Over the past five years in Turkey, the
agricultural and rural sector has seen substantial change in
transfer policies which now place greater emphasis on
improved equity and investment. These have been summarized
in the earlier World Bank "Review of the Impact of the
Reform of Agricultural Sector Subsidization (2004), and
"Policy and Investment Priorities for Agricultural and
Rural Development" (2005). Currently, the structural

Over the past dozen years, policymakers
have largely abandoned long-standing popular approaches for
addressing risk in agriculture without fully resolving the
question of how best to manage the negative consequences of
volatile agricultural markets. The article reviews the
transition from past policies and describes current
approaches that distinguish between the trade-related fiscal
consequences of commodity market volatility and the

The objective of this report is to
design an integrated strategy for rural poverty reduction in
Brazil. It contains an updated and detailed profile of the
rural poor in the northeast and southeast regions of Brazil;
identifies key determinants of rural poverty in these
regions; and proposes a five-pronged strategic framework and
a tentative set of policy options. The latter were
identified via an analysis of rural poverty determinants

This Country-Level Effectiveness and
Accountability Review (CLEAR) examines the efficacy of
microfinance aid in Madagascar, based on an objective
analysis of donor assistance for the sustainable development
of financial systems targeting the poor. The three levels of
the financial system are the micro level (e.g., retail
institutions), the meso level (e.g., apex, technical service
providers), and the macro level (e.g., regulations and

Urban growth is, in all parts of the
world, inevitable and welcomed. Despite concerns that local
governments will not be able to address those issues
associated with increased urban population, the number of
people living in urban centers will sur-pass those of the
rural population by 2030. Since productivity levels are
consistently higher in urban areas than in rural settings,
this would seem a reason to rejoice since it suggests more

This paper considers the potential implications of the Doha Development Agenda, as well as other trade liberalization scenarios, for Mozambique. An applied general equilibrium model, which accounts for high marketing margins and home consumption in the Mozambique economy, is linked to results from the GTAP model of global trade. In addition, a microsimulation module is used to consider the subsequent implications of trade liberalization for poverty. The implications of trade liberalization, particularly the Doha scenarios, are found to be relatively small.

During the 2007 spring meetings, the
development committee endorsed the World Bank Group's
action plan on the Clean Energy Investment Framework (CEIF).
This progress report is a response to the committee's
request for an update on the implementation of the action
plan for the annual meetings in October 2007. It summarizes
accomplishments in the three areas of the action plan: 1)
energy for growth, with a particular emphasis on access to

The estimated coefficient of distance on
the volume of trade is generally found to increase rather
than decrease through time using the traditional gravity
model of trade. This distance puzzle proved robust to
several ad hoc versions of the model using data for 1962-96
for a large sample of 130 countries. The introduction of an
augmented barrier to trade function removes the paradox,
yielding a decline in the estimate of the elasticity of

The objective of this study is to gain
an overview of current nonenergy projects with rural
electrification components in LCR. The research included
compiling a list of projects, contact information, and
issues regarding the integration of rural electrification
and other services and interviewing the relevant task
managers. This report provides an overview of what effects
are expected theoretically to happen, and what the initial

Recent trends in Albania suggest that it
has the potential for a modern and competitive agricultural
sector, provided there is sufficient private investment and
the right policy environment. This chapter looks at the role
of agriculture in the economy and the current status of the
sector, and outlines the implications of modernization and
transformation of agriculture for rural areas. It also
identifies trends and sources of growth for agriculture, and

China has an ancient tradition of
hydraulic engineering but in the past half century the
intensity of exploitation of water resources has accelerated
as a result of population and economic growth. The three
major issues for Chinese water management are water
shortages, flood control and pollution. The World Commission
on Dams noted that since 1949 the number of large dams in
China had increased from 22 to 22,000, almost half the

How effective are public interventions in addressing significant regional disparities in formal manufacturing concentration in a developing economy? The authors examine the aggregate and sectoral geographic concentration of manufacturing industries for Indonesia, and estimate the impact of factors influencing location choice at the firm level. They distinguish between natural advantage, including infrastructure endowments, wage rates, and natural resource endowments, and production externalities, arising from the co-location of firms in the same or complementary industries.