Experience has shown that money
compensation payments to individual citizens are ineffective
when used alone as a means to achieve the Bank's aims
and World Bank for evidence on the Bank's experience].
Instead, the Bank's advice is that compensation
payments should be a part of a wider, coordinated package of
development assistance. It is not the purpose of this Note
to describe how such a package should be developed, or

In the 1980s the Thai government tried to legalize squatters by issuing special titles that restricted the sale and rental of the land. Using data from 2,874 farming households collected in 1997, the author finds that in places where these government titles where issued, leased plots are more likely to be titled than those that are self-cultivated. For these areas, he uses a model to estimate a 6 percent risk premium in the rental rate for untitled plots.

To implement the vision of fostering
economic development, social equity, and a transparent and
effective government, the Government of Liberia has outlined
key transitions that need to be accomplished. These include
the development of infrastructure (roads, electricity),
schools, job creation and transition from war, civil
conflict and social polarization to a well functioning
society in which economic opportunities are fostered and

Land reform can broadly be divided into
land tenure reform-the establishment of secure and
formalized property rights in land-and land
redistribution-the transfer of land from large to small
farmers. The paper is therefore divided into two chapters.
The first chapter gives a short narrative of some of the key
land tenure and land policy issues. While these issues
remain politically sensitive, there is a solid consensus

This document builds upon several recent
studies and reports carried out in the 2006-2007 period. The
first note, entitled analysis of housing supply mechanisms
(World Bank), analyzes the situation of housing supply in
urban areas in Egypt, including the study of existing formal
and informal mechanisms for the delivery of urban housing,
the institutions responsible for supply and regulation, the
characteristics of the formal and informal stock, and the

The authors compare the welfare effects of in situ slum upgrading programs with programs that provide slum dwellers with better housing in a new location. Evaluating the welfare effects of slum upgrading and resettlement programs requires estimating models of residential location choice, in which households trade off commuting costs against the cost and attributes of the housing they consume, including neighborhood attributes. The authors accomplish this using data for 5,000 households in Mumbai, a city in which 40 percent of the population live in slums.

Although early attempts at land titling
in Africa were often unsuccessful, the need to secure rights
in view of increased demand for land, options for
registration of a continuum of individual or communal rights
under new laws, and the scope for reducing costs by
combining information technology with participatory methods
have led to renewed interest. This paper uses a
difference-in-difference approach to assess economic impacts

Although increased global demand for
land has led to renewed interest in African land tenure, few
models to address these issues quickly and at the required
scale have been identified or evaluated. The case of
Rwanda's nation-wide and relatively low-cost land
tenure regularization program is thus of great interest.
This paper evaluates the short-term impact (some 2.5 years
after completion) of the pilots undertaken to fine-tune the

Today, 370 million people live in cities
in earthquake prone areas and 310 million in cities with
high probability of tropical cyclones. By 2050, these
numbers are likely to more than double. Mortality risk
therefore is highly concentrated in many of the world s
cities and economic risk even more so. This paper discusses
what sets hazard risk in urban areas apart, provides
estimates of valuation of hazard risk, and discusses

Wastewater use in agriculture is a
growing practice worldwide. Drivers include increasing water
stress, in part due to climate change; increasing
urbanization and growing wastewater flows; and more urban
households engaged in agricultural activities. The problem
with this trend is that in low-income countries, but also in
many middle-income countries, it either involves the direct
use of untreated wastewater or the indirect use of polluted

The purpose of this guidance note is to
bridge precisely identify how to implement World Bank
resettlement policies in the context of infrastructure
projects affecting South Asian largest cities, with a focus
on the impacts on poor areas and slums. The guidance note is
intended as a tool to help decision makers in Government
agencies and in the Bank, particularly in respect of the
main aspects: 1) methods to assess and evaluate resettlement

Although official warfare in the Republic of Congo stopped more than eight years ago, the pool region has continued to feel the collateral effects of war until now at a scale largely ignored by the general public. The pool region is where the Ninjas, a group of local militias, originated during the civil strife and retreated to afterwards. Peace and recovery did not gain traction in the area until 2010/11.