This briefing note examines perspectives
on trust, authority, and responsibility for decision making
in Timor-Leste, using findings from the justice module
included in an extension of the 2007 Timor-Leste Survey of
Living Standards (TLSLS2) and a review of relevant
social-science literature. It is hoped that this report will
be a valuable resource for civil servants, civil society,
and donor agencies working in Timor-Leste. This note

This report makes several policy
conclusions related to urban poverty and development in
Uruguay and potentially the rest of Latin America. First,
policies which prioritize improvements in access to quality
basic services, particularly education, health,
transportation, social assistance, more flexible land use
policies, as well as public information for those in
marginal areas could help to provide an important link to

Recruiting and retaining leaders and public servants at the grass-roots level in developing countries creates a potential tension between providing sufficient returns to attract talent and limiting the scope for excessive rent-seeking behavior. In China, researchers have frequently argued that village cadres, who are the lowest level of administrators in rural areas, exploit personal political status for economic gain.

Poverty reduction on a large scale
depends on empowering those who are most motivated to move
out of poverty-poor people themselves. But if empowerment
cannot be measured, it will not be taken seriously in
development policy making and programming. Building on the
"Empowerment and Poverty Reduction Sourcebook,"
this volume outlines a conceptual framework that can be used
to monitor and evaluate programs centered on empowerment

The objective of this study, requested
by the Minister of Housing, Utilities and Urban Development,
is to assist the government of Egypt in: formulating a
coherent national affordable housing strategy which puts in
place an effective institutional and regulatory framework
that creates the necessary conditions for an efficiently
functioning housing market, devises the incentive structure
needed to promote increased private sector participation in

This paper assesses the impact of
work-related migration by males on the labor market behavior
of females in Nepal. Using data from the 2004 Nepal
household survey, the authors apply the Instrumental
Variable Full Information Maximum Likelihood method to
account for unobserved factors that could simultaneously
affect males' decision to migrate and females'
decision to participate in the labor market. The results

Yemen is the second poorest country in
the Middle East and North Africa region, with 42 percent of
its population counted as poor in 1998. GDP has stagnated at
around US$530 per capita in real terms since 2002.
Unemployment, estimated at 11.5 percent in 1999, is expected
to have worsened as the population has climbed at 3 percent
a year and the labor force has burgeoned. Extreme gender
inequalities persist. Malnutrition is so severe that Yemeni

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

This study looks at the experience of integrated urban upgrading in a low-income neighborhood of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Infrastructure and social investments have been made in the community through a government program, with community participation playing a major role in the design and implementation. This approach is now perceived to be highly successful in terms of its implementation and positive impact on living conditions, and will provide the basis for a major state-wide program.

The majority of the world live in rural areas and are dependent on land and land based resources. The increasing pressure on land, particularly that used for food production, by countries and private investors poses a huge risks to millions of these rural communities. One of the major causes is weak and poor governance in land tenure systems, as most Governments have so far failed to provide adequate safeguards to protect poor people from eviction or dispossession leaving them without compensation and remedy. 

This publication offers crucial lessons
for policy makers and development experts who may be
considering using small area poverty maps as tools of
economic development and helps add to our array of tools for
dealing with the political economy issues of poverty. It
represents a major contribution to a little understood
aspect of the well-known adage "location, location,
location," demonstrating that the conceptualization of

This paper investigates how reductions
of barriers to migration affect the decision of middle
school graduates to attend high school in rural China.
Change in the cost of migration is identified using
exogenous variation across counties in the timing of
national identity card distribution, which made it easier
for rural migrants to register as temporary residents in
urban destinations. The analysis first shows that timing of