World Bank Support to Jobs and Labor Market Reform through International Development Association Financing

This evaluation is the first stage of the Independent Evaluation Group’s assessment of the World Bank’s support for more, better, and more inclusive jobs through International Development Association (IDA) financing, and it assesses the implementation of IDA-supported interventions directly supporting its jobs objectives across the three Replenishment cycles from fiscal years 2015 to 2022. Supporting the creation of more, better, and more inclusive jobs is critical towards achieving the goals of poverty reduction and shared prosperity in countries. This is especially true for countries that are eligible for International Development Association (IDA) financing. Since 2014, IDA has included jobs as a special theme, and subsequent IDA replenishments have had what this evaluation calls an ‘IDA jobs strategy.’ This strategy included explicit objectives, a series of policy commitments to achieve them, and results indicators to track them. This evaluation represents the first stage of the Independent Evaluation Group’s assessment of the World Bank’s performance in supporting more, better, and more inclusive jobs through IDA financing. It assesses the implementation of IDA-supported interventions that directly supported its jobs objectives across the three Replenishment cycles from fiscal years 2015 to 2022. The evaluation answers two questions: (i) To what extent IDA’s strategy on jobs was grounded in sound analytics, adaptive, and operationally relevant (ii) To what extent the strategy has been translated into relevant and effective jobs interventions that directly address the objectives of more, better, and more inclusive jobs The scope of the evaluation is limited to the three main channels for achieving IDA jobs objectives: acting on labor demand, increasing labor supply, and improving labor market flexibility and geographic mobility.The report offers recommendations for further strengthening of the IDA jobs agenda towards the objective of supporting more, better, and more inclusive jobs.