This report highlights recent economic
updates in Bangladesh as of April 2015. Economic growth in
Bangladesh was gaining momentum in the first half of FY15.
Capacity utilization improved and investments were showing
some signs of recovery. This growth was also job-friendly.
The 12-monthly-moving average inflation decelerated from 7.6
percent in February 2014 to 6.8 percent in February 2015.
The resilience of the Bangladesh economy continues to be

Comprehensive details about Mizoram state and its environmental and
social sensitivities. Mizoram Investment Plan under NERPSIP (GoI & World Bank Funding).

The contribution of women to labor in
African agriculture is regularly quoted in the range of 60
to 80 percent. Using individual-disaggregated, plot-level
labor input data from nationally representative household
surveys across six Sub-Saharan African countries, this study
estimates the average female labor share in crop production
at 40 percent. It is slightly above 50 percent in Malawi,
Tanzania, and Uganda, and substantially lower in Nigeria (37

The report Africa Can Help Feed Africa
(World Bank 2012) showed that increasing food staples1
supply can be met by better connecting African markets to
each other. That report called for a stronger focus on
removing trade barriers and building on the forces of
regional integration. This report builds on the lessons of
Africa Can Help Feed Africa by looking into the specific
circum¬stances met in West Africa, home to one-third of the

This report is the result of a World
Bank mission that visited Paraguay in June 2013 at the
request of the Government of Paraguay. The mission’s
objective was to identify, quantify, and prioritize
agriculture risks that determine the volatility of
agriculture gross domestic product (GDP), based on a
methodology to assess sector risks developed by the World
Bank. The methodology stipulates a two-phase process. The

This report seeks to understand the
successes, challenges and opportunities of Cambodia’s
agricultural transformation over the past decade to derive
lessons and insights on how to maintain future agricultural
growth, and particularly on the government’s role in
facilitating it. It is prepared per the request of the
Supreme National Economic Council and the Ministry of
Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries and is based on the

Drawing on international trade data,
this paper uses the product space approach to analyze
changes in Morocco’s goods exports in 1990–2010 and future
export priorities. The level of Morocco’s gross domestic
product and its moderate growth match the predictions of
product space analysis, informed by changes in the income
potential of Morocco’s export basket, reflecting relatively
strong capabilities (a high density) in products with

Self-help groups (SHGs) are the most
common form of microfinance in India. The authors provide
evidence that SHGs, composed of women only, undertake
collective actions for the provision of public goods within
village communities. Using a theoretical model, this paper
shows that an elected official, whose aim is to maximize
re-election chances, exerts higher effort in providing
public goods when private citizens undertake collective

This paper decomposes the gender gap in
pay in the Russian Federation along the earnings
distribution for the period 1996–2011. The analysis uses a
reweighted, recentered influence function decomposition that
allows estimating the contribution of each covariate on the
wage structure and composition effects along the earnings
distribution. The paper finds that women are in flat career
paths compared with men; the importance of observable

Renato and Hecinta are raising six young
children in a rural area of Mozambique’s northern Nampula
Province. On just half a hectare, they grow rice, maize,
beans, cashew, peanuts, cabbage, and tomatoes, selling what
they can and eating the rest. But, like many of the 475
million smallholder household’s worldwide, agricultural
production is just one of their many income-generating
activities. They balance several sources of income, within

Climate change is a critical issue
facing the countries of the Nile basin. While individual
weather events are difficult to attribute to climate change,
their sum is already having adverse effects on socioeconomic
conditions across the region. While climate change was not
an overt focus of the Nile basin initiative’s (NBI’s)
mandate when it was launched in 1999, it has emerged as a
key challenge for countries of the Nile to take seriously.

Watershed management has come to be
recognized as a critical issue in the Nile Basin. Upstream
land use can cause degradation and soil erosion, resulting
in lower agricultural yields locally and causing
sedimentation downstream. The increased sediment load causes
economic problems by reducing water quality, and irrigation
and hydropower potential, as well as increasing flooding.
This note shows how, through Basin-wide cooperation, the