The Kingdom of Lesotho is a land-locked
nation located in the Drakensberg mountain range in Southern
Africa. The country has a total area of 30355 km² and in
2009 had an estimated population of nearly 2.1 million, with
nominal per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of US$ 1080
(in 2010). About 75 percent live in rural areas, often in
scattered mountain villages, while most of the urban
population lives in and around the capital Maseru and the

The East Asian and Pacific region has
achieved tremendous progress in poverty reduction in recent
years. However, further progress in poverty reduction may be
undermined by the high levels of vulnerability in many
countries across the region. The term vulnerability is
viewed from an economic context, where it is conceived as
the likelihood of suffering from future deteriorations in
standard of living which may result in a state of poverty,

The Tugi Silvo-pastoral Project (TUSIP)
is a South-South Cooperation between the Tropical
Agriculture Research and Higher Education Centre (CATIE)
based in Costa Rica (www.catie.ac.cr) and the Akwi Memorial
Foundation (AMF) based in the North West Region of Cameroon.
The main goal of TUSIP was to assess the environmental
benefits of a set of silvo-pastoral practices and to empower

The paper aims to provide an overview of
the gender disparities in three major domains-human capital,
labor market and entrepreneurship. In doing so, it builds on
the framework of the World Bank's regional gender
report opportunities for men and women: emerging Europe and
Central Asia (World Bank, 2011) and the world development
report on gender and development (World Bank, 2011). This
joint gender assessment work has the objectives of analyzing

This country note for Georgia is part of
a series of country briefs that summarize information
relevant to climate change and agriculture for three
countries in the Southern Caucasus Region, with a particular
focus on climate and crop projections, adaptation options,
policy development and institutional involvement. The note
series has been developed to provide a baseline of knowledge
on climate change and agriculture for the countries

This report investigates Egypt's
regional economic growth, explores the causes for
geographically unbalanced development, and proposes policy
options to make unbalanced growth compatible with inclusive
development. Regional disparities in income and consumption
may be attributed to differences in natural endowments and
geographical location, but unbalanced growth is mostly due
to economies of scale, spillover effects, and the lower

This study provides estimates of social
and financial costs of environmental damage in India from
three pollution damage categories: (i) urban air pollution;
(ii) inadequate water supply, poor sanitation, and hygiene;
and (iii) indoor air pollution. It also provides estimates
based on three natural resource damage categories: (i)
agricultural damage from soil salinity, water logging, and
soil erosion; (ii) rangeland degradation; and (iii)

This paper aims to develop a vision
statement for the agricultural sector that may then guide
the future investments in Chile's agricultural
innovation system, A joint and shared perspective on how the
sector might look and what role agricultural innovation
should play in getting there is a prerequisite for any
effective strategy. But developing such a vision is not only
a function of what the country wants: it also depends on the

This paper applies an econometric
analysis to estimate the average and distribution benefits
of rural electrification using rich household survey data
from India. The results support that rural electrification
helps to reduce time allocated to fuelwood collection by
household members and increases time allocated to studying
by boys and girls. Rural electrification also increases the
labor supply of men and women, schooling of boys and girls,

This summary report is the culmination
of a comprehensive, more than a year-long, collaboration
between the World Bank, Fiji Department of Social Welfare
(DSW), Fiji Islands Bureau of Statistics (FIBOS) and AusAID.
It reflects various activities undertaken under the work
program that was agreed upon with the Government of Fiji
(GOF), with financial support provided by AusAID under the
Externally Funded Output (EFO) agreement with the World

The report is divided into two volumes.
The first volume includes the fundamental content of the
report. It is organized as follows. Chapter one provides a
conceptual framework to analyze risk and vulnerability and
provides a definition of social protection. Chapter two
assesses the main risks faced by the Malagasy population as
well as its vulnerability profile. Chapter three reviews
Madagascar's social protection policies, the

Climate change is believed to represent
a serious challenge to poverty reduction efforts around the
globe. This paper conducts an up-to-date review of three
main strands of the literature analyzing the poverty impacts
of climate change : (i) economy-wide growth models
incorporating climate change impacts to work out consistent
scenarios for how climate change might affect the path of
poverty over the next decades; (ii) studies focusing on the