Poverty and economic stagnation
characterize most rural areas in Peru. National growth has
been slow and uneven since the mid-1970s, benefiting urban
areas rather than rural ones. Between 1985 and 2000, the
number of poor people increased by 71 percent. The incidence
of poverty (67 percent) and extreme poverty (40 percent) is
highest in rural areas, reaching 73 percent (poverty) and 41
percent (extreme poverty) in the sierra. This means that 4.2

The proliferation of urban slums is due
in large part to obsolete regulatory, legal and
institutional frameworks at the local level governing land
use, development standards, land registration and titling.
These regulations are often exclusionary, insisting on
development norms and standards that are outside the realm
of the poor to pay and subdivision procedures are often over
burdensome, leading to informal land subdivision, thus

The report identifies the challenges,
and opportunities the forestry sector faces in Turkey, where
twenty five percent of the country's land area is
covered by forests, with significant economic,
environmental, and cultural functions. The challenges
identified in the review include poverty, land tenure, the
need to establish multi-purpose, participatory forest
management planning, and, to control soil erosion in

This staff sector assessment note
accompanies the recently completed national environmental
action plan for sustainable development (NEAP-SD), which, as
an output of the Industrial Pollution Control Project in
Algeria, focused on charting a new course for environmental
management in the country, based on an objective assessment
of past policy, and institutional failures, on a new
consensus on the need for mainstreaming the environment into

This report aims to analyze key aspects
of the low-income housing sector in Brazil, and to provide
an analytical framework for reviewing alternatives to
addressing the lack of adequate formal housing and urban
services for the poor. It addresses four fundamental
questions for policymakers in the housing sector in Brazil:
First, should the government be involved in policy
interventions in the low-income segment of the housing

This report analyzes the experience
of Mauritania with the Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS)
process. The focus of the report is on evaluating the
performance of the World Bank in supporting the PRSP
initiative, not on appraising the authorities policies. The
report covers the formulation and implementation of the PRSP
and encompasses the two PRSP progress reports which have
been completed since the initiative was launched in

This article uses survey data from
Ecuador to examine the effects of women's employment on
the allocation of paid and unpaid labor within the
household. The reader compares a region with high demand for
female labor with a similar region in which demand for
female labor is low. The comparison suggests that market
labor opportunities for women have no effect on women's
total time in labor but increase men's time in unpaid

The Sustainable and Participatory Energy
Management project - PROGEDE was implemented by the
government between 1997 and 2004. From project preparation
to supervision the World Bank worked in close collaboration
with Dutch Co-operation (DGIS). At the time of project
preparation, forest-based traditional fuels (firewood and
charcoal), mainly used for household cooking purposes,
represented 53 percent of Senegal's final energy

This paper analyzes the available
literature about the effects of structural adjustment
programs (SAPs) on the environment and the convincing
evidence for their success or failure. The studies covered
refer to the SAPs by the World Bank as well as to general
government programs that have similar policy implications.
SAPs are designed to reform economies to become more
liberalized and export-oriented while reducing the role of

During the 1970s and 1980s in Tanzania,
there was a widespread perception, though a somewhat narrow,
and inaccurate one, that high and accelerating rates of
deforestation in some areas, was primarily being driven by
demand for woodfuel, and construction timber. In order to
take a more comprehensive, and strategic view of the sector,
the government launched the Tanzania Forestry Action Plan,
which covered the period 1990/91-2007/08. The Bank-assisted

India's environmental problems
are deep-rooted and severe. Estimates of annual
environmental damage range from 4.5 percent to 8 percent of
gross domestic product (GDP), in line with annual economic
growth. Since 1990 the World Bank has lent India 1.94
billion dollars for 19 projects to mitigate environmental
damage and another 97 million dollars was granted under
global environmental facility (GEF) and Montreal protocol

The largest hydrographic basin in the
world, the Amazon is the source of 20 percent of all the
fresh water on the planet. The Basin covers some 600 million
hectares in nine countries, over half of which are located
within Brazil's national boundaries. A striking
characteristic of the Amazon region is its tremendous
biodiversity, which includes an estimated 50,000 species of
plants, 3,000 species of fish and over 400 known species of