The post-2015 development agenda is being shaped as we speak. The role of identity and identification
and its importance to development outcomes places it within the new Sustainable Development
Goals (SDG) agenda—specifically as one of the proposed SDG targets (#16.9), but also as a key enabler
of the efficacy of many other SDG targets. Although there is no one model for providing legal
identity, this SDG would urge states to ensure that all have free or low-cost access to widely accepted,

For more than a decade, Africa has enjoyed a mineral boom. is the growth mostly happening in isolated places, sectors and periods? The approach adopted in this study is two-pronged. First, through case studies, including the results of fieldwork, mining’s impacts are examined in a country-specific context for each of three countries, Ghana, Mali, and Tanzania; and second, a statistical analysis is used to test whether the indicators of welfare improve with proximity to a mine.

Natural resources offer opportunities,
but also bring challenges. They have generally been linked
to a series of negative outcomes like economic decline,
corruption, and conflict. Oil and minerals reserves, in
particular, are often very spatially concentrated, and their
discovery becomes a potential source of conflict between the
governments, the people of the producing areas, and those of
the rest of the country. But can this increased risk of

This report focuses on two competing forces: the Soviet industrial legacy and

This paper reviews the performance of
the parastatal sector, with a specific focus on four main
parastatals: the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority
(ZESA); the Zimbabwe Water Authority (ZINWA); the National
Oil Company of Zimbabwe (NOCZIM); and the Grain Marketing
Board (GMB). These parastatals are selected on the basis of
their quasi-fiscal dependency and strategic importance to

As part of a national experiment, in
2008 Chengdu prefecture implemented ambitious property
rights reforms, including complete registration of all land
together with measures to ease transferability and eliminate
labor market restrictions. This study uses a discontinuity
design with spatial fixed effects to compare 529 villages
just inside and outside the prefecture’s border. The results
suggest that the reforms increased tenure security, aligned

Donors could assist in clarifying the
role, building the capacity, and potentially helping to
secure funding of key disaster risk management organizations
in Ghana. Engagement in Ghana to develop private sector
property catastrophe risk and agriculture insurance should
be seen as a medium term engagement. Banking penetration is
low, as is insurance and micro-insurance penetration, even
when compared to regional countries. That said, Ghana has

Migration is transforming rural
economies, landscapes, and potentially, gender relations.
Migration is one of the drivers of the so-called
feminization of agriculture in Latin America. This
feminization has relevance for everyone given agriculture’s
role in regional food security, national shared prosperity,
and household resilience to shocks. The objective of this
study is to investigate the feminization of agriculture as

This paper is one of a series aimed at
deepening the World Bank’s capacity to follow through on
commitments made in response to the World Development Report
(WDR) 2011, which gave renewed prominence to the nexus
between conflict, security, and development. Nigeria is a
remarkable illustration of how deeply intractable the cycle
of poverty, conflict, and fragility can become when tied to
the ferocious battles associated with the political economy

Public sector management (PSM) reform is concerned with improving public sector results by changing
the way governments work. It is a challenging reform area in which to offer assistance. Sustainable institutional
change often requires that thousands of public agents alter their behavior, and political incentives may be at odds
with improving public sector performance. “What works” in PSM reform is highly context-dependent and
explicit evidence remains limited.
The Bank’s Approach to PSM for 2011-2020 emphasizes that public sector reform is a pragmatic

This report examines the Doing Business
database for 6 cities in Pakistan in order to assess how
cities in the Punjab – Lahore, Faisalabad and Sialkot, may
hypothetically improve their global rankings, as defined by
the Doing Business methodology, by adopting the policies,
regulations and practices of other cities in Pakistan. The
report attempts to distinguish between those areas which are
related to policies and regulations from those which are

The Country Policy and Institutional
Assessment (CPIA) Africa report describes the progress
African countries are making on strengthening the quality of
their policies and institutions. Some of the results from
this report include: The overall quality of policies and
institutions in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa was
unchanged in 2014, but there was much variation in
performance across countries. More than half the countries