The paper uses harmonized household
survey micro-data to assess the levels and determinants of
economic inequality in 12 Arab countries. It focuses on the
sources of rural-urban, as well as
metropolitan-nonmetropolitan, inequalities and applies the
unconditional quantile regression decomposition technique to
analyze the welfare gaps across the entire distribution. The
analysis finds moderate inequality levels, with the Gini

Urbanization is the single most
important transformation that the African continent will
undergo this century. More than half of Africa's
population will live in its cities by 2040. In the face of
rapid urbanization, there is a narrow window of opportunity
to harness the potential of cities as engines of economic
growth, and use this as a powerful leverage to achieve
sustainable development and poverty reduction. Despite its

This publication is part of a series
aimed at promoting good policies and practices on rural
transport in Africa. A recent review of the status of Rural
Transport Knowledge Products and Practice (Riverson, 2012)
identified a number of knowledge gaps and recommended the
production of working papers to address these. One of these
gaps was the absence of robust tools, including relevant
indicators and instruments, to measure the impact of rural

This paper examines the employment
growth of Indian districts from 2000 to 2010 in the
manufacturing and services sectors. Specialization and
diversity metrics that combine industries in both sectors
are calculated and related to subsequent job growth. The
analysis finds robust and consistent evidence that the
diversity of industries in the district across the two
sectors links to subsequent job growth. Somewhat

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

This issue of Handshake focuses on
natural resource PPPs that are making a difference. In
Cartagena, Colombia, a hybrid public-private agency is
profiled that has standardized water service to residents
while restoring the coast, and in the process, contributed
to political stabilization. Around Africas Lake Victoria, an
environmental management initiative with the potential to
reduce the pollution and resource footprint of industrial

This paper documents a significant
impact of climate variation on urbanization in Sub-Saharan
Africa, primarily in more arid countries. By lowering farm
incomes, reduced moisture availability encourages migration
to nearby cities, while wetter conditions slow migration.
The paper also provides evidence for rural-urban income
links. In countries with a larger industrial base, reduced
moisture shrinks the agricultural sector and raises total

Nepal needs a new economic model to
achieve faster and sustained growth as well as further
improvements in human development and poverty outcomes.
Economic growth, while ro¬bust at around 4 percent annual
average since 2005, is far from the level needed to achieve
the government s ambitious targets. The economy, highly
dependent on remittances, lacks the nec¬essary dynamism.
While substantial gains have been made to reduce poverty and

Disasters are increasing worldwide, with
more devastating effects than ever before. While the
absolute number of disasters around the world has almost
doubled since the 1980s, the average number of natural
disasters in Middle East and North Africa (MNA) has almost
tripled over the same period of time. In the MNA, the
interplay of natural disasters, rapid urbanization, water
scarcity, and climate change has emerged as a serious

The African coastal countries are facing
several environmental and socio-economic challenges, such as
unplanned urban and economic development, fueled by a
growing rural exodus; non-functional or non-existent public
infrastructures to handle the demographic growth along the
coastline; air, water and soil pollution; and alteration of
coastal ecosystems. West Africa, in particular, is facing
severe land losses and major damage due to coastal erosion

Despite a decline in both monetary and
multidimensional poverty rates since 2000, Haiti remains
among the poorest and most unequal countries in Latin
America. Two years after the 2010 earthquake, poverty was
still high, particularly in rural areas. This report
establishes that in 2012 more than one in two Haitians was
poor, living on less than $ 2.41 a day, and one person in
four was living below the national extreme poverty line of

The continued decline in global poverty
over the past 100 years particularly in the past three
decades is a remarkable achievement. In 1981, 52 percent of
the world population lived on less than $1.25 a day. By
2005, that rate had been cut in half, to 25.0 percent, and
by 2008 to 22.2 percent (World Bank 2012). Preliminary
estimates for 2010 indicate that the extreme poverty rate
has fallen further still; if follow-up studies confirm this,