Well-functioning urban land and housing markets are critical success factors for achieving robust economic growth. This paper provides an overview of urban land and housing market performance in Punjab Province of Pakistan. It describes the characteristics of well-functioning markets and argues that the Punjab's present markets are not performing adequately.

The Country Partnership Framework (CPF)
for Montene gro covers the period from July 1, 2015 to June
30, 2020 (fiscal years 2016-2020). This CPF builds on the
results and lessons of the previous World Bank Group (WBG)
Country Partnership Strategy (CPS), which originally covered
the period July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2014, and was
subsequently extended to June 30, 2015.The one-year CPS)
extension was intended to provide greater clarity on the

The extractive industries (EI) sector occupies an outsize space in the economies of many developing countries. Economists, public finance professionals, and policy makers working in such countries are frequently confronted with issues that require an in-depth understanding of the sector. The objective of this volume is to provide a concise overview of EI-related topics these professionals are likely to encounter.

Increased future demands for food, fiber and fuels from biomass can only be met if the available land and water resources on a global scale are used and managed as efficiently as possible. The main routes for making the global agricultural system more productive are through intensification and technological change on currently used agricultural land, land expansion into currently non-agricultural areas, and international trade in agricultural commodities and processed goods.

The idea of social inclusion has
garnered considerable attention, especially in the context
of two recent developments: the Sustainable Development
Goals and the heightened attention to inequality. This paper
reviews the manner and extent to which social inclusion is
addressed in the first 17 Systematic Country Diagnostics
(SCDs), which are ex ante, country-level assessments
conducted by the World Bank Group, ahead of the preparation

Over the past twenty years, Uganda’s
population density has been increasing rapidly, placing
significant pressure on the use of land. Uganda now has a
population density of 194 persons per square kilometer of
arable land, compared to 80 in Kenya and 116 in Ghana. At
present, the majority of Uganda’s population still lives in
rural areas, where the main source of livelihood is
agriculture. However, the proportion of the population

In 1982, because there was increasing pressure on land resources in Thailand, the Department of Lands designed and implemented a 20 year Land Titling Program (LTP) to grant secure tenure to agricultural landholders. The success of the program has been due to a number of factors, including the clear vision for the project, the long-term plan to achieve this vision and the commitment of RTG and key stakeholders to project implementation. There was also a strong policy, legal and institutional framework for land administration in Thailand and a long history of land titling.

This paper assesses the relation between
access to markets and cultivated land in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Making use of a geo-referenced panel over three decades
(1970-2005) during which the road network was significantly
improved, the analysis finds a modest but significant
positive association between increased market accessibility
and local cropland expansion. It also finds that cropland
expansion, in turn, is associated with a small but

Enabling the Business of Agriculture 2016 provides a tool for policy makers to identify and analyze legal barriers for the business of agriculture and to quantify transaction costs of dealing with government regulations.

Most of the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries has
training institutions that offer corporate governance
courses and programs for directors (e.g., the Institute of
Directors in the United Kingdom, and the National
Association of Corporate Directors in the United States)
that have received independent accreditation. There is a
high demand among corporate governance institutes and

In absence of deposit insurance,
underdeveloped financial systems can exhibit a coordination
failure between banks, unable to commit on safe asset
holding, and depositors, anticipating low deposit repayment
in bad states. This paper shows conditions under which a
government can solve this failure by imposing safe asset
purchases, which boosts deposits by increasing depositor
repayment in bad states. In so doing, financial regulation

Over the past quarter century, Vietnam’s
agricultural sector has made enormous progress. Vietnam’s
performance in terms of agricultural yields, output, and
exports, however, has been more impressive than its gains in
efficiency, farmer welfare, and product quality. Vietnamese
agriculture now sits at a turning point. The agricultural
sector now faces growing domestic competition - from cities,
industry, and services - for labor, land, and water. Rising