This report looks at the growth poles
policy in Romania to determine ways to increase its
effectiveness and efficiency for the next programming cycle
(2014-2020). The growth poles policy in Romania has been
initiated in 2008, as a means to support a balanced economic
development of the country, while still targeting
investments to maximize economic impact. A total of seven
growth poles have been designated and are currently

Disasters are increasing worldwide, with
more devastating effects than ever before. While the
absolute number of disasters around the world has almost
doubled since the 1980s, the average number of natural
disasters in Middle East and North Africa (MNA) has almost
tripled over the same period of time. In the MNA, the
interplay of natural disasters, rapid urbanization, water
scarcity, and climate change has emerged as a serious

Most of the world's population now
lives in urban areas, and in developing regions the
proportion living in cities and towns has risen from 35
percent in 1990 to 45 percent in 2010, from 1.4 billion to
2.5 billion people (Jacobsen et al. 2012). A 2008 World Bank
analysis estimated that a third of people living on less
than US$2 per day reside in urban areas, and United Nation
or UN-habitat estimates that just under 40 percent of urban

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

This report provides Mayors and other policymakers with a policy framework and diagnostic tools to anticipate and implement strategies that can avoid their cities from locking into irreversible physical and social structures. At the core of the policy framework are the three main dimensions of urban development.
· Planning— where the focus is on making land transactions easier, and making land use regulations more responsive to emerging needs especially to coordinate land use planning with infrastructure, natural resource management, and risks from hazards;

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

Agriculture and fisheries are the main pillars of Mozambique's economy, having contributed in the last few years to more than 25 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) and around 7 to 11 percentage points of the rate of economic growth. Agricultural development in Mozambique has been part of the government agenda because it is crucial to reducing poverty within rural zones.

Most of the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa
live in rural areas where agriculture is the main income
source. This agriculture is characterized by low performance
and its productivity growth has been identified as a key
driver of poverty reduction. In Niger, as in many other
African countries, productivity is even lower among female
peasants. To build policy interventions to improve
agricultural productivity among women, it is important to

This report provides tremendous insight
on gender norms an area that has been resistant to change,
and that constrains achievement of gender equality across
many diverse cultures. The report synthesizes data collected
from more than 4,000 women and men in 97 communities across
20 countries. It is the largest dataset ever collected on
the topic of gender and development, providing an
unprecedented opportunity to examine potential patterns

Urbanization is undoubtedly a key driver
of development -- cities provide the national platform for
prosperity, job creation, and poverty reduction. But
urbanization also poses enormous challenges that one is
familiar with: congestion, air pollution, social divisions,
crime, the breakdown of public services and infrastructure,
and the slums that one billion urban resident's call
home. Urbanization is perhaps the single most important

Agriculture has been a mainstay of the
Cambodian economy. It has seen significant growth throughout
the 2000s and showed a significant resilience against
external shocks during the 2008-09 economic and financial
crises. Agribusiness enterprises do not operate in isolation
from the rest of the economy. The state of production of
agricultural raw materials, the state of the financial
sector, and the nature of the financial sector's

This strategic environmental assessment
(SEA) is a technical piece intended to assist in the current
and future identification of priority industrial pollutants
and economic instruments to minimize industrial waste. This
industrial sector SEA is one of six pieces of technical
support envisioned by the Himachal Pradesh (HP) inclusive
green growth (IGG) development policy loan (DPL) to fill
knowledge gaps and strengthen operational success of the