Urban growth throughout the developing
world has created a challenge for financing infrastructure.
Investment in infrastructure is needed to provide basic
services for newly developed parts of urban areas. It is
needed to meet the demand for a safer and more reliable
water supply, higher standards for the removal and treatment
of wastewater and solid waste, and the transportation
requirements of a population whose expectations of mobility

What are the socioeconomic impacts of
resource abundance? Are these effects different at the
national and local levels? How could resource booms benefit
(or harm) local communities? This paper reviews a vast
literature examining these questions, with an emphasis on
empirical works. First, the evidence and theoretical
arguments behind the so-called resource curse, and other
impacts at the country level, are reviewed. This

This book examines issues at the
forefront of the debate on land law reform, pays particular
attention to how reform options affect the poor and
disadvantaged, and recommends strategies for alleviating
poverty more effectively through land law reform. It reviews
the role of the World Bank in land law reform, examining
issues of process as well as substance. It also identifies
key challenges and directions, and stresses the need to

Land rights and the systems that
administer them can vary significantly across the world and
within countries (World Bank 2003). For a number of reasons,
land rights may be unclear or insecure. Securing land rights
plays an important role in driving economic growth and
poverty reduction. In recent years there has been increasing
awareness of the relevance of land tenure issues to food
security, climate change, rapid urbanization, informality,

This is covers land administration and
reform in Sub-Saharan Africa, and is highly relevant to all
developing countries around the world. It provides simple
practical steps to turn the hugely controversial subject of
"land grabs" into a development opportunity by
improving land governance to reduce the risks of
dispossessing poor landholders while ensuring mutually
beneficial investors' deals. This book shows how Sub

Cities emerge from the spatial
concentration of people and economic activities. But spatial
concentration is not enough; the economic viability of
cities depends on people, ideas, and goods to move rapidly
across the urban area. This constant movement within dense
cities creates wealth but also various degrees of
unpleasantness and misery that economists call negative
externalities, such as congestion, pollution, and

This study assesses the alignment of
land use, land tenure, and land market outcomes in El
Salvador with public policy aspirations in recent decades
for efficient, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable
development in both urban and rural spaces. In doing so the
study indirectly gauges the effectiveness of land sector
institutions in facilitating such developmental outcomes in
agricultural production, urbanization, and forest

Land and real estate reforms have not
been effective at achieving their objectives, in part
because of how they have been designed and implemented. To
be successful, reforms must become comprehensive in design,
argue the authors, although implementation may be phased
over time and take local conditions into account. Reform
must include three elements: 1) Institutional reforms that
better define property rights, reduce information asymmetry,

Albania's radical farmland
distribution is credited with averting an economic crisis
and social unrest during the transition. But many believe it
led to a holding structure too fragmented to be efficient,
and that public efforts to consolidate plots are needed to
lay the foundation for greater rural productivity. This
paper uses farm-level data from the 2005 Albania Living
Standards Measurement Survey to explore this quantitatively.

The City of Ulaanbaatar (UB) is
undergoing a historic transformation toward market-driven
urban development. This growth remains strongly influenced
by city policy decisions that affect the supply and location
of land for public and private uses. Private investment is
concentrated in well-serviced land located in the central
portion of the city and along major transportation
corridors, which represent a small part of the total built

The Land-Based Poverty Alleviation
Project of Brazil is addressing one of the major factors
underlying poverty in the countryside: inadequate access to
land by the rural poor. Preceded by two highly successful
Bank-financed pilots, the project demonstrates the
large-scale viability of a community-based approach to land
reform. In the project beneficiary groups negotiate directly
with willing sellers for the purchase of suitable

Brazil has developed a community-led,
market-based approach to land reform in which poor rural
laborers and farmers, either landless or with insufficient
land for subsistence, form beneficiary associations through
which to obtain financing to buy agricultural properties,
for which they negotiate directly with willing sellers. The
financing package includes complementary funds for
investments to enhance land productivity (water,