Rwanda established targets for Gross
Domestic Product (GDP) growth and poverty reduction, to be
achieved by the year 2020; these were to (i) raise real per
capita income from $230 to $900; and (ii) reduce the poverty
incidence by half. To reach these targets, the Government
projected in its 2002 Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
(PRSP) that GDP growth will to be in the range of 6 to 7
percent over the medium term. The PRSP focused on six

This assessment, reflecting
poverty's many dimensions in Mozambique, combines
multiple disciplines and diagnostic tools to explore
poverty. It draws on a combination of approaches and tools
from three separate analytical diagnostics developed by the
World Bank: poverty assessment, country gender assessment,
and country social analysis. It uses monetary, human, and
social indicators and combines quantitative and qualitative

This paper discusses the social impacts
of Costa Rica's Payments for Environmental Services
(PSA) program and their effect on rural poverty. Although
the analysis is hampered by significant information gaps, we
believe that the PSA Program has probably managed to have an
impact on the poor. This impact is almost certainly positive
on the poor who were able to participate, but is difficult
to quantify. However, except for very few cases, it seems

Housing is one of the most important
sectors of the economy -- in developing countries as in
richer ones -- with large positive externalities in terms of
economic growth, public health and societal stability. It is
the primary form of asset accumulation for the poor -- often
representing more than 50 percent of the assets of
households. However, housing systems in developing countries
are dominated by badly designed, poorly targeted, and

The workshop brings diverse perspectives
from outside the World Bank, providing a forum in which to
exchange ideas and debate in the course of developing the
World Development Report (WDR). Participants at the 2006
Berlin Workshop gathered to discuss challenges and successes
pertaining to agriculture and development. Agriculture is
the major sector contributing to economic development in
many poor countries. Three out of every four poor people in

The World Bank’s assistance strategies
showed strong client orientation and were aligned with
Uganda’s poverty reduction strategy. The programs were
substantially effective in decentralization, public sector
reform, growth and economic transformation, education, and
water and sanitation. However, more could have been done to
help counter the perception of increasing corruption,
improve power supply, reduce transport costs, enhance

This is a summary report of the South
Asia Region and the East Asia Pacific regions training
workshop from April 28-30, 2008 on the importance of
disaster risk reduction and risk transfer including major
concepts, models, and various applications of disaster risk
reduction around the globe. This report represents an
analysis and summary of the main presentations made during
the course of the workshop. It provides a comprehensive

The World Bank Group's clean energy
for development investment framework action plan has
outlined some of the key activities it intends to undertake
in the area of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and
helping client countries adapt to changes in climate. One of
these activities focuses on an analysis of the role of
low-carbon energy technologies in climate change mitigation.
This report provides an initial analysis of this issue. The

This paper compares and contrasts the
performance of rural and urban manufacturing firms in
Ethiopia to assess the impact of market integration and the
investment climate on firm performance. Rural firms are
shown to operate in isolated markets, have poor access to
infrastructure and a substantial degree of market power,
whereas urban firms operate in better integrated and more
competitive markets, where they have much better access to

The proposed methodology begins with a
consistent downscaling of projected climatic changes from a
multiplicity of General Circulation to local levels. Subsets
of the suite of downscaled climatic factors are then to be
used to estimate the vector of impacts on key economic
sectors of each country, using sector-specific impact
assessment models. Based on this information, alternative
government adaptation projects will be specified and

Several studies addressing the supply
and demand for food in China suggest that the nation can
largely meet its needs in the coming decades. However,
these studies do not consider the effects of climate change.
This paper examines whether near future expected changes in
climate are likely to alter this picture. The authors
analyze the effect of temperature and precipitation on net
crop revenues using a cross section consisting of both

This paper uses two recently completed
surveys of individual entrepreneurs (farmers and
microentrepreneurs) and registered enterprises (agricultural
and nonagricultural) operating in Mexico s rural sector to
provide new evidence about the factors influencing the
incidence of credit constraints and investment behavior. To
measure the incidence of credit constraints, the authors use
self-reported information on whether economic agents have a