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 book is designed to contribute to
the government's thinking on how best to translate
broad MKUKUTA (the government of Tanzania's National
Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty) policy
objectives into practical tactics and programs well suited
to Tanzania's economic priorities and to the removal of
key institutional and infrastructure bottlenecks. The book
aims to respond to three fundamental questions: (a) what

What happened to poverty in India in the
1990s has been fiercely debated, both politically and
statistically. The debate has run parallel to the wider
debate about globalization and poverty in the 1990s and is
also an important part of that debate. The economic reforms
of the early 1990s in India were followed by rates of
economic growth that were high by historical standards. The
effects on poverty remain controversial, however. The

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

Communities supported by World Bank
rural development projects often cite support for the
development of income-generating activities (IGAs) as a
critical need. This note identifies some of the core
problems encountered by Bank task teams that attempt to
respond to this need, outlines the issues involved, and
offers suggestions on some of the points that should be kept
in mind when designing grant programs for this purpose.

The rapid pace of economic growth in
China has been unprecedented since the start of economic
reforms in late 1970s. It has delivered higher incomes and
made the largest single contribution to global poverty
reduction. Measured by international poverty lines, from
1978-2004, the absolute poor population in rural areas has
dropped from 250 million to 26.1 million. Such gains are
impressive and have been driven largely by a set of

This study by the World Bank indicates that forests offer vast potential for poverty reduction and rural economic growth in India while also supporting critical national conservation goals. An estimated 275 million people in rural areas depend on forests for at least part of their livelihoods. Forest dwellers, which include a high proportion of tribals, are among the poorest and most vulnerable groups in society. The government of India has adopted Joint Forest Management as a principal approach for community-based forestry.

The analysis of the distributional
impact of policy reforms on the well-being or welfare of
different stakeholder groups, particularly on the poor and
vulnerable, has an important role in the elaboration and
implementation of poverty reduction strategies in developing
countries. In recent years this type of work has been
labeled as Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) and is
increasingly implemented to promote evidence-based policy

Rural transport services are often
inadequate. Passenger and goods transport needs improving to
stimulate rural economies and reduce poverty. Understanding
existing rural transport systems and constraining factors is
a precondition for appropriate policy action. The
Sub-Saharan Africa Transport Policy Program (SSATP)
commissioned a study to develop and test a methodology for
the rapid assessment of rural transport systems. The

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 article highlights some of the
findings from recent analytical work that has been carried
out in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, notably
a number of promising practices that are being developed to
effectively address the infrastructure provision challenge,
and in particular to ensure that infrastructure increases
rural competitiveness and incomes.

In view of its increasing importance,
and the dearth of information on return migration and its
impacts on source households, this study uses data from the
2005 Albania Living Standards Measurement Study survey and
assesses the impact of past migration experience of Albanian
households on non-farm business ownership through
instrumental variables regression techniques. Moreover,
considering the differences in earning potentials and