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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Publication Feasibility of Increasing Fiscal Space for Health in Uganda(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-02) World BankThis study builds on the analysis on fiscal space for health in Uganda that was conducted by the World Bank in 2010. The previous study by Okwero et al. (2010) showed that there was low and inefficient health spending, limited scope for domestic revenue mobilization, high dependence on external financing, and that there was need for prioritization of health, and more concessional borrowing. It also provided some recommendations on enhancing efficiency of health spending, increasing DAH, and addressing corruption. The study also informed the development of Uganda’s Health Financing Strategy 2015/16–2024/25 (MoH, 2016). In addition to the study by Okwero et al. (2010), this study builds on recent studies such as the Public Expenditure Review (2022-23), Raising Taxes for Improving Health in Uganda (2022), and a Cross Programmatic Efficiency Analysis (2022). These studies have also highlighted the financing constraints in the health sector in Uganda, and the need for more innovative and sustainable financing options.Publication Guidance Note on Designing and Implementing Early Childhood Parenting Programs(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-02) Bozmamadova, Manzuma; Laouali, Rayanatou; Walder, Pia SosaEvidence-based parenting programs are interventions aimed at improving behaviors, parental practices, skills, and knowledge to promote healthy child development, through support and education from professionals or paraprofessionals working directly with the child’s caregiver. The objective of this guidance note is to provide digestible information about parenting programs to World Bank teams and government partners so they may optimize the design and implementation of parenting programs. The main aim is to make this guidance note relevant to any sector, such as education, health, and social protection. Although the primary target audiences are World Bank teams and government partners, we hope other practitioners will find this guidance note useful as well.Publication Soaring Food Prices Threaten Recent Economic Gains in the EU(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-02) Robayo, Monica; Lucchetti, Leonardo Ramiro; Delgado-Prieto, Lukas; Badiani-Magnusson, ReenaThe surge in food prices following the 2021 economic rebound has become a significant concern for households, particularly low-income ones, in Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland, and Romania. Food price inflation, which surpasses general inflation rates, risks worsening poverty and food insecurity in these countries. This paper explores the distributional impacts of rising food prices and the effectiveness of government response measures. Low-income households, who allocate a larger share of their income to food, are disproportionately affected and are struggling to cope with unexpected expenses, leading to increased difficulties in accessing proper nutrition. Simulations indicate that rising food prices contribute to higher poverty rates and greater income inequality, especially among vulnerable populations. They also suggest that the main poverty-targeted social assistance schemes offer critical support for the extreme poor, but expanding both coverage and benefits is vital to shield all at-risk individuals. Targeted policies that balance immediate relief with long-term resilience-building are essential to addressing the challenges posed by escalating food prices.Publication Climate Change Negotiations under the Shadow of History(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-02) Banuri, Sheheryar; Sergenti, Ernest J.Climate change is a global challenge requiring unprecedented levels of collective action. In this context, this paper asks: do appeals to historical responsibility facilitate or hinder collective action? This paper uses a simple lab experiment simulating climate mitigation bargaining between high- and low-income countries. A key design feature is that the need for mitigation is triggered based on historical actions that were undertaken without knowledge of their impact on the environment (and hence, the need for mitigation). Two treatment arms were conducted, a baseline where the cause for mitigation (past actions) is not revealed, and a treatment—“the shadow of history”—where the historical origins of the problem are made explicit. In both conditions, negotiations take place regarding contributions to a mitigation fund (i.e., collective action). Results show that revealing the shadow of history marginally increases average contributions, but the distribution of those contributions changes markedly. When made aware of the historical causes of the climate problem, low-income countries significantly reduce their contributions, while high-income countries contribute more—offsetting the reduction. Critically, the overall welfare of low-income countries increases, while it decreases for high-income countries. Moreover, results from textual analysis of chat data show greater tension when historical responsibility is made explicit, with more negative sentiment and adversarial conversations. These results suggest that appealing to historical responsibility appears to be a successful negotiations tactic for poor countries.Publication Cache: A Generalized Mechanism for Storing and Replaying any Stata Command(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-02) Castañeda, R.Andrés; Clarke, DamianIn this paper we describe the Stata program cache, which allows for the full output of any Stata command to be cached to disk, enabling easy recovery of command output in the future without the need for re-computation. The cache program interacts with any native Stata or user-written command, allowing for caching of any elements returned by Stata commands, including matrices, scalars, graphs, data and frames, as well as command output itself. This command is useful for improving programming practices and efficiency, particularly in cases where the underlying Stata commands are computationally intensive and slow to run.