Over the past five years in Turkey, the
agricultural and rural sector has seen substantial change in
transfer policies which now place greater emphasis on
improved equity and investment. These have been summarized
in the earlier World Bank "Review of the Impact of the
Reform of Agricultural Sector Subsidization (2004), and
"Policy and Investment Priorities for Agricultural and
Rural Development" (2005). Currently, the structural

This survey report will help the
government of Afghanistan think through its approach to
private sector development. Historically, there has been a
dearth of information and reliable statistics about
Afghanistan's economy. This report reviews the
constraints that firms currently operating in Afghanistan
face and provides a basis for possible policy
recommendations to address these constraints. It is hoped

The aim of this report is to identify a set of concrete steps that the government of Mongolia might take to promote private-sector activity and greater integration with the global economy in a way that leads to job creation, broad-based growth and most importantly, poverty reduction. It does this by combining an assessment of the investment climate faced by firms (through analyses of firm and household surveys and supply chains in selected sectors) with a diagnostic trade integration study. The report is structured as follows.

When designing and implementing a
project in a conflict-affected country, some of the
conflict's more obvious impacts-damage to
infrastructure and energy supplies, are apt to immediately
come to mind. However, based on the experiences with the
Kosovo privatization program, there are additional problems
related to a conflict's aftermath that may be
overlooked during a project's design but which should

This review concludes that for
Togo's urban and peri-urban areas to sustainably grow,
issues of urban governance and development need to be
approached in a comprehensive manner, driven by well -guided
policies developed in partnership with the people to support
Sub-National Government Authorities and Entities(SGAs) in
carrying out their functions efficiently. To meet evolving
challenges of urbanization and decentralization, the

This paper tests the hypothesis that
enterprises may forgo formal finance in lieu of informal
credit by choice. They do so to avoid the additional
regulatory scrutiny and harassment that engaging with the
formal financial sector invites. We test this hypothesis
using enterprise-level data on 3,564 enterprises in 29
countries. In this sample, enterprises finance
approximately 57 percent of their working capital

This report was prepared in close
collaboration with the Bank of Albania. This report focused
on trade, services, and agriculture; however, the limited
scope of their operations still leaves a potentially large
unmet demand for credit in agriculture. This report focuses
on problems related to the operation of Immovable Property
Registry System (IPRS) and other institutions and the
formalization of property rights and inscription of

The high levels of public debt and
persistent fiscal deficits limit Organization of Eastern
Caribbean States (OECS) governments' ability to pursue
counter-cyclical fiscal policies during future economic
downturns, leaving private investment as the key driver of
future growth. This study on private sector financing in the
OECS analyzes the issue of access to finance from three
different angles: the demand side; the supply side; and the

This paper assesses the state of
research and examines priorities for future work in the area
of urbanization and growth. This is done by reviewing and
summarizing the findings of five scoping papers covering the
following topics: urban poverty, the political economy of
urban poverty, urban real estate and housing, urban
infrastructure finance, and external assistance for urban development.

This paper compares and contrasts the
performance of rural and urban manufacturing firms in
Ethiopia to assess the impact of market integration and the
investment climate on firm performance. Rural firms are
shown to operate in isolated markets, have poor access to
infrastructure and a substantial degree of market power,
whereas urban firms operate in better integrated and more
competitive markets, where they have much better access to

Bangladesh has recorded impressive
economic and social gains since the 1990s. Recent growth has
been at levels close to six percent. The country has doubled
per capita growth and taken large strides toward reaching
many Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), ahead of many
comparable countries. Attaining the MDGs calls for
accelerating economic growth to six-seven percent a year.
Accordingly, Bangladesh's Poverty Reduction Strategy

Sri Lanka has embarked on a gradual
transition from a system of directed credit in a highly
segmented market toward an integrated market-driven housing
finance system. This transition has included an increased
role of private universal banks in the immediate term and a
functioning secondary mortgage market in the long term. An
active system of housing finance provides real economic
benefits and positively affects savings, investment, and