Economics & Development

Human capital - people’s knowledge, skills, and health - drives productivity and growth. The Human Capital Index Plus (HCI+) measures the human capital a child born today can expect to accumulate over their working life, extending the original HCI by incorporating tertiary education and work experience. This brief summarizes Tuvalu's HCI+ score and its performance in building human capital.

Human capital - people’s knowledge, skills, and health - drives productivity and growth. The Human Capital Index Plus (HCI+) measures the human capital a child born today can expect to accumulate over their working life, extending the original HCI by incorporating tertiary education and work experience. This brief summarizes Uganda’s HCI+ score and its performance in building human capital.

Human capital - people’s knowledge, skills, and health - drives productivity and growth. The Human Capital Index Plus (HCI+) measures the human capital a child born today can expect to accumulate over their working life, extending the original HCI by incorporating tertiary education and work experience. This brief summarizes Marshall Island's HCI+ score and its performance in building human capital.

Human capital - people’s knowledge, skills, and health - drives productivity and growth. The Human Capital Index Plus (HCI+) measures the human capital a child born today can expect to accumulate over their working life, extending the original HCI by incorporating tertiary education and work experience. This brief summarizes Kenya's HCI+ score and its performance in building human capital.

Human capital - people’s knowledge, skills, and health - drives productivity and growth. The Human Capital Index Plus (HCI+) measures the human capital a child born today can expect to accumulate over their working life, extending the original HCI by incorporating tertiary education and work experience. This brief summarizes Zimbabwe's HCI+ score and its performance in building human capital.

The Country Opinion Survey in Mozambique assists the World Bank Group (WBG) in better understanding how stakeholders in Mozambique perceive the WBG. It provides the WBG with systematic feedback from national and local governments, multilateral and bilateral agencies, media, academia, the private sector, and civil society in Mozambique on: 1) their views regarding the general environment in Mozambique; 2) their overall attitudes toward the WBG in Mozambique; 3) overall impressions of the WBG’s effectiveness and results, knowledge work and activities, and communication and information sharing in Mozambique; and 4) their perceptions of the WBG’s future role in Mozambique.

Ratings of the Financial and Digital Inclusion Development Policy Lending I-III for Morocco were as follows: Overall Outcome was moderately satisfactory; Relevance of Prior Actions was moderately satisfactory; Achievement of Objectives (Efficacy) was moderately satisfactory; Bank Performance was moderately satisfactory. Key lessons and recommendations include the following: First, well coordinated and mutually reinforcing policy actions that pair upstream payment reforms with the digitization of large, recurrent government-to-person transfers are powerful drivers of digital payment adoption and also enhance the efficiency and transparency of social transfers; future programs should systematically leverage such linkages in design and sequencing. Second, reforms are more likely to advance when they are closely associated with complementary World Bank Group engagements and partner support; it is recommended to purposefully align policy actions with investment and technical assistance operations and to mobilize IFC to help develop markets, as demonstrated in microinsurance, secured transactions, credit information, public guarantees, social registries, disaster risk compensation, digital payments, private equity, and e‑procurement. Third, sustained political commitment and clear institutional ownership are critical in programmatic series; operations should incorporate flexibility to adapt sequencing and content to evolving priorities and political economy constraints, replacing delayed or overly complex measures with feasible, outcome‑oriented steps while maintaining the reform trajectory. Fourth, program scope should be kept focused; concentrating on a smaller set of high‑impact prior actions and results helps preserve leverage, reduces implementation and monitoring burdens, and enables timely course corrections, including delaying later operations if needed to realign reforms. Fifth, results frameworks should be streamlined and strongly attributable; indicators must clearly link to the supported prior actions, be realistic to measure, and remain stable over time, with disciplined adjustments only when methodologies change; avoid proliferation of indicators when policy content shifts. Sixth, gender results require intentionality; gender indicators should reflect a direct causal pathway from prior actions and be backed by reliable, regularly available data with consistent definitions; where this is not feasible, alternative indicators or data collection plans should be embedded in the reform design; positive examples, such as women’s representation on boards supported by legal changes, should guide future selection. Collectively, these lessons point to the importance of integrated design across payments, social protection, financial infrastructure, and entrepreneurship; tight alignment with complementary investment and advisory support; early identification and mitigation of political economy risks; and disciplined, attributable monitoring to sustain momentum and results.

Despite a challenging external environment, Malaysia’s growth outperformed projections in the second half of 2025, lifting full-year growth to 5.2 percent. The government achieved a better-than-estimated fiscal deficit at 3.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) last year, against its initial target of 3.8 percent, helped by stronger revenues despite continued spending pressures. While household incomes have recovered strongly and more inclusively, spatial disparities remain pronounced. Jobs - the special focus of this edition - are central to achieving the Malaysian Government’s objectives of raising the ceiling (productivity gains in the economy) and raising the floor (improving living standards of the Rakyat). While Malaysia has achieved steady gains in education, employment, and incomes over the past two decades, real wage growth has lagged GDP growth and remained modest relative to rising aspirations and skills. This special issue argues that to address this, the jobs agenda must be understood as a productivity agenda. These challenges are rooted in a business environment that limits firm entry, exit, and expansion. Malaysia has begun to address these constraints through regulatory, skills, and institutional reforms, but progress remains uneven.

Human capital- people’s knowledge, skills, and health- drives productivity and growth. The Human Capital Index Plus (HCI+) measures the human capital a child born today can expect to accumulate over their working life, extending the original HCI by incorporating tertiary education and work experience. This brief summarizes Slovenia’s HCI+ score and its performance in building human capital