At the request of the World Bank's
Executive Board, the Bank's Operations Evaluation
Department (OED) has been conducting an evaluation of the
Bank's involvement in global programs. The Phase 1
Report titled The World Bank's Approach to Global
Programs focused on the strategic and programmatic
management of the Bank's global portfolio of 70
programs in five Bank Networks (a cluster of closely related

Economic shocks at birth have lasting
effects on children's health several years after the
shock. The authors calculate height for age z-scores for
children under age five using data from a Rwandan nationally
representative household survey conducted in 1992. They
exploit district and time variation in crop failure and
civil conflict to measure the impact of exogenous shocks
that children experience at birth on their height several

The Andean region of Puno, known as the
altiplano, is located at 3,830 meters above sea level. The
terrain is prone to flooding, and thus difficult to
cultivate. In order to deal with this situation, Andean
indigenous populations displaced huge amounts of soil in
order to create raised fields that were better adapted to
agricultural use. Raised fields resolved many of the
problems that affect agriculture at high altitude. The

The objective of this report is to
identify ways of enhancing competitiveness through sector
reforms in Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mali (the
Cotton-4). The report promotes best practices to manage cost
and define sales strategies so as to enhance the
contribution of the cotton sector to shared growth and
lessen the risk of contingent liabilities borne by the
countries. Areas of improvement, investigated in the report,

This report contends that the key to unleashing the North West Frontier Province's possibilities and to improving the lives of its citizens is strengthening the governance and policy environment in the province for both the private and the public sectors, and investing in the provinces' most valuable resource - its people. Reforms and efforts in the past few years have already started to translate into higher growth, improved incomes, and better living conditions for the citizens of the NWFP.

Since the 1980s and early 1990s, the
World Bank has been supporting projects that involve
communities own development. This has been largely
manifested in the design and implementation of
community-based development (CBD) and community-driven
development (CDD) initiatives, with the latter gaining
increasing momentum in recent years. The purpose of this
study was to assess the development effectiveness of the

This report shows that after a decade of
moderate growth but little or no long term change in rural
poverty in Pakistan, agricultural output, rural incomes,
rural poverty and social welfare indicators all showed
marked improvements between 2001-02 and 2004-05. However,
longer term trends suggest there is little reason for
complacency. The agricultural GDP per capita growth rate
(1999- 2000 to 2004-05) was only 0.3 percent per year; rural

The purpose of this Transport Sector
Note (TSN) is to assist the Palestinian Authority (PA) in
developing a strategy for the sector that can aid in
addressing the immediate constraints and transport issues in
support of the PA's effort to revive the national
economy, improve mobility and reduce poverty. The TSN also
aims to assist the responsible sector ministries prepare a
coherent strategic framework and program for the sector.

Using recent advances in modeling
climate-related risks and adjusting state of the art
catastrophic risk modeling techniques to drought, the study
conducts an innovative long-term assessment of drought risks
in Andhra Pradesh, India, and suggests strategies to reduce
their impact, under several economic, drought management and
climate change scenarios. The analysis deepens an
understanding of climate risk adaptation strategies,

Policies and external shocks affecting agriculture, the main source of income for rural households, can be expected to have a significant impact on poverty. The authors study the case of Uganda. Throughout the 1990s, more than 90 percent of its poor lived in rural areas and, during the same period, large international price fluctuations as well as an extensive domestic deregulation affected the coffee sector, its main source of export revenues.

In this issue: making finance work for
Africa; focus on water in the Middle East: how to manage
scarcity; fungibility, and the apos;flypaper effectapos; of
aid; do girls gain from migration-induced male absence? The
distributional effects of World Trade Organization (WTO)
agricultural reforms in rich and poor countries;
clientelism, credibility, and policy choices of young
democracies; and entry regulation as a barrier to entrepreneurship.

This report presents an update on the
economic challenges facing Ethiopia with a focus on the
shared goal of accelerating equitable growth. The starting
point is the Government's own Plan for Accelerated and
Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP), which is in
the process of finalization, and is designed to cover the
period 2005-2010. This report proposes that the growth
strategy should more explicitly adopt a