Officials responsible for a nation’s economy have been primarily concerned with delivering jobs, stimulating growth, and promoting competitiveness. They are also becoming worried about the effects climate change will inflict on their country’s economic future. Increasingly, these officials want to know if there are investments and efforts that can advance urgent development priorities and, at the same time address the challenges of our rapidly warming world.
This report uses new modeling tools to examine the full range of benefits ambitious climate mitigation policies can produce across the transportation, industry and building sectors in the United States, China, the European Union, India, Mexico and Brazil. This report also describes the multiple benefits of four development project simulations scaled up to the national level.
Crowdfunding is the practice of raising monetary contributions from a large number of people, typically online, to fund a project or venture. In the past 10 years, crowdfunding has evolved into a $16 billion market, largely concentrated in North America and Europe. In developing countries, the crowdfunding market is expected to reach $327 million this year—about 2 percent of the global total. Despite this slow adoption, crowdfunding has been heralded as an opportunity to expand access to capital for entrepreneurs.
To better understand the challenges of crowdfunding in emerging markets, the World Bank Group conducted interviews with a number of East African technology entrepreneurs who ran crowdfunding campaigns, both successful and unsuccessful. From the interviews emerged six lessons about when, why, and how to launch crowdfunding campaigns.
This paper discusses the nature and scope of international trade in environmentally related services, and analyses the implications that services trade restrictions have on the provisions of these services domestically and abroad. Numerous services appear crucial to the delivery and proper functioning of environmental goods and equipment be they a wastewater-treatment facility or a renewable power plant. By helping lower the costs of these services and improving access to world-class suppliers, trade policy can contribute alongside energy and environmental policy to the prevention and abatement of greenhouse gas emissions and pollution in all its forms. Besides clarifying the role and scope of services related to the environment, the analysis undertaken in this paper suggests that the restrictions that countries impose on services trade may have a detrimental effect on the provision of environmental activities through the establishment by specialised firms of a commercial presence abroad, i.e. through mode 3 trade in services.
This resource is also available in Arabic.
The National Strategy and Action Plan for Mainstreaming Sustainable Consumption and Production into Agriculture/Food Production, Transport, and Waste Management Sectors in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (2016-2025) aims at supporting the implementation of agreed on SCP strategic, operational objectives and actions at the national level. This document has been prepared in line with the regional SCP Action Plan for the Mediterranean, in cooperation with the SWITCH-Med Programme and financed by the European Union to support SCP common objectives in the region. Jordan’s SCP Strategy and National Action Plan (NAP) addresses key human activities, which have a particular impact on the Jordanian environment including marine and coastal areas and related transversal and crosscutting issues. It defines common objectives and identifies actions guiding the implementation of the SCP at the national level.