Critical choices must now be made if
growth is to be sustained. Significant potential exists for
future growth, but bringing out this potential poses a major
challenge for government policy. Agricultural strategy must
shift its focus towards support for continuous productivity
growth by peasant farms in a conducive marketing
environment. Key priorities include completion of land
reforms (especially in the North); fundamental restructuring

States can do much to tap
community-level energies, and resources for development, if
they seek to interact more synergistically with local
communities. The broader spin-off is creating a
developmental society, and polity. Using case studies from
Asia and Latin America, the authors show how: 1) State
efforts to bring about land reform, tenancy reform, and
expanding non-crop sources of income, can broaden the

Food policy often depends on markets and
markets depend on institutions. But how good do institutions
have to be before reforms can be launched? Relying on well
timed surveys of agricultural prices and a joint study by
the Government of Bulgaria and the World Bank on
agricultural market institutions, this paper presents
evidence that performance in food markets improved following
significant policy reforms in Bulgaria, although public

This paper addresses labor markets in
Haiti, including farm and nonfarm employment and income
generation. The analyses are based on the first Living
Conditions Survey of 7,186 households covering the whole
country and representative at the regional level. The
findings suggest that four key determinants of employment
and productivity in nonfarm activities are education,
gender, location, and migration status. This is emphasized

Throughout the 20th century, the debate on women's rights and their role in Afghan society has been closely interlinked with the national destiny. Women not only carry the burden of symbolizing the honor of the family, but often are seen as embodying the national honor as well. Gender has thus been one of the most politicized issues in Afghanistan over the past 100 years, and attempts at reform have been denounced by opponents as un-Islamic and a challenge to the sanctity of the faith and family.

This Poverty report is aimed at improving the understanding of poverty in Ukraine, and providing linkages between growth, the evolution of economic sectors, and poverty. The main findings can be summed up as follows: An absolute poverty line and a revised consumption aggregate -- jointly developed with Ukraine experts -- indicate that around 19 percent of the population lived in poverty by 2003. While in 1999 Ukraine had a poverty incidence higher than Poland, Russia, Lithuania, or Bulgaria, by 2003 it was the lowest compared with these countries.

This report examines the implications of
spatial heterogeneity - the uneven distribution of poverty,
growth, and environmental assets - for policy. Its goal is
to inform a wide set of policies that are either explicitly
spatially targeted or may have unanticipated spatial
implications. These include poverty alleviation policies
targeted on poor municipios; demand-driven poverty
alleviation policies; territorial development policies aimed

The World Bank's revised forest
policy came into being in 2002 and covers all types of
forests. It has the following key objectives: (i) harnessing
the potential of forests to reduce poverty in a sustainable
manner; (ii) integrating forests effectively into
sustainable development; and (iii) protecting vital local
and global environmental services and values. The policy
enables the bank to fully engage in forestry throughout the

This regional study encompasses three
Central American countries: Nicaragua, Guatemala, and
Honduras. The focus of this report is Honduras. The
objective of the study is to understand how broad-based
economic growth can be stimulated and sustained in rural
Central America. The study identifies "drivers" of
sustainable rural growth and poverty reduction. Drivers are
defined as the assets and combinations of assets needed by

This report for Iraq - country water
resources assistance strategy (CWRAS) addresses these
objectives in two parts. The first part, which is largely
descriptive, reviews existing conditions and summarizes
Iraq's considerable accomplishments over the past
decades in developing and managing water resources. The
second part investigates challenges and priorities-how to
balance the needs of short-term reconstruction and the

This Sourcebook deals with social
analysis in policy reform, encompassing the transition from
gaining a better understanding of the distributional impacts
of proposed or continuing reform to influencing a more
informed and locally embedded process of policy review and
design. In a generic sense, the term "social
analysis" encompasses institutional, political, and
social analyses. These three overlapping areas, derived from

This book is designed to contribute to
the government's thinking on how best to translate
broad MKUKUTA (the government of Tanzania's National
Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty) policy
objectives into practical tactics and programs well suited
to Tanzania's economic priorities and to the removal of
key institutional and infrastructure bottlenecks. The book
aims to respond to three fundamental questions: (a) what