the COVID-19 vaccine portfolio in order to generate predictions about the vaccine portfolio's timeline.

The cover of the note
September 23, 2020

COVID-19 and Violence against Women and Children: A Second Research Round Up

COVID-19 has raised the profile of violence against women and children (VAW/C) within the global discourse. Nine months after the emergence of COVID-19, global stakeholders continue to advocate for increased funding and action to mitigate against the risk of violence on vulnerable populations and support survivors. How much have we learned from research since the beginning of the crisis?

The cover of the report
September 16, 2020

Sound Banks for Healthy Economies: Challenges for Policymakers in Latin America and the Caribbean in Times of Coronavirus

The purpose of this report is twofold: to identify and discuss a set of challenges, and to develop key recommendations. The overarching goal is to provide support to policymakers in the region who may face difficult decisions to ensure that banks play a constructive role and support families and firms through and beyond the current crisis. 

The cover of the note
September 16, 2020

Closing Gender Pay Gaps

We convened a virtual roundtable to discuss how public and private sector actors can better understand and work together to narrow gender gaps in pay. To operationalize recommendations raised during the discussion, here we present 6 actions for governments that draw on principles of openness and 6 actions for businesses to champion.

Working Paper 550 cover
September 15, 2020

A Rosetta Stone for Human Capital

How can we accurately measure the global distribution of skills when people in different countries take different tests? We develop a new methodology to non-parametrically link scores from distinct populations. By administering an exam combining items from different assessments to 2,300 primary students in India, we estimate conversion functions among four of the world’s largest standardized tests spanning 80 countries.

September 10, 2020

Gender Equity in Development Finance Survey

By surveying DFIs, we aim to start building a baseline of their gender policies and practices, analyze the data, and make recommendations where stronger policies and practices are needed. The survey’s findings give DFIs an important opportunity to learn from one another and work towards standards for how they can best promote gender equity.

A cover image of a paper on private sector climate finance
September 9, 2020

Private Sector Climate Finance After the Crisis

Climate investments in the emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) have so far fallen well short of what is required to meet targets set in the 2015 Paris Agreement. National commitments ahead of the 2021 UN climate summit will further underline the discrepancy.

Cover of working paper 546
September 2, 2020

Teacher Labor Markets in Developing Countries

The types of workers recruited into teaching and their allocation across classrooms can greatly influence a country’s stock of human capital. This paper considers how markets and non-market institutions determine the quantity, wages, skills, and spatial distribution of teachers in developing countries.

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