Despite the popularity and unique nature
of women's self-help groups in India, evidence of their
economic impacts is scant. Based on two rounds of a 2,400
household panel, the authors use double differences,
propensity score matching, and pipeline comparison to assess
economic impacts of longer (2.5-3 years) exposure of a
program that promoted and strengthened self-help programs in
Andhra Pradesh in India. The analysis finds that longer

Opium, Afghanistan's leading
economic activity, lies at the heart of the challenges the
country faces in state building, governance, security, and
development. With their narrow law enforcement focus and
limited recognition of development, security, and political
implications, current global counter-narcotics polices
impose a heavy burden on Afghanistan. This paper first
provides a summary overview of Afghanistan's opium

Danang City is the capital and economic
hub of the central region of Vietnam. As in all of the major
urban centers of the country, Danang is currently
experiencing rapid urbanization fueled by consistent
economic growth and the resultant steady increase in
population, much through rural-urban migration. For this
reason, central and city government has been increasingly
concerned with the urban development and housing sectors.

This assessment, reflecting
poverty's many dimensions in Mozambique, combines
multiple disciplines and diagnostic tools to explore
poverty. It draws on a combination of approaches and tools
from three separate analytical diagnostics developed by the
World Bank: poverty assessment, country gender assessment,
and country social analysis. It uses monetary, human, and
social indicators and combines quantitative and qualitative

This report reviews Community Driven
Development (CDD) projects in Lao People's Democratic
Republic (PDR) to determine their effectiveness in
channeling resources to communities for poverty reduction.
The study examines three CDD projects in depth: the Poverty
Reduction Fund, the Village Investment for the Poor (both
supported by the World Bank), and the Government-financed
Village Development Fund. Through close analysis of these

This paper provides the results of an
international survey of practitioners with experience in
facilitating the participation of African smallholder
farmers in supply chains for higher-value and/or
differentiated agricultural products. It explores their
perceptions about the constraints inhibiting and the impacts
associated with this supply chain participation. It also
examines their perceptions about the factors affecting the

The workshop brings diverse perspectives
from outside the World Bank, providing a forum in which to
exchange ideas and debate in the course of developing the
World Development Report (WDR). Participants at the 2006
Berlin Workshop gathered to discuss challenges and successes
pertaining to agriculture and development. Agriculture is
the major sector contributing to economic development in
many poor countries. Three out of every four poor people in

Agricultural and Rural Development (ARD)
is a fundamental component of Ethiopia's economic
growth and poverty reduction strategy. The agricultural
development strategy under Agriculture Development Led
Industrialization (ADLI) and Sustainable Development and
Poverty Reduction Program (SDPRP) focused on enhancing the
productive capacity of smallholder farmers, promoting crop
diversification, shifting to a market based system, ensuring

This paper uses data from the 61st Round
of the National Sample Survey to understand the employment
outcomes of Dalit and Muslim men in India. It uses a
conceptual framework developed for the US labor market that
states that ethnic minorities skirt discrimination in the
primary labor market to build successful self-employed
ventures in the form of ethnic enclaves or ethnic labor
markets. The paper uses entry into self-employment for

Irrigation has made a major contribution
to poverty reduction in the past decades, enabling higher
yields and better nutrition. Despite these achievements,
large-scale irrigation schemes have usually yielded low
returns and attracted negative publicity because of their
adverse environmental and social impacts. As a result, the
Bank has largely switched its support for irrigation away
from new construction toward rehabilitation and policy

Balochistan offers some of the best
assets for development. Balochistan is generously bestowed
with natural and locational resources. It possesses the
largest land area of any province of Pakistan, proving vast
rangeland for goats, sheep, buffaloes, cattle, camels and
other livestock. Its southern border makes up about two
thirds of the national coastline, giving access to a large
pool of fishery resources. As a frontier province, it is

This study estimates the vulnerability
of Latin American agriculture to climate change using a
Ricardian analysis of both land values and net revenues.
Examining a sample of over 2,500 farms in seven countries,
the results indicate both land value and net revenue are
sensitive to climate. Both small farms and large farms have
a hill-shaped relationship with temperature. Estimating
separate regressions for dryland and irrigated farms reveals