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This review, developed in cooperation with UNICEF, provides Serbia with recommendations to help strengthen its evaluation and assessment system to focus on support for student learning. It will be of interest to Serbia, as well as other countries looking to make more effective use of their evaluation and assessment system to improve quality and equity, and result in better outcomes for all students.

Infrastructure (Economics)

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The authors bring new empirical evidence on the impact of the choice of ownership and regulatory regime on firms' productivity and prices paid by consumers. They collect the evidence from a sample of electricity distribution companies in Latin America. The authors rely on estimations of labor and operation and maintenance (O&M) input requirement functions using alternative econometric approaches. Their main conclusions are: 1. Private firms perform better (approximately 30 percent) than public firms. 2. The regulatory regimes matter, so that price-cap regulated firms do better than rate-of-return regulated firms, and firms regulated under hybrid regimes have intermediate performance. 3. Private firms operating under rate of return are at most as efficient as public firms. 4. There is no clear pattern of differences in electricity prices according to the regulatory regime. 5. Final prices fell in general but the drop did not match the productivity gains, implying that the operators and the state share some of the gains in the form of rents and higher tax revenue, respectively.

Infrastructure (Economics)

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"Global value chains (GVCs) powered the surge of international trade after 1990 and now account for almost half of all trade. This shift enabled an unprecedented economic convergence: poor countries grew rapidly and began to catch up with richer countries. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, however, the growth of trade has been sluggish and the expansion of GVCs has stalled. Meanwhile, serious threats have emerged to the model of trade-led growth. New technologies could draw production closer to the consumer and reduce the demand for labor. And trade conflicts among large countries could lead to a retrenchment or a segmentation of GVCs. World Development Report 2020: Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains examines whether there is still a path to development through GVCs and trade. It concludes that technological change is, at this stage, more a boon than a curse. GVCs can continue to boost growth, create better jobs, and reduce poverty provided that developing countries implement deeper reforms to promote GVC participation; industrial countries pursue open, predictable policies; and all countries revive multilateral cooperation"--

Infrastructure (Economics)

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This paper presents a meta-analysis of the infrastructure research done over more than three decades, using a database of close to a thousand estimates from 201 papers conducted between 1983-2022, reporting outcome elasticities. The analysis casts a wide net to include the transport, energy, and digital or information and communications technology sectors and the whole set of outcomes covered in the literature, including output, employment and wages, inequality and poverty, trade, education and health, population, and environmental aspects. The results allow for an update of the underlying parameters of interest, the "true" underlying infrastructure elasticities, accounting for publication bias, as well as for heterogeneity stemming from both study design and context, with a particular focus on policy relevant subsectors and developing countries.

Infrastructure (Economics)

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The foundation for effective dam safety assurance is an appropriate and well-designed regulatory framework that captures the legal, institutional, technical, and financial elements in the reality of a particular jurisdiction. Aging infrastructure, diminishing returns on new projects, changes in climate and weather patterns, and shifting trends of human settlement require ever-increasing attention in the effort to ensure the safety of dams and downstream communities. Establishing and maintaining a regulatory framework that is fit for purpose is, therefore, necessary for assuring the quality of dam design, construction, and operations. The framework also ensures that safety measures are reflective of the risks inherent in managing these structures and the context in which they are developed. Such frameworks need to be developed as part of a holistic strategy for water management that is integrated in basin and regional planning processes. The purpose of this Decision Support Tool is to guide countries and jurisdictions through various considerations in designing and updating their regulatory environment for dam safety assurance. This Decision Support Tool aggregates information derived from a comprehensive review and comparative analysis of regulatory frameworks in 51 countries. It presents a typology of situations that correlate with regulatory framework options along a continuum from minimum to maximum assurance of safety. It then presents hypothetical examples of how the Decision Support Tool can be used by countries and jurisdictions to assess their own situations and which regulatory options may be appropriate to consider for improving dam safety assurance.

Infrastructure (Economics)