Delivering on the Promise of Pro-Poor
Growth contributes to the debate on how to accelerate
poverty reduction by providing insights from eight countries
that have been relatively successful in delivering pro-poor
growth: Bangladesh, Brazil, Ghana, India, Indonesia,
Tunisia, Uganda, and Vietnam. It integrates growth analytics
with the microanalysis of household data to determine how
country policies and conditions interact to reduce poverty

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

This report is part of the Armenia
Programmatic Poverty Assessment work. It is jointly produced
by the National Statistics Service (NSS) of the Republic of
Armenia and the World Bank. Armenia has achieved impressive
economic growth and poverty reduction since the late 1990s.
The country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has grown at
an astounding annual rate of over 11 percent since 2002. The
main objectives of Armenia poverty are: (i) to inform policy

In August 2004, in response to a request
from the Government of Vietnam (GOV), the WB/ IDA launched
preparatory activities for the Priority Infrastructure
Investment Project (PIIP) in Danang. The PIIP is a
multi-sectoral infrastructure investment initiative aimed at
poverty reduction and the promotion of economic growth. The
Project reflects the national goals set out in the
Comprehensive Poverty Reduction and Growth Strategy (CPRGS),

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

Policies and external shocks affecting agriculture, the main source of income for rural households, can be expected to have a significant impact on poverty. The authors study the case of Uganda. Throughout the 1990s, more than 90 percent of its poor lived in rural areas and, during the same period, large international price fluctuations as well as an extensive domestic deregulation affected the coffee sector, its main source of export revenues.

This paper explores the role of export
costs in the process of poverty reduction in rural Africa.
The authors claim that the marketing costs that emerge when
the commercialization of export crops requires
intermediaries can lead to lower participation into export
cropping and, thus, to higher poverty. They test the model
using data from the Uganda National Household Survey. The
findings show that: i) farmers living in villages with fewer

The overall objective of the
Comprehensive Assessment of the Agricultural Sector (CAAS)
is to provide an evidence base to enable appropriate
strategic policy responses by the Government of Liberia
(GoL) and its development partners in order to maximize the
contribution of the agriculture sector to the
Government's overarching policy objectives. Given the
strong relationship between growth in agricultural

Index insurance, such as weather
indexing, addresses other inherent problems in insurance by
using an indicator that is not affected by individual
behavior and may address monitoring costs and moral hazard.
A number of innovations using index insurance are being
tried currently in diverse settings ranging from India to
Mongolia to Malawi. Marketing costs may limit the provision
of such insurance to small farmers, but even in such cases

"From Vision to Action", the
Bank's previous rural development strategy launched in
1997, had a decisive influence on global thinking - but
disappointing results on the ground. In 2001, lending for
agricultural projects was the lowest in the Bank's
history. The new strategy is results oriented:
"Reaching the Rural Poor" stresses practice,
implementation, monitoring, and empowerment of the people it

This paper, prepared in response to the
Chinese government's request, examines the
institutional and financial arrangements under which the
expansion of the Chinese expressway network has taken place.
China's outstanding achievements in economic growth and
poverty reduction over the last fifteen years have been well
documented. The major emphasis has been on the development
of its infrastructure, particularly transport. All modes of

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.