After decades of growth and
experimentation, financial service providers (FSPs) have
learned that to achieve financial inclusion and generate
benefits for lower-income clients, one must be
customer-centric. The products should be designed to help
the poor improve lives, and service delivery must be
responsible, transparent, fair, and safe. Decision-making at
each level of the business should place customers at the

Enabling the Business of Agriculture
2015 is a pilot assessment report on the agribusiness sector
enabling environment in 10 countries. This progress report
covers the methodology, key insights and lessons learned
from the pilot effort. Enabling the Business of Agriculture
2015 is a first step toward identifying areas and data sets
that can be used to build indicators in subsequent phases of
the project; the indicators will measure and monitor

According to a new World Bank report,
economic complementarities between Egypt, Turkey, Jordan,
Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and the Palestinian Territories are
significant, with substantial welfare gains expected from
increased trade and investments and, ultimately, economic
integration. With a population of 224 million, a land area
of 2.4 million km, a nominal GDP of 1.4 trillion dollars,
and close to major markets and transportation corridors,

In past four years, the World Bank, in
close cooperation with the Government of Zimbabwe, and the
support of international partners - has carried out a number
of studies and technical assistance activities in key areas
of the socio-economic recovery. In line with Bank’s Africa
strategy of fostering Africa’s economic transformation and
poverty reduction, the overall goal of these studies has
been to support broad-based development of Zimbabwe by

The World Bank Group, DFAT-Australia,
and Carnival Australia have partnered to conduct this study
of the economic impact of cruise ship tourism in Vanuatu.
Data gathering and analysis for this study was carried out
by Net Balance Management Group. Over the past 10 years,
Vanuatu’s cruise arrivals have grown by 15 percent per year.
Cruising to Vanuatu has been buoyed by an advantageous
location within a few days’ sail of Australia, a varied

With increased global interest in biofuels, Zambia, a Sub-
Saharan African country that entirely depends on imports
for its petroleum supply, is planning to implement
blending mandates for biofuels. But, a large number
of issues—including production costs of biofuels, land
requirements to meet the mandates, and environmental
benefits—have not yet been explored. This study aims to
contribute in filling this gap. It finds that depending on
feedstock type, costs of ethanol production range from

As Indonesia heads to the polls in 2014, its economy is slowing. The end of the commodities boom and the global return to more normal monetary policy has exposed some weaknesses. Exchange-rate depreciation has absorbed some of the adjustment; but structural rigidities are still likely to limit the expansion of non-commodity sectors, and the increased fuel-subsidy bill for imported oil is putting pressure on the current account and the budget. The immediate focus is on demand-side consolidation to manage inflation and the current account deficit.

The study found that logistics costs are
high due to transshipment costs and various forms of
payments. Many of these payments are imposed by the private
sector with little or no transparency on how or where the
costs are incurred. International trade corridors in
Cambodia therefore perform well in terms of time but not
cost. However, the corridors with transshipment have higher
costs than the national corridor between Phnom Penh and

The Program Nasional Pemberdayaan
Masyarakat (PNPM) or National Community Empowerment Program
is the world’s largest program of its kind with long term
goals to reduce poverty by making development planning more
inclusive, accountable, and reflective of local needs. PNPM
currently covers about 70,000 rural and urban communities
across Indonesia. PNPM works by giving communities block
grants to spend on projects developed through a

The water resources of the atolls of the Republic of the Maldives are under continual threat from climatic and anthropogenic stresses, such as changing rainfall patterns, sea-level rise, and contamination from human activities and climatic events. Groundwater, a historically important resource of the island communities of the Maldives, is particularly affected due to the fragile nature of the freshwater lens on small atoll islands.

This book looks at the effect of legal
and economic rights on women's economic opportunities.
It focuses on entrepreneurship because women in Africa are
active entrepreneurs, and the links between property rights
and the ability to enter contracts in one's own name
affect entrepreneurial activities. The laws that are the
focus of this book are not business laws and regulations,
which are generally gender blind and presuppose that

The author provides a briefing on cost-benefit analyses (CBA) for disaster risk reduction (DRR), stating that the most cost-effective forms of DRR investment tend to be non-structural approaches, such as land use planning, warning systems, and household-level changes. These are often backed by structural measures, making full separation difficult. Barriers to enacting DRR savings occur because political capital is rarely gained from implementing DRR, except in cases where it is visible and tangible and might not even be the most effective DRR approach.