All countries fund safety net programs
for the protection of their people. Though an increasing
number of safety net programs are extremely well thought
out, adroitly implemented, and demonstrably effective, many
others are not. This book aims to assist those concerned
with social policy to understand why countries need social
assistance, what kind of safety programs will serve those
best and how to develop such programs for maximum

At the outset of China's reform
period, the country had a far higher poverty rate than for
Africa as a whole. Within five years that was no longer
true. This paper tries to explain how China escaped from a
situation in which extreme poverty persisted due to failed
and unpopular policies. While acknowledging that Africa
faces constraints that China did not, and that context
matters, two lessons stand out. The first is the importance

This paper develops a Structural
Ricardian model to measure climate change impacts that
explicitly models the choice of farm type in African
agriculture. This two stage model first estimates the type
of farm chosen and then the conditional incomes of each farm
type after removing selection biases. The results indicate
that increases in temperature encourage farmers to adopt
mixed farming and avoid specialized farms such as crop-only

Bangladesh represents a success story
among developing countries. Poverty incidence, which was as
high as 57 percent at the beginning of the 1990s, had
declined to 49 percent in 2000. This trend accelerated
subsequently, reducing the poverty headcount rate to 40
percent in 2005. The primary contributing factor was robust
and stable economic growth along with no worsening of
inequality. Respectable GDP growth that started at the

This publication focuses on public
finance, development economics, and the Chinese economy. The
government will focus on the public good aspects of
education and training-compulsory education and some aspects
of higher education and training. The publication encourages
seven reforms including raising government expenditure on
education to four percent of gross domestic product (GDP),
and ensuring that all children actually receive nine years

This assessment, reflecting
poverty's many dimensions in Mozambique, combines
multiple disciplines and diagnostic tools to explore
poverty. It draws on a combination of approaches and tools
from three separate analytical diagnostics developed by the
World Bank: poverty assessment, country gender assessment,
and country social analysis. It uses monetary, human, and
social indicators and combines quantitative and qualitative

The workshop brings diverse perspectives
from outside the World Bank, providing a forum in which to
exchange ideas and debate in the course of developing the
World Development Report (WDR). Participants at the 2006
Berlin Workshop gathered to discuss challenges and successes
pertaining to agriculture and development. Agriculture is
the major sector contributing to economic development in
many poor countries. Three out of every four poor people in

Irrigation has made a major contribution
to poverty reduction in the past decades, enabling higher
yields and better nutrition. Despite these achievements,
large-scale irrigation schemes have usually yielded low
returns and attracted negative publicity because of their
adverse environmental and social impacts. As a result, the
Bank has largely switched its support for irrigation away
from new construction toward rehabilitation and policy

This study reviews how the integration of environmental concerns into agriculture and forestry is progressing in the countries of Southeastern Europe (SEE) and of Eastern Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia (EECCA) since 2000 and assesses prospects for the future. The present report is a contribution to the environment for Europe process. At the Fifth Ministerial Conference in Kiev in 2003, participants decided to pay greater attention to the needs of the EECCA and adopted an environmental strategy for the sub-region.

Several studies addressing the supply
and demand for food in China suggest that the nation can
largely meet its needs in the coming decades. However,
these studies do not consider the effects of climate change.
This paper examines whether near future expected changes in
climate are likely to alter this picture. The authors
analyze the effect of temperature and precipitation on net
crop revenues using a cross section consisting of both

Opium, Afghanistan's leading
economic activity, lies at the heart of the challenges the
country faces in state building, governance, security, and
development. With their narrow law enforcement focus and
limited recognition of development, security, and political
implications, current global counter-narcotics polices
impose a heavy burden on Afghanistan. This paper first
provides a summary overview of Afghanistan's opium

Income inequality in China has risen
rapidly in the past decades across regions, between rural
and urban sectors, and within provinces. The dynamics of
divergence across these sub-national areas have taken the
form of a "race to the top" - meaning that all
segments of the population, including the poor with low
education in lagging inland rural areas, have experienced
gains in average income. The largest gains have been