Most of the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries has
training institutions that offer corporate governance
courses and programs for directors (e.g., the Institute of
Directors in the United Kingdom, and the National
Association of Corporate Directors in the United States)
that have received independent accreditation. There is a
high demand among corporate governance institutes and

In absence of deposit insurance,
underdeveloped financial systems can exhibit a coordination
failure between banks, unable to commit on safe asset
holding, and depositors, anticipating low deposit repayment
in bad states. This paper shows conditions under which a
government can solve this failure by imposing safe asset
purchases, which boosts deposits by increasing depositor
repayment in bad states. In so doing, financial regulation

Over the past quarter century, Vietnam’s
agricultural sector has made enormous progress. Vietnam’s
performance in terms of agricultural yields, output, and
exports, however, has been more impressive than its gains in
efficiency, farmer welfare, and product quality. Vietnamese
agriculture now sits at a turning point. The agricultural
sector now faces growing domestic competition - from cities,
industry, and services - for labor, land, and water. Rising

This 2015 index of sustainability
indicators has been prepared in accordance with the
internationally recognized standard for sustainability
reporting Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines and
complies with the ‘core option.’ The GRI Index provides an
overview of sustainability considerations within the World
Bank’s lending and analytical services as well as its
day-to-day operations and management of staff. The World

The objective of this report is to
update the Government of Bangladesh, think tanks and
researchers, the general public as well as the Bank’s senior
management on the state of the economy, outlook, risks,
progress on structural policy reforms, and key challenges
the economy is currently facing. The coverage includes
developments in the real sector focusing on growth,
inflation, and poverty; external sector developments

The growing awareness about the need to anticipate the future of land systems focuses on how well we understand the interactions between society and environmental processes within a complexity framework. A major barrier to understanding is insufficient attention given to long (multidecadal) temporal perspectives on complex system behavior that can provide insights through both analog and evolutionary approaches. Analogs are useful in generating typologies of generic system behavior, whereas evolutionary assessments provide insight into site-specific system properties.

This Policy Note looks at impacts of European Union accession on agriculture and rural sectors, taking into account specific sectoral features and policy choices pre- and post-accession. The most important lesson learned from recently acceded member states is that policy choices before accession will largely determine whether the agriculture sector will be able to fully reap the benefits of EU membership, by expanding trade, or will struggle in the face of increased market pressure.

Low export prices and high production
costs are contributing to a persistent deficit in the
external accounts. Despite narrowing somewhat in recent
years, Zimbabwe’s current account deficit remains much
larger than those of comparable countries in the region, and
exports currently amount to just over half of imports. A
decline in global prices for gold, platinum and other
mineral commodities, coupled with unresolved supply-side

Shifting Kenya’s private sector into
higher gear: a trade and competitiveness agenda’ was born
out of the World Bank’s Trade and Competitiveness (T&C)
Global Practice recent stock taking of its work in Kenya.
This was part of a Programmatic Approach that aimed to
organize T&C’s knowledge, advisory, and convening
services to address Kenya’s development challenges in the
private sector space. By Sub-Saharan African standards,

The urban land policy reforms implemented in Peru since 1996 aimed at the creation of a system able to assure formal rights to real property in large urban settlements. This case study looks at the factors that motivated reform, how the reform process itself was managed, the results, and lessons learned.

Azerbaijan’s performance on the twin
goals has been commendable. The middle class has doubled in
size and extreme poverty has almost been eliminated in the
space of a decade. At the same time, regional differences
persist, with significantly higher poverty rates in lagging
regions, and Baku dominating overwhelmingly in terms of
share of GDP. Disparities in welfare also persist between
rural and urban areas as well as across social groups. As

Since the first edition of paying taxes,
and especially following the global financial crisis, the
media, the public, and many policymakers have become
increasingly interested in how international tax systems
operate. Most recently the focus has been the work initiated
by the G20 and carried out by the Organization of Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) on base erosion and
profit shifting (BEPS). The BEPS agenda however does not