This sector report claims that in the
three years between 2002 and 2005 alone, almost 235,000
people have moved out of poverty in Albania. Strong economic
growth and large inflow of remittances are at the center of
this impressive achievement. However, low productivity of
predominantly small family farms has put a drag on rural
growth prospects. Moreover, Ndihma Ekonomike (NE) program,
the means-tested income support program is small in scale,

Studies of risk and its consequences
tend to focus on one risk factor, such as a drought or an
economic crisis. Yet 2003 household surveys in rural
Kilimanjaro and Ruvuma, two cash-crop-growing regions in
Tanzania that experienced a precipitous coffee price decline
around the turn of the millennium, identified health and
drought shocks as well as commodity price declines as major
risk factors, suggesting the need for a comprehensive

Since the 1980s and early 1990s, the
World Bank has been supporting projects that involve
communities own development. This has been largely
manifested in the design and implementation of
community-based development (CBD) and community-driven
development (CDD) initiatives, with the latter gaining
increasing momentum in recent years. The purpose of this
study was to assess the development effectiveness of the

Half of the moderately poor, and one third of the extremely poor now live in urban areas in Mexico. While cities offer a number of opportunities and specific challenges for the poor, low quality and high costs restrict real access to basic public services. Yet, the urban-rural distinctions need to be seen as a continuum, where depth and characteristics of poverty vary with settlement size. The objective of this report is to inform the design of urban poverty interventions. It is organized as follows.

This assessment, reflecting
poverty's many dimensions in Mozambique, combines
multiple disciplines and diagnostic tools to explore
poverty. It combines quantitative and qualitative approaches
to understand trends in poverty and the dynamics that shape
them. The objective is to support the development and
implementation of proper policies that really work by taking
poverty's multiple dimensions into account. The first

The overall objective of the present study is to contribute to the knowledge-base that is urgently required for the implementation of sustainable rural development activities in Haiti.

This report shows that after a decade of
moderate growth but little or no long term change in rural
poverty in Pakistan, agricultural output, rural incomes,
rural poverty and social welfare indicators all showed
marked improvements between 2001-02 and 2004-05. However,
longer term trends suggest there is little reason for
complacency. The agricultural GDP per capita growth rate
(1999- 2000 to 2004-05) was only 0.3 percent per year; rural

Rural poverty remains a crucial part of the poverty picture in Argentina. This paper used a rural dataset collected by the World Bank in 2003. Findings show that extreme income poverty in rural areas reached 39 percent of the people or 200,000-250,000 indigent families.

Tanzania's Pilot Rural Investment
Climate Assessment (RICA) measures the economic environment
of non-farm entrepreneurs. The pilot assessment has three
key objectives: it aims to better understand the rural
non-farm economy in Tanzania, shed light on rural enterprise
dynamics and business constraints, and reflect on areas
where government policies are readily directed to help
promote rural non-farm enterprise activity. The RICA is

This paper addresses the deceptively simple question: What is the rural population of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)? It argues that rurality is a gradient, not a dichotomy, and nominates two dimensions to that gradient: population density and remoteness from large metropolitan areas. It uses geographically referenced population data (from the Gridded Population of the World, version 3) to tabulate the distribution of populations in Latin America and in individual countries by population density and by remoteness.

This report presents an update on the
economic challenges facing Ethiopia with a focus on the
shared goal of accelerating equitable growth. The starting
point is the Government's own Plan for Accelerated and
Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP), which is in
the process of finalization, and is designed to cover the
period 2005-2010. This report proposes that the growth
strategy should more explicitly adopt a

This publication offers crucial lessons
for policy makers and development experts who may be
considering using small area poverty maps as tools of
economic development and helps add to our array of tools for
dealing with the political economy issues of poverty. It
represents a major contribution to a little understood
aspect of the well-known adage "location, location,
location," demonstrating that the conceptualization of