Côte d’Ivoire

The World Bank Institute (WBI) has responded to the challenges of urban development and city management by launching a number of important initiatives. Chief among these... Show More + is the program on Urban Challenges of the 21st Century, under which the Institute developed a number of courses on urban and city management that have been conducted worldwide. These courses were designed in the context of a new urban strategy in the World Bank. The strategy recognizes that cities are crucial in efforts to address poverty and developmental issues, but acknowledges that this potential will not be realized unless cities are livable, competitive, well-governed and managed, and bankable--all themes that are explored in this book. This book results from the first such course, which was held in Toronto, Canada, in May 1999. The book's chapters correspond to the course's ten modules on such topics as globalization and city management, city strategy and local governance, urban financial management, private sector participation in infrastructure provision, urban environmental management, and urban poverty reduction. Show Less -

This study examines the state of agricultural incentives in Sub-Saharan Africa, taking stock of the current policy environment and its recent evolution. The global price... Show More + environment is examined together with the macroeconomic, export crop, food crop, and fertilizer policies in sixteen African countries. Policy diamonds are constructed as incentive indicators reflecting the state of macroeconomic and agricultural policies relative to a perceived frontiers. The study attempts to determine the factors inhibiting countries from moving towards this frontier. The study highlights several continuing policy challenges that sub-Saharan Africa faces to ensure appropriate agricultural incentives to stimulate growth. These include: coping with agricultural commodity price decline and fluctuation; securing access to foreign markets and in particular meeting the sanitary and phytosanitary requirements; removing continuing domestic trade barriers; stabilizing macroeconomic policies; enhancing the institutional framework and the credibility of rules; removing the remnants of marketing boards in many African countries; removing excessive agricultural taxation and ensuring public rural investment; improving transportation infrastructure; encouraging public and private sector partnership and dealing with aid in input markets. Show Less -

This paper evaluates World Bank activities to prevent and mitigate the effects of AIDS in all regions of the developing world during fiscal years 1986 to 1996. It first... Show More + prioritizes HIV-prevention and treatment interventions using the principles of public economics. Based on this framework, it assesses the appropriateness of Bank lending and grants, Bank Country Assistance Strategies, and country economic and sector work. While the Bank provided extensive assistance for efforts to collect information (surveillance and behavioral studies), support was less extensive for interventions that focus on reducing risky behaviors of those at highest risk for contracting and transmitting HIV. Few of the projects reviewed in the paper relied on strong economic analysis in ex-ante or ex-post evaluation. These findings suggest two primary challenges for the World Bank: (i) to focus its support for HIV prevention interventions that reach groups at highest risk to contract and spread HIV; and (ii) to improve the economic analysis used in preparing Bank HIV-related projects and in evaluating their effectiveness. Show Less -

Does Mercosur's trade performance raise concerns about the effects of regional trade agreements?, by Alexander J. Yeats. A panel data analysis of the fungibility of... Show More + foreign aid, by Tarhan Feyzioglu, Vinaya Swaroop, and Min Zhu. Technological capability and firm efficiency in Taiwan (China), by Bee Yan Aw and Geeta Batra. Skills, schooling, and household income in Ghana, by Dean Jolliffe. The tragedy of the commons in Cote d'Ivoire agriculture: empirical evidence and implications for evaluating trade policies, by Ramon Lopez. Economic parameters of deforestation, by Joachim von Amsberg. Why has Poland avoided the price liberalization trap? : the case of the hog-pork sector, by Anning Wei, Waldemar, Guba, and Richard Burcroff II. Show Less -

These proceedings from a workshop in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, organized jointly by the government of Cote d'Ivoire, the Public Administration Division of the United Nations... Show More + Secretariat, and the World Bank, focus on aiding Francophone African countries with public sector reform. They draw broadly on best practices derived from both Anglophone and Francophone Africa, and from the experiences of the industrialized as well as the developing countries. The first of two parts comprises papers, the core of the workshop discussions, concerning public sector management as viewed by industrialized, then developing countries. The key themes center on professional ethics, accountability, and transparency to combat corruption and deliver improved services. The papers also present guidelines leading to effective reform, and discuss better coordination among lenders in supporting reform. In the second part, country administrators illustrate these themes by using their countries -Burkina Faso, Botswana, Uganda, and Cote d'Ivoire- as case studies. This part ends by reviewing several initiatives creating local capacity in Mali and Senegal to improve the quality of public services for users. The third and last part of these proceedings is devoted to distilling the debate's essential elements, and presenting the workshop's conclusions and recommendations. Show Less -

Health care demand price elasticities are often estimated from samples conditioned to include only sick people. This paper shows that not only may such estimates be... Show More + statistically biased, but even when properly estimated they can only be interpreted as short-run price responses. In contrast, unconditional estimates take into account the long-run feedback of prices on health. The paper discusses simple strategies for estimating the long-run unconditional elasticities, which do not depend on controversial exclusion or functional form restrictions. Using the Cote d'Ivoire Living Standards Survey, a test based on the multinomial probit finds that the usual conditional estimates do not suffer from selection bias. However, short-run conditional estimates differ significantly from long-run unconditional ones for several covariates, with conditional price elasticities being about 25 percent larger than unconditional ones. Show Less -

This paper examines the economic performance of East and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and attempts to identify some of the practical lessons that Africa can... Show More + learn from Asia, in order to facilitate industrial development and export growth. Africa's factor endowments and economic structures are quite similar to those found in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. The Southeast Asian countries - Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand - have achieved rapid industrial growth over the past 3 decades, while Africa has struggled with adjustment, and witnessed a marginal industrial response. The emergence of a significant gap in per capita incomes between these two groups of countries, however, is a relatively new phenomenon. This suggests hope for Africa, if an appropriate policy environment can be sustained over a period of years. In this paper, 3 country comparisons, of Nigeria and Indonesia, Cote d'Ivoire and Malaysia, and Tanzania, Ghana and Thailand, illustrate the critical nature of government policies, such as exchange rate policy and the role assigned to the agricultural sector. Southeast Asia, in addition to maintaining the "basics" of macroeconomic stability, high savings, and investment in human capital, used several complementary measures to place the development of exports as the central economic strategy. A key conclusion of this study is that correct use of the exchange to maintain export competitiveness was of fundamental importance in East and Southeast Asia. The paper also suggests six elements that should be pursued in industrial lending: the development of training financing mechanisms; technical assistance programs for enterprises; the development of simple duty exemption schemes; export credit support mechanisms; public-private training institutions; and the development of industrial/export processing zones. While many of these have been tried in the past in Africa, this review suggests ways in which their design could be improved, or where necessary accompanying policies were missing. As African governments become more committed to development, and to developing the sort of long-term vision for their economies that was so crucial in East Asia, these sort of policies could have a key role to play in Africa. Show Less -

How important to India's poor is the sectoral composition of economic growth? Martin Ravallion and Gaurav Datt Is debt crisis history? Recent private capital inflows... Show More + to developing countries. Michael Dooley, Eduardo Fernandez-Arias, and Kenneth Kletzer The surge of capital inflows to developing countries : an analytical overview. Eduardo Fernandez-Arias and Peter J. Montiel Introduction : fertility in sub-Saharan Africa. Martha Ainsworth The impact of women's schooling on fertility and contraceptive use : a study of fourteen sub-Saharan African countries. Martha Ainsworth, Kathleen Beegle, and Andrew Nyamete Fertility and child mortality in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana. Kofi Benefo and T. Paul Schultz Contraceptive use and the quality, price, and availability of family planning in Nigeria. Bamikale J. Feyisetan and Martha Ainsworth Fertility, contraceptive choice, and public policy in Zimbabwe. Duncan Thomas and John Maluccio Show Less -

The great successes achieved by the Onchocerciasis Control Program in West Africa (OCP) in the large-scale control of the blinding savanna form of onchocerciasis (river... Show More + blindness) have allowed vast tracts of previously abandoned valleys to be resettled and developed. Among the many issues and problems that have to be addressed, to ensure the most effective long-term management of settlement and development in these onchocerciasis-controlled areas, is that which relates to the potential impact of those development activities on the environment. Due to the increasing concern for the welfare of both aquatic and terrestrial environments, it was recognized that there was a need for the formulation of an appropriate methodology for environmental impact assessment. In 1991 the OCP Committee of Sponsoring Agencies (CSA) started to address this issue, and in 1993 launched a pilot project in one selected basin (the Upper Lebara Basin), the results of which are described in this report. The primary objective of the Pilot Project were: 1) assessment of the present environmental situation in the Basin, with a view to determining potential sources of impact on the aquatic environment; 2) quantification of chemical loads, and assessment of modification to the physical environment; and 3) identification of simple study methods which would be applicable to other areas and which could be offered as examples to predict environmental impacts of settlement and development, and offer ways to minimize those impacts. The following conclusions were made: 1) organic loads and nutrients were only of relevance along limited stretches of the main Lebara rivers; 2) the contamination of river water by pesticides used for cotton protection was calculated by means of simple models which also permitted the theoretical concentrations of pesticides in river water to be estimated; 3) with regard to physical changes in the environment, about 75 percent of the original savanna woodland had been cleared for settlement and for agricultural development. On the positive side, it was concluded that there had not been any significant disturbance of the riverine forests and associated floodplain grasslands of the main rivers. The overall conclusion from the Pilot Project was that, on the basis of studies which were limited both in time and scope, it was possible to make valid and meaningful assessments of the Upper Lebara Basin, in terms of chemical contamination of river water, of localized changes in the biological condition of the aquatic ecosystem, and of physical degradation of the woodland savanna component of the terrestrial environment. Finally, in relation to the Pilot Project's third main objective, the investigations clearly demonstrated that the techniques employed can be used as examples of quick and reliable environmental impact assessment methodologies, which are applicable to other, similar areas. Show Less -

In the 1980s chronic public sector deficits forced countries to undertake fiscal adjustment. The need to face hard choices continues in the 1990s. But the problem is... Show More + not a simple and easily diagnosed one with an obvious solution. Rather, public sector deficits have had widely differing consequences; high inflation in some countries, low inflation but also low investment and growth in others, and in still others no evident short-term macroeconomic spillovers. This book presents the findings of a World Bank research project designed to shed light on the complex dynamics of public sector deficits. It includes an in-depth examination of eight countries: Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Morocco, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe. These cases are analyzed within a comprehensive theoretical framework elaborated for the study and in conjunction with cross-country data from a larger set. The book draws the following conclusions. The ways chosen to finance deficits - money creation, debt, or arrears - go far to explain medium-term financial and macroeconomic imbalances, but in the short term these relations are blurred. Deficits tend to be bad for growth; they increase financial and price instability and crowd out private investment. Public saving typically reduces private saving only slightly; increasing public saving is a very effective policy instrument for raising national saving. Fiscal adjustment typically leads to a lower trade deficit and a moredepreciated real exchange rate. Finally, the blame for large, systemic public deficits must be placed not on bad luck but on unwise policy choices - and, conversely, sound fiscal policies can set a country on a path leading to stability and growth. Show Less -