Publicación: Quality Matters: Estimating Economic Impacts of Improving Education Quality in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/fde7e767-905b-45bd-a2c7-a8610b7c2481 Quality education drives economic growth and equality. Saudi Arabia has achieved near-universal enrollment but still trails peers in learning quality, limiting workforce readiness. Using data from 97 countries (2000–19), this paper models how Harmonized Learning Outcomes affect gross domestic product growth, accounting for factors like resource income. A 180-point rise in learning—matching the world’s best—could raise Saudi Arabia’s gross domestic product by 27 percent in 20 years, or $225 billion (in 2021 prices). Simulated scenarios yield gains of $125 billion to $156 billion, or 15 to 19 percent of gross domestic product, with front-loaded improvements offering faster returns. Strengthening teaching, curricula, early childhood programs and private sector engagement are key to realizing these gains.

Publicación: @A Billion: Reaching One Billion People through Digital Access and Services by 2030

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/71282079-9509-4772-b24c-9197d417b708 This report presents the World Bank Group’s Digital & AI Implementation Plan (FY26–30), which outlines a roadmap to expand digital inclusion and accelerate development outcomes through technology and artificial intelligence. The plan aims to reach one billion people by 2030, including 600 million people using broadband internet and 400 million people using digitally enabled services, by addressing barriers to connectivity, affordability, digital service delivery, and AI readiness. Built around four strategic pillars: Access, Affordability, Ecosystem, and AI Readiness, the plan introduces ten scalable solutions that combine policy reform, financing, private capital mobilization, digital skills development, digital public infrastructure, and AI innovation. It emphasizes expanding broadband connectivity, lowering the cost of devices and digital services, strengthening digital ecosystems, promoting inclusive digital economies, and enabling the safe adoption of AI technologies in developing countries. The report also underscores the importance of digital trust, cybersecurity, data governance, and responsible AI as foundational elements of sustainable digital transformation. Through partnerships with governments, private sector organizations, development institutions, and technology firms, the implementation plan seeks to create jobs, improve public service delivery, strengthen economic opportunities, and ensure that low- and middle-income countries can participate effectively in the global digital and AI economy.

Institutions and Prosperity: Public Institutions for Enabling the Private Sector

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/4bddd50e-7b12-47a0-8f96-fc883ea62f95 A thriving private sector is the engine of economic growth and development, driving job creation, generating income, and spurring innovation. Yet, behind any flourishing private sector is a well-functioning public sector that fosters a strong business climate and provides public goods and services that support private investment. Weak public institutions can inhibit the private sector, constraining broader growth and development. Institutions and Prosperity: Public Institutions for Enabling the Private Sector examines private sector development through a critical but often-overlooked lens: the capacity of public institutions to effectively implement their policy mandates. Drawing on extensive evidence and data, this report provides a practical conceptual framework that can diagnose the complex challenges facing public institutions and identify pathways for addressing them, focusing on regulatory institutions and public procurement. The analysis underscores the need to understand how organizational and governance dimensions interact to determine public institutions’ capacity to implement policies effectively. The report also includes a discussion of corruption and passive waste in procurement and a case study on telecommunications regulatory institutions in Peru. Highlighting the role of the public sector in the private sector, Institutions and Prosperity serves as a call to action to improve institutional capacity and as a resource for policy makers seeking to strengthen how both sectors can work together to unlock growth and development.

Building Food Security, Creating Jobs: Policy Pathways for the Region

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/98b8f3d6-6544-4f9f-b6ac-df9299c7ff92 Food security is a major concern for the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan (MENAAP). Across the region, food insecurity and malnutrition are rising at a pace not seen in recent decades, affecting high-income, middle-income, and conflict-affected countries alike. While one in six MENAAP residents lacks secure access to food, the region simultaneously records some of the highest rates of overweight and obesity in the world. Mounting pressures from conflict, water scarcity, climate shocks, and economic volatility make the need for food system transformation both urgent and unavoidable. Yet transformation also presents a crucial opportunity. MENAAP's agrifood systems are already a major engine of employment, and they hold untapped potential for creating better, more inclusive jobs , particularly in rural areas and for women and youth. This report argues that confronting the region's food security crisis and its chronic jobs challenge goes hand-in-hand. Drawing on regional data, original quantitative modeling, new survey evidence, and country case studies, the report examines the full complexity of the challenge: the evolution of food demand, the constraints on domestic production under climate change and severe water scarcity, trade management, the devastating impact of conflict on food systems, and the role of the private sector in driving sustainable change as well as the potential for job creation.

Integration: World-Class Trade Logistics Along the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/6ea46a38-3a3a-4ced-b7bc-61afec552699 The Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor (TCTC), also known as the Middle Corridor, is a developing network of rail freight, maritime shipping, and cargo handling connections linking markets in East Asia, Central Asia, the South Caucasus, Türkiye, and the rest of Europe. Considering the TCTC’s unique length and multimodal, multipurpose nature; the large number of host and terminus countries that comprise it; and the significant economic opportunity that the integration of these markets represents, transforming the TCTC into an efficient economic corridor is among the world’s most consequential—and complex—challenges in global trade logistics today. Integration: World-Class Trade Logistics Along the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor provides an in-depth assessment of the TCTC’s value proposition; its current status and performance gaps; the magnitude of the economic impacts that can be expected from addressing these gaps; and both the investments and the reimagined, transformational solutions that are needed to attain these improvements. The report makes the case that transforming the TCTC into an economic corridor will take more than investments in infrastructure; it will require integration-driven approaches to trade facilitation, logistics service delivery, and cross-border collaboration. What is at stake is the opportunity to more closely integrate the nations of Eurasia through trade and investment; to boost the economic and job creation performance of TCTC host countries; to facilitate the delivery of more efficient and more cost-competitive logistics services to a diverse range of shippers; and to make Eurasian trade more resilient to market and nonmarket disruptions.

Raising Revenue Right

https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/raising-revenue-right Governments across emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) face a growing fiscal challenge: how to finance essential public services at a time of rising debt burdens, higher interest costs, and uncertain external assistance. Yet the challenge is not simply about how much revenue countries collect. Tax systems in most EMDEs are also inefficient and inequitable, leading to costly economic distortions while failing to adequately support vulnerable households. Raising Revenue Right: A Roadmap for Domestic Resource Mobilization examines how countries can raise the revenue they need in ways that are more efficient, fair, and supportive of inclusive growth. The report introduces the concept of the fiscal frontier: the best possible combination of efficiency and fairness that a country can achieve for a given level of revenue and its underlying structural constraints. Its central finding is that many EMDEs operate well below this frontier—and that reforms can improve efficiency, equity, and revenue performance at the same time. The report offers a practical roadmap for domestic resource mobilization, showing how advances in technology, transparency, and trust—the 3Ts—can help countries move toward the fiscal frontier.

THE PROMISE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2026 In a time when development progress has dipped to its weakest pace in 75 years, artificial intelligence (AI) offers developing economies a rare path to greater prosperity. World Development Report 2026 provides the first comprehensive assessment of what AI means for these economies—how firms and governments are already using it, what is holding them back, where the largest gains may lie, and how the risks can be managed.