The objective of the World Bank’s Investment Climate Capacity Enhancement Program is to help countries take concrete steps to improve their investment climate. We assist in all of the principal stages of a reform program: the diagnosis of the challenges at hand, the drawing up of reforms that respond to these challenges and the management of the resulting implementation process.

Our team is part of the Private Sector Development (PSD) programme in the World Bank Institute.

Diagnosing the Problem
An essential first step in improving the investment climate is a diagnosis of the main obstacles hindering firms from investing and doing business. Careful research and analysis both pinpoints the main challenges and provides the evidence base to convince stakeholders of the need for reform. Through our analysis of the investment climate in Russia, we are helping to identify constraints to enterprise growth, to compare Russian firms to their international rivals and to propose concrete steps that the government can undertake to make firms more competitive in the global market.

Facilitating Dialogue and Building Consensus
Raising awareness of the challenges at hand and building a consensus among the main stakeholders on how to tackle them is a vital part of any reform process. A major part of our work is to convene the main stakeholders – including the private sector, the government and the legislature – and facilitate dialogue between them. For example, in Madagascar, we catalyzed debate between stakeholders on how to surmount heavy regulatory barriers to business, partly by bringing in experts from other developing countries to share their insights. This helped generate agreement on priority areas for reform and led to action plans being developed to address them.

Developing Skills through Training
In some cases, skills will need to be developed, in both the public and private sectors. For example, in Serbia we have helped to develop and deliver a series of technical training programs in the area of regulatory reform. This helped the Council for Regulatory Reform of Serbia build the skills it needed to undertake Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA), so that new laws did not place an undue burden on businesses and investors.

Focused Technical Assistance
In other cases, carefully focused technical assistance may be required to figure out the details of investment climate reform plans. We can bring in experts with experience elsewhere to design implementable solutions. For example, in Orissa, India, we are helping the State Government implement a ‘single window’ clearance system by identifying the right international expertise and through direct, regular support to the Government by team members on implementation issues and solutions.

Providing Implementation Support
And in many cases, stakeholders may need support to manage complex implementation plans. We can help by bringing in innovative project management tools that ensure that the energy for reform is not dissipated by bureaucratic inertia. For example, in Kenya, we used the ‘Rapid Results’ approach – a management methodology used in major organizational change efforts – to jump-start the implementation of the Kenyan Economic Recovery Program in five priority sectors.