Proposed Sustainability Checklist for Assessing Economic Recovery Interventions

The World Bank Group's proposed sustainability checklist provides granular information on key criteria that governments may need to weigh as part of their COVID-19 recovery packages. Short-term considerations include impacts on employment, economic activity, timeliness and risk. Long-term factors include impact on human and social capital, technologies, natural and cultural capital, physical capital, fundamental market failures, adaptation and resilience, and sustainable growth. Such factors necessarily include things like the geographical distribution of stimulus interventions, whether they address inclusivity concerns, or whether they improve local labor force skills and productivity. The checklist also emphasizes the need to understand what type of corollary institutional or policy changes would be required to ensure successful delivery of each proposed intervention, so that these can be accounted for ahead of time.