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The objective of this working paper is to: (i) document China's business environment reform experience over the past few years, (ii) analyze the reform measures and the institutional arrangements that enabled this success, (iii) identify the remaining opportunities for business environment reforms; and (iv) share lessons learned from China's experience with other economies that also aspire to improve the business environment.

Business Environment --- E-Government --- Enterprise Development and Reform --- Investment Climate --- Knowledge Sharing --- Private Sector Development --- Public Sector Development --- Regulatory Reform

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Library science --- Information science --- Information science. --- Library science. --- Library & Information Science --- knowledge management --- knowledge sharing --- knowledge organization --- knowledge services --- knowledge innovation

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The World Bank Group is currently engaged in reflection and debate on how to improve the delivery of development support. Part of this debate concerns strengthening the knowledge agenda. The findings of this evaluation are particularly relevant because they speak directly to questions that the institution is deliberating. In particular, they address four key aspects of the "science of delivery": the role of local partners or local knowledge hubs; consultation with clients and other stakeholders in the process of designing knowledge services; delivery of knowledge on issues that are relevant to the client; and improving the way the Bank Group learns from upper-middle-income countries and intermediating this knowledge to other countries. The evaluation assesses knowledge-based activities in nine country programs selected from 48 knowledge-intensive programs supported by the Bank Group. It identifies the factors in the success or failure of those activities as they contribute to policy making or development outcomes. It also identifies areas of strength for the Bank Group as well as areas of weakness or risk. The main objective of the evaluation is to learn lessons from practices in a focus group of high-income and upper-middle-income countries that have knowledge-based programs with the Bank Group. The findings have implications for the Bank Group's knowledge work, including governance and incentives. Over the past 15 years, Bank Group country programs have shifted toward more intensive delivery of knowledge services relative to lending, and this trend is expected to continue. The evaluation was done on economic and sector work and non-lending technical assistance activities selected from a purposive sample of knowledge-intensive country programs. In addition, the evaluation assessed International Finance Corporation Advisory Services for their synergy with the Bank's analytical and advisory activities. The lessons from this evaluation could help leverage the Bank Group's global knowledge to meet the needs of countries that mainly rely on knowledge services and are not pressed for financing.

Development Economics and Aid Effectiveness --- Education --- Governance --- Information and Communication Technologies --- International Governmental Organizations --- Knowledge for Development --- Knowledge Sharing --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- World Bank

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This toolkit, commissioned by infoDev, a global partnership program within the World Bank, provides guidance on how to develop business analytics, measuring and learning from the performance and effects of mobile application labs (mLabs) and mobile social networking hubs (mHubs). It was made for managers of tech hubs. Dozens of tech hubs have emerged over the last few years across the globe. Managers of these innovation and entrepreneurship enablers grapple with problems that infoDev has experience with. This toolkit takes lessons that infoDev has gathered from its own tech hub pilots, mLabs and mHubs, and apply them to tech hubs in general. The toolkit is especially useful for current and future mLab and mHub managers. mLabs and mHubs are tech hubs established through grants administered by the infoDev Digital Entrepreneurship Program. infoDev is committed to supporting the analytical capacities of mLabs and mHubs. This toolkit is part of that agenda. It will help grantees to improve local implementation while setting a common framework on how to collaborate with infoDev on business analytics and performance measurements. The third target audience is mobile innovation specialists at other World Bank units and other development organizations, who design impact and measurement frameworks for tech hubs. Given the recent rise in numbers of tech hubs, international development organizations are exploring if and how they can be employed to achieve socio-economic development impact goals. In particular, tech hubs' flexibility and diverse potential effects have sparked interest but have also caused problems for specific and concrete analysis and projection of hubs' effects and impact. This toolkit addresses this complication. All elements of the toolkit that speak of infoDev's role in facilitating and coordinating with mLabs or mHubs on business analytics processes can be seen as use cases with potential for replication and adaptation by practitioners and decision makers of other development organizations, including relevant units of the World Bank.

Business --- Business Development --- Business Environment --- Business in Development --- Communities --- Competitiveness and Competition Policy --- Decision Making --- E-Business --- Economic Development --- Financial Institutions --- Financial Services --- Identity --- Knowledge --- Knowledge Sharing --- Marketing --- Newsletters --- Organizational Learning --- Private Sector Development --- Software --- Technical Assistance --- Technology Transfer

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The European Union (EU) is one of the most successful examples in recent times of the peaceful regional expansion of prosperity and stability through institutional structures and shared resources. The EU has supported a process of governance and economic development across the European continent which now encompasses 27 member countries and over 500 million people. EU accession is a process of alignment through which acceptance of the acquis communautaire (the body of EU law) in aspiring states leads to the reorganization of an entire corpus of political, social, economic and cultural relationships, with the Commission and the Council explicitly negotiating, agreeing upon, refereeing and monitoring these linkages. These technical and political changes- largely generated through accession conditionality are accompanied by a process of 'Europeanization' by which all EU countries come to adopt European norms and values, transferred through many different routes including declaratory policies and documents, small-scale projects, and socialization between governments. In combination, the transformation that the concept and process of Europe has brought about is extraordinary- indeed in many ways it can be argued that the EU accession process has overcome the aid complex and its inefficient parallel systems and short-term projectized approaches which can often prevent exactly these successful outcomes in developing countries today. That is not to suggest, however, that the project of European enlargement is a single monolith, or has been equally successful in all EU accession countries. In certain contexts it has generated real and important reforms, while in others, positive institutional change has been far less clear. Moreover, problems with the process remain, and moving forward the EU will itself need to adapt to new realities and changing dynamics in order to ensure that future enlargement is as successful as past accession.

Communities --- Corruption --- Economic Development --- Education --- Gender --- Globalization --- Human Resources --- Human Rights --- Identity --- Information and Communication Technologies --- Innovation --- Judicial Reform --- Knowledge for Development --- Knowledge Sharing --- Market Economy --- Mental Models --- Refugees --- Rule of Law --- Social Learning --- Technical Assistance --- Trade Agreements --- World Trade Organization