The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.
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Total publications: 39,071
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Publication The Global Findex Database 2025: Connectivity and Financial Inclusion in the Digital Economy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-16) Klapper, Leora; Singer, Dorothe; Starita, Laura; Norris, AlexandraThe Global Findex 2025 reveals how mobile technology is equipping more adults around the world to own and use financial accounts to save formally, access credit, make and receive digital payments, and pursue opportunities. Including the inaugural Global Findex Digital Connectivity Tracker, this fifth edition of Global Findex presents new insights on the interactions among mobile phone ownership, internet use, and financial inclusion. The Global Findex is the world’s most comprehensive database on digital and financial inclusion. It is also the only global source of comparable demand-side data, allowing cross-country analysis of how adults access and use mobile phones, the internet, and financial accounts to reach digital information and resources, save, borrow, make payments, and manage their financial health. Data for the Global Findex 2025 were collected from nationally representative surveys of about 145,000 adults in 141 economies. The latest edition follows the 2011, 2014, 2017, and 2021 editions and includes new series measuring mobile phone ownership and internet use, digital safety, and frequency of transactions using financial services. The Global Findex 2025 is an indispensable resource for policy makers in the fields of digital connectivity and financial inclusion, as well as for practitioners, researchers, and development professionals.Publication Democratic Republic of the Congo Budget Execution in Health: From Bottlenecks to Solutions(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-15) Cros, Marion Jane; El Kadiri El Yamani, Fatima; Muvudi, Michel; Nana, Aminata TOUThe Democratic Republic of Congo is committed to achieving Universal Health Care by 2030. Progress toward this goal faces challenges due to limitations in the execution and allocation of the country's health budget. This contributes to health spending being predominantly financed by households and donors rather than the government. The only part of the government health budget that is consistently executed in line with allocations is for health worker payments. Execution rates for other spending categories are volatile and generally low. Many parts of the budget are not executed at all, while some activities are implemented without having been included in the budget. Budget execution within the Ministry of Health is influenced by both internal and external factors. Inconsistencies between strategic planning, budget preparation, and execution processes hinder effective financial management; inaccurate cost estimations; heavy reliance on exceptional procedures for spending and over-execution of specific budget lines to the detriment of otherwise planned activities. External challenges include a systematic over-estimation of national revenue; the highly centralized nature of budget execution processes; the dominance of health worker payments in budget allocations; the non-respect of budget management rules and cumbersome procurement and expenditure execution procedures.Publication The Future of Poverty: Projecting the Impact of Climate Change on Global Poverty through 2050(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-15) Fajardo-Gonzalez, Johanna; Nguyen, Minh C.; Corral, PaulClimate change is increasingly acknowledged as a critical issue with far-reaching socioeconomic implications that extend well beyond environmental concerns. Among the most pressing challenges is its impact on global poverty. This paper projects the potential impacts of unmitigated climate change on global poverty rates between 2023 and 2050. Building on a study that provided a detailed analysis of how temperature changes affect economic productivity, this paper integrates those findings with binned data from 217 countries, sourced from the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform. By simulating poverty rates and the number of poor under two climate change scenarios, the paper uncovers some alarming trends. One of the primary findings is that the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide could be nearly doubled due to climate change. In all scenarios, Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to bear the brunt, contributing the largest number of poor people, with estimates ranging between 40.5 million and 73.5 million by 2050. Another significant finding is the disproportionate impact of inequality on poverty. Even small increases in inequality can lead to substantial rises in poverty levels. For instance, if every country’s Gini coefficient increases by just 1 percent between 2022 and 2050, an additional 8.8 million people could be pushed below the international poverty line by 2050. In a more extreme scenario, where every country’s Gini coefficient increases by 10 percent between 2022 and 2050, the number of people falling into poverty could rise by an additional 148.8 million relative to the baseline scenario. These findings underscore the urgent need for comprehensive climate policies that not only mitigate environmental impacts but also address socioeconomic vulnerabilities.Publication Running Uphill: Growth, Jobs, and the Quest for Productivity. Philippines Growth and Jobs Report(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-15) World BankFaster growth was driven by pro-investment reforms implemented in a period of high returns to investment and facilitated by public foundational infrastructure investment. Macroeconomic and structural reforms enhanced stability and lowered investment costs. Public investment, increasing from 2.5 to 5.0 percent of GDP on average in the past decade, contributed to providing some of the public goods needed. Given the remaining gaps in investment relative to global standards, these reforms led to high returns to private investment, creating the right conditions to attract more investment from home and abroad, particularly to lagging regions. Spatial convergence became another engine of growth. A more complex external environment and ambitious national targets call for accelerating growth and improving labor outcomes. Potential growth must rise to create more productive jobs. This requires improved connectivity infrastructure, better local governance, and innovation policies to enhance productivity, together with regulatory and trade reforms to optimize resource allocation and tap into the global economy. It also requires stronger skills to prepare for the jobs of the future. In the following six chapters, this report looks at these issues in detail. The first two chapters look at macro and micro features of growth and job creation. They centrally position better labor outcomes as an objective of faster growth. They examine how policies supported or inhibited job creation and growth, and provide long-term growth projections. The subsequent three chapters look at specific development challenges. Chapter 3 looks at spatial growth and job creation dynamics; Chapter 4 looks at technology adoption and productivity dynamics; and Chapter 5 looks at how climate events affect firms’ performance and decisions on investment and jobs.Publication Pakistan Budget Execution in Health: From Bottlenecks to Solutions(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-15) Hadi, Qurat ul Ain; Verhaghe, Johan; Yunus, HammadPakistan’s overall national health budget had a high rate of execution from 2016 to 2019, averaging 95 percent. However, execution rates between provinces as well as between categories of spending varied significantly. At the health facility level, execution of spending is notably challenging, particularly for non-wage expenditure. Good practices that facilitated better budget execution included strong integration of payroll and personnel records in most provinces as well as the contracting out of the provision of primary healthcare services to the private sector in Sindh, Baluchistan, and Punjab Provinces. This approach has facilitated more consistent budget execution rates and evidence of resources reaching the facility level. There remain challenges, however, with ensuring the accountability of how these resources are used. The main bottlenecks holding back the quality of budget execution include an inability to track primary, secondary, and tertiary healthcare budgets and their execution; systematic over-estimation of resources by the provinces; weaknesses in budget preparation processes; inefficiency in spending control processes; lack of autonomy for primary healthcare facilities; insufficient integration of vertical programs in local health systems; and lack of a process for capturing spending arrears.
