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

Afghanistan is one of the poorest and
longest suffering countries among members of the World Bank,
and has been ravaged by chronic conflict and political
instability. Afghanistan's infrastructure has been
destroyed or degraded; its human resource base severely
depleted; and its social capital eroded. Despite existing
public administration structures, the majority of state
institutions are only beginning to function effectively, and

Rwanda's completion, in 2012/13, of
a land tenure regularization program covering the entire
country allows the use of administrative data to describe
initial performance and combine the data with household
surveys to quantify to what extent and why subsequent
transfers remain informal, and how to address this. In
2014/15, annual volumes of registered sales ranged between
5.6 percent for residential land in Kigali and 0.1 percent

This report presents the results of a
novel study on land transparency in Vietnam; a study that
focuses on the actual provision of information related to
land. This study was produced as part of the Vietnam
Transparency Project, an effort to systematically measure
transparency, provide actionable advice on how to improve
transparency, and analyze the causes and effects of
transparency in Vietnam. If a country's political,

On Boxing Day morning, 2004, a 9.3
magnitude earthquake struck the Indian Ocean. The quake
unleashed a blast of energy and created a tsunami three
stories high. The disaster claimed more than 228,000 lives,
affected 2.5 million others and caused close to US $11.4
billion of damage in 14 countries. By far the highest price
was paid by Aceh, where more people died than in all the
other countries combined. In Banda Aceh, the capital of the

Mauritania is a vast country covering
over a million square kilometers, where a relatively small
population of 3.5 million people lives on just one-fifth of
the country’s total area. With extremely advanced
desertification, the country is particularly vulnerable to
the impact of climate change and other external shocks. The
main sources of income in Mauritania are agriculture, which
is either irrigated or rain-fed, and livestock. This is

Land rights for women are important to
women's overall role in the household economy. In most
Europe and Central Asia (ECA) countries, women have equal
rights to land by law, but practice varies widely across the
region. Improving gender outcomes in land administration is
therefore related more to education and the need to change
norms and habits than it is to a specific legislative
problem. Access to gender-disaggregated data and the

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.

While scholars agree on the importance
of land rental markets for structural transformation in
rural areas, evidence on the extent and nature of their
operation, including potential obstacles to their improved
functioning, remains limited. This study uses
household-level data from six countries to start filling
this gap and derive substantive as well as methodological
lessons. The paper finds that rental markets transfer land

Around the world, in both developed and
developing countries, policy makers use a variety of tools
to manage and accommodate urban growth and redevelopment.
Government officials have three main concerns in terms of
land policy: (i) accommodating urban expansion, (ii)
providing infrastructure, and (iii) managing density.
Together, the planning for infrastructure and urban
expansion, land use, and density policies combine to shape

Evidence is mounting that secure
property rights have positive effects for poor people in
general and women in particular. The aim of this report is
to review what is known about women s access to and control
over land and real property in urban settings, identifying
approaches to strengthening property rights that enhance
women s agency, and sharing key lessons. Section two
synthesizes the evidence on urban women s priorities with

Unequal land distribution and the
negative social and economic implications resulting from
such polarization in Colombia have long been of concern to
policymakers. A 1950 World Bank mission identified unequal
land distribution as a key impediment to economic and social
development in the country. Since then, a wide range of
policies has been adopted to deal with this issue and its
consequences. Numerous studies show that the success of