This paper focuses on several
interrelated key questions on the geography of development.
Although we herald cities with their industrial bases as
'engines of growth,' does industrialization in
fact drive urbanization?1 What economic activities do cities
of different sizes undertake? Does this change as countries
develop? If so, what are the policy implications? Do
development policies have a big-city bias? If so, what does

The purpose of this report is to assess
the climate change impacts on water resources in Romania
from an integrated, multi-sectoral perspective, and to
recommend priority actions for addressing the identified
risks and opportunities. The analysis is presented from an
integrated water resources perspective, thereby including
all pertinent water-related sectors, viz. municipal water
supply and sanitation, industrial water supply, agriculture,

Agriculture has been a mainstay of the
Cambodian economy. It has seen significant growth throughout
the 2000s and showed a significant resilience against
external shocks during the 2008-09 economic and financial
crises. Agribusiness enterprises do not operate in isolation
from the rest of the economy. The state of production of
agricultural raw materials, the state of the financial
sector, and the nature of the financial sector's

Over the seven years from 2004 through
2011, Cambodian economic growth was tremendous, ranking amid
the best in the world. Moreover, household consumption
increased by nearly 40 percent. And this growth was
pro-poor, not only reducing inequality, but also
proportionally boosting poor people's consumption
further and faster than that of the non-poor. As a result,
the poverty rate dropped from 52.2 to 20.5 percent,

In many Pacific island countries,
meeting non-food basic needs is a growing challenge and
further complicated by substantial economic and
environmental risks. Hardship and vulnerability are
increasingly prominent concerns in Pacific island countries,
but the knowledge base to guide policymaking is limited.
Family and community networks are central to life in most
Pacific island countries, providing critical support to

The Multi Donor Fund for Aceh and Nias
(MDF) and the Java Reconstruction Fund (JRF) have played
significant roles in the remarkable recovery of Aceh, Nias
and Java, following some of the worst disasters in Indonesia
in recent years. The MDF and the JRF, which is patterned
after it, are each considered a highly successful model for
post-disaster reconstruction. This paper presents lessons
from the MDF and JRF's efforts to facilitate

Indonesia's Program Nasional
Pemberdayaan Masyarakat (PNPM) is the largest Community
Driven Development (CDD) program in the world covering all
urban wards (PNPM-Urban) and rural villages (PNPM-Rural) in
Indonesia. This policy note summarizes a comprehensive
process evaluation of the PNPM-Urban program which has been
carried by the Research and Development (RAND) corporation
in collaboration with survey meter, as well as a rapid

This paper quantifies the contributions
to distributional changes observed in Pakistan over the last
decade. In contrast to methods that focus on aggregate
summary statistics, the method adopted in this paper
generates entire counterfactual distributions to account for
the contributions of demographics, labor and non-labor
incomes in explaining poverty reduction. The results show
that the most important contributor was the growth in

Indian remains one of the countries
wherein a lot of efforts are still required to eliminate the
practice of open defecation. In rural areas, open defecation
though reduced in scale continues to be a socially and
culturally accepted traditional behavior largely. Low
awareness of the potential health and economic benefits of
better sanitation and hygiene practices, perception of high
costs of having a toilet, the perceived convenience of open

The African Ministers' Council on
Water (AMCOW) commissioned the production of a second round
of Country Status Overviews (CSOs2) to better understands
what underpins progress in water supply and sanitation and
what its member governments can do to accelerate that
progress across countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). AMCOW
delegated this task to the World Bank's Water and
Sanitation Program and the African Development Bank (AfDB),

The situation within the water supply
and sanitation (WSS) sector in Mauritania is somewhat
contradictory: in spite of the weakness of the institutions
in charge of the sector and the lack of financing for
sanitation and, more recently, for the rural water supply
(RWS) subsector, significant improvements have been made in
the access rates since 1990. The institutional reform of the
RWS subsector, notably marked by the implementation of a

Sana'a is located in an upland
basin at an altitude of 2300 meters within a mountainous and
semi-arid region of Yemen. Because of its high altitude, the
city enjoys a moderate climate year around. The main rainy
season is in summer. The nearest port is Hodeidah, roughly
250 kilometers away. Bound by mountains and steep slopes to
the east and west, the city has few options but to expand
primarily along its north and south axes within its basin.