World Bank in Europe and Central Asia
The Bank is working with ECA clients to strengthen social cohesion through supporting community-driven development and social accountability, which will allow citizens' voices to be heard in the design of social policies and the improvement of public services. Increasing economic opportunities and public services for disadvantaged communities is also an important element of the Bank's social sustainability work; for example, the Bank supports Roma inclusion in countries of Central and Southeastern Europe through advocacy and evidence-based analysis as well as through lending and technical assistance from the Bank's budget.
Climate adaptation and energy efficiency remain strategic priorities for the region. Despite significant progress in the past decade, ECA remains the most energy-intensive region in the world. Better energy efficiency will bring both environmental and economic gains. The Bank is working with ECA clients to achieve these gains through policy reforms (for example, energy pricing) and investments in both public infrastructure and private industry. Adaptation efforts focus on improved water resource management (flood protection, water loss reduction, irrigation efficiency), disaster risk mitigation, climate-smart agriculture (a shift to more resilient crops, for instance), and increasing institutional capacity for improving weather forecasting and climate change monitoring.
Examples of recent World Bank projects in ECA include work in Greece, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Poland:
• In Greece, technical support from the WBG has helped the country climb 28 ranks in the past two Doing Business rankings through the reimbursable advisory services work on improving the business environment.
• In FYR Macedonia, the conditional cash transfer program (CCT) has increased secondary education enrollment by 10 percentage points. Approximately 7,500 children from poor families, who would not otherwise attend school, regularly attended secondary school in the school year 2013-14, thanks to the CCT benefit. The coverage of the CCT secondary education program increased from about 67 percent of eligible children in the first year of implementation to about 86 percent in 2012-13.
• In Poland, following 200 years of flooding of the Odra River Basin, thousands of homes—and millions of residents—are now protected, and 60,000 ancient artifacts were found and conserved during archaeological excavations as part of the flood protection project work along Poland's Odra River.
IFC in Europe and Central Asia
In Europe and Central Asia, IFC supports economic development by expanding access to finance, improving infrastructure, and tackling climate change through a combination of investments and advisory services. With continued volatility in the Euro Area, IFC promotes diversification and works to ensure access to basic goods and services for people in the region. IFC invested $4 .2 billion in Europe and Central Asia in fiscal 2014, including nearly $1 billion mobilized from other investors. IFC supported the region's sustainable growth by helping the private sector improve competitiveness and create more and better jobs and also helped expand access to finance, services, and infrastructure—and contributed to increasing the region's resilience to climate change.
IFC's clients supported more than 430,000 jobs and provided assistance to nearly 230,000 farmers. In the financial sector, they provided more than 4 million loans valued at about $70 billion to micro, small, and medium enterprises in the region.
MIGA in Europe and Central Asia
Recent political risk guarantees issued by MIGA for companies investing in Europe and Central Asia have supported a range of sectors, including capital markets in Hungary, leasing in Ukraine, financial services in the Russian Federation, banking in Serbia, transportation in Turkey, and services in Croatia.
Data resources on Europe and Central Asia
data.worldbank.org/region/ECA
Research on Europe and Central Asia
worldbank.org/en/region/eca/research
