Urbanization is the single most
important transformation that the African continent will
undergo this century. More than half of Africa's
population will live in its cities by 2040. In the face of
rapid urbanization, there is a narrow window of opportunity
to harness the potential of cities as engines of economic
growth, and use this as a powerful leverage to achieve
sustainable development and poverty reduction. Despite its

Within any economy, agriculture is the
sector that is most sensitive to climate change. In Armenia,
however, the risks are even more pronounced because the
majority of the rural population depends on agriculture for
their livelihoods. This publication outlines the policy
options available to Armenia, based on a rigorous evaluation
of the impacts of climate change on agricultural systems. It
provides a solid foundation for taking strategic and, in

The oil, gas, and mining unit series
publishes reviews and analyses of sector experience from
around the world as well as new findings from analytical
work. It places particular emphasis on how the experience
and knowledge gained relates to developing country policy
makers, communities affected by extractive industries,
extractive industry enterprises, and civil society
organizations. This paper explores the divergent experiences

In the Pacific island countries, which
are small and far from world markets, labor mobility
represents the most significant and substantial opportunity
for overcoming geographic constraints on employment. This
report presents a brief overview of employment challenges in
small Pacific island countries and recommendations for
addressing them. The report contributes to an ongoing World
Bank analytical program examining the linkages between

Sierra Leone is still recovering from a
brutal civil war (1991-2002), fuelled in part by a valuable
and easily extractable natural resource (diamonds). Sierra
Leone now stands on the verge of an unprecedented period of
economic growth, driven primarily by revenues from
large-scale iron ore mining. Yet it continues to face many
governance and developmental challenges. The rapid rise of
the extractives governance agenda in Sierra Leone requires

Private sugar processors in Andhra
Pradesh, India use an unusual form of vertical coordination.
They issue 'permits' to selected cane growers a
few weeks before harvest. These permits specify the amount
of cane to be delivered during a narrow time period. This
article investigates why processors create uncertainty among
farmers using ex post permits instead of ex ante production
contracts. The theoretical model predicts that ex post

Climate change is a huge challenge for
the agriculture and rural development (ARD) sector in
Romania. On the one hand, agriculture is a source of
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and must therefore be
expected to contribute towards the climate change mitigation
goals of the Europe 2020 strategy. European farmers,
foresters, rural businesses, and other local people
therefore need to start paying much greater attention to

Despite a decline in both monetary and
multidimensional poverty rates since 2000, Haiti remains
among the poorest and most unequal countries in Latin
America. Two years after the 2010 earthquake, poverty was
still high, particularly in rural areas. This report
establishes that in 2012 more than one in two Haitians was
poor, living on less than $ 2.41 a day, and one person in
four was living below the national extreme poverty line of

Over the seven years from 2004 through
2011, Cambodian economic growth was tremendous, ranking amid
the best in the world. Moreover, household consumption
increased by nearly 40 percent. And this growth was
pro-poor, not only reducing inequality, but also
proportionally boosting poor people's consumption
further and faster than that of the non-poor. As a result,
the poverty rate dropped from 52.2 to 20.5 percent,

The continued decline in global poverty
over the past 100 years particularly in the past three
decades is a remarkable achievement. In 1981, 52 percent of
the world population lived on less than $1.25 a day. By
2005, that rate had been cut in half, to 25.0 percent, and
by 2008 to 22.2 percent (World Bank 2012). Preliminary
estimates for 2010 indicate that the extreme poverty rate
has fallen further still; if follow-up studies confirm this,

The purpose of this Agriculture Business Indicators Study was to isolate the success factors and construct
indicators that reflect the performance of the agriculture sector in Nigeria and that benchmark it in terms
directly comparable to agriculture sectors in other developing countries. Providing policy makers and public
officials with access to this type of empirical information is seen as way to stimulate and inform policy
dialogue about what reforms are needed and about how scarce public resources can be most effectively

Two of the great stylized predictions of
development theory, and two of the great expectations of
policy makers as indicators of progress in development, are
inexorable urbanization and inexorable formalization.
Urbanization is indeed happening, beyond the "tipping
point" where half the world's population is now
urban. However, formalization has slowed down significantly
in the past quarter century. Indeed, informality has been