This year's edition of the little green data book includes a focus story on oceans and its ecosystem services, as well as estimates of global marine fisheries wealth accounts, a first step in capturing the value of this important resource stock. A new set of ocean-related indicators are also introduced, highlighting the role of oceans in economic development and providing policy makers the information to make better decisions for the sustainable management of oceans.

This Joint Social and Economic
Assessment (JSEA) has been prepared in response to a request
from the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation
(MoPIC), and was undertaken jointly by the World Bank, the
United Nations, the European Union, and the Islamic
Development Bank. The JSEA's main purpose is to assess
the social and economic impact of the crisis in Yemen, and
to identify challenges and key priorities for early

Differences in relative female
employment by soil texture are used to explain the
heterogeneous deficit of female children across districts
within India. Soil texture varies exogenously and determines
the depth of land tillage. Deep tillage, possible in loamy
but not in clayey soil textures, reduces the demand for
labor in agricultural tasks traditionally performed by
women. Girls have a lower economic value where female labor

This paper describes the key challenges
to job creation in conflict-affected environments in South
Asia. It uses household survey data since the early 2000s
for Afghanistan, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka to document the
characteristics of labor markets in conflict-affected areas,
exploiting the spatial and time variation in armed conflict
within countries. The analysis finds that, across countries,
labor markets look very different in conflict-affected areas

The objective of the Nepal Investment Climate Assessment (ICA) is to evaluate the investment climate in Nepal in all its dimensions and promote policies to strengthen the private sector. The investment climate is made up of many dimensions that shape the opportunities for investments, employment creation, and growth of private firms. Such dimensions include factor markets, product markets, infrastructure services, and the macroeconomic, legal, regulatory, and institutional framework.

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

This report presents the key message,
lessons, and insights from agrifin's first knowledge
exchange event, held in Hyderabad, India, March 7-12, 2011.
Agrifin is a special initiative aimed at building capacity
in agriculture finance for commercially-oriented
smallholders and small and medium enterprise (SME)
agribusiness market segments. The initiative, managed by the
World Bank, through generous support from the bill and

Parts of Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), the
northeastern most administrative region of Pakistan, have
been undergoing a dramatic transformation over the last
three decades. Given the challenging environment, GB's
development outcomes are impressive, built on the
time-tempered resilience of the people of GB and facilitated
by high levels of social capital. GB has also benefitted
from the attentions of the national Government of Pakistan

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

Agriculture and agroprocessing are
important in Zambia's economy, representing more than
40 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and contributing
about 12 percent of national export earnings. Agriculture
employs some 67 percent of the labor force and supplies raw
materials to agricultural industries, which account for some
84 percent of manufacturing value-added in the country.
Smallholder agriculture dominates the rural economy. It

The objective of conducting this case
study on Mozambique is to uncover the pattern of municipal
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) impact that
may exist in other low-capacity countries with analogous
political economy structures in relation to leveraging ICT
in public sectors. The study concludes by suggesting
measures to link the continent's ICT boom in
citizen-based mobile telephony and internet usage with the

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