Rapid urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa
places immense pressure on urban services to meet the needs
of the burgeoning urban population. Although several
country- or city-level reports offer insight into the
housing challenges of specific places, little is known about
regional patterns affecting housing markets. This lack of
clear knowledge on the relative importance of the factors
influencing households' housing demand in countries in

This study uses household models based
on detailed expenditure and agricultural production data
from 31 developing countries to assess the impacts of
changes in global food prices on poverty in individual
countries and for the world as a whole. The analysis finds
that food price increases unrelated to productivity changes
in developing countries raise poverty in the short run in
all but a few countries with broadly-distributed

This report provides an analysis of the
spatial planning system in Romania and suggests ways in
which it can be improved. Romania has recently experienced a
proliferation of plans, strategies, and policies developed
at all administrative levels. Adding to this, the analysis
of territorial and urban development in Romania reveals
important dynamics and challenges, such as uncontrolled
expansion of built perimeters, increased pressures on

Across the world, the housing sector
plays a key role in local and national economies, and
expanding access to housing can encourage more equitably
shared economic growth. This report surveys current policy
interventions designed to encourage affordable housing in
East Asia and the Pacific (EAP). The purpose of this report
is to provide a general overview of the recent trends in
urbanization and development in EAP and to consider

This paper seeks to provide evidence on
the extent of household vulnerability to exogenous economic
shocks in the Pacific region and consider policy options
that help to manage this risk. Characteristics of the region
such as remoteness, small size, dispersion, and urbanizing
populations lead to pronounced vulnerabilities. The paper
presents macroeconomic and distributional analysis and
complements it with results of a micro-simulation model

The Government of Sierra Leone (GosL)
and the World Bank (WB) have agreed upon the design and
implementation of a growth poles program (GPP) in support of
the agenda for prosperity (A4P), the GoSL's third
poverty reduction strategy paper (PRSPIII). With support
from the European Union competitive industries and
innovation practice trust fund, the WB has been undertaking
a series of scoping and diagnostic analyses on the GPP since

The objective of this report is to
examine the linkages between rural economic activity, food
insecurity and poverty in Haiti as a means of determining
the barriers to rural development. The analysis draws on a
newly available set of house-hold level living standards
measurement data collected in 2012 (ECVMAS). About 70.7
percent of all rural households are poor, and education
levels are low with an average of 2.8 years of education for

This report identifies the key drivers
of rapid poverty reduction in Bhutan over the recent years,
explaining why some dzongkhags are stuck in poverty or
reducing poverty is not significant while others prospered,
and whether female headed households have a harder time
reducing poverty. The exercise draws mainly on data from the
two rounds of Bhutan Living Standards Survey (2007 and 2012)
supplemented with focus group discussions carried out for

Since economic liberalization in the
early 1990s, India has experienced high economic growth and
made considerable progress in gender equality in areas such
as primary education. However, it fared poorly on
gender-parity in labor force participation (LFP). During the
period between 1993-94 and 2011-12, female labor force
participation rate (LFPR) remained consistently low as
compared to male participation. More alarming is the fact

Since early 2012, the World Bank’s High Frequency South Sudan Survey has collected a panel data set to monitor the welfare and perceptions of citizens in a
selected number of state capitals in South Sudan. This note presents the findings of all six rounds of the survey on the topics of (1) Security, (2) Economic
Conditions, (3) Assets and Consumption, and (4) Access to Services. The results are based on 143 households in Juba, Wau and Rumbek revisited six times.

The purpose of this report is to
document some of the aforementioned achievements over the
2000-2010 decade and to illustrate their collective impact
on poverty in Bangladesh. Analysis is undertaken to identify
which factors contributed to the rapid decline in poverty
over time. The main limitation of this report is that the
analysis is based on a limited number of data sources, which
do not cover all aspects of the poverty reduction process.

This paper employs decomposition methods
to analyze differences in agricultural productivity between
male and female land managers in Ethiopia. It employs data
from the 2011-2012 Ethiopian Rural Socioeconomic Survey. An
overall 23.4 percent gender differential in agricultural
productivity is estimated at the mean in favor of male land
managers, of which 10.1 percentage points are explained by
differences in land manager characteristics, land