The 2006 edition of the little green
data book coincides with a wave of renewed attention to the
energy sector coming out of the group of eight summit at
Gleneagles, Scotland. While energy demand is rising along
with gross domestic product (GDP) in the developing world,
many poor countries still lack the basic infrastructure that
sustains everyday needs. Electric power consumption per
capita is 25 times lower in low-income countries than in

This issues paper discusses a gender
assessment exercise carried out in April-June 2005. It
provides the government of Mali and its partners with
proposals aimed at improving policies and activities that
promote gender equity and equality (GEE). The study is
divided into four sections: Section 1 presents the national
context within which the study falls; Section 2 deals with
the gender profile in Mali; Section 3 addresses the

This note deals with the extent to
which, and the means by which, project level distributional
analysis of benefits can be undertaken and how poverty
impact indicators can be developed. Section 1 sets out the
issues associated with using traditional cost benefit
analysis for the appraisal of pro-poor projects. Section 2
discusses the techniques and analysis available to consider
the distributional consequences of a transport change,

The authors evaluate the impact of two
key factor market distortions in China on rural-urban
inequality and income distribution. They find that creation
of a fully functioning land market has a significant impact
on rural-urban inequality. This reform permits agricultural
households to focus solely on the differential between farm
and non-farm returns to labor in determining whether to work
on or off-farm. This gives rise to an additional 10 million

From what was historically known as
'Arabia Felix', a land of prosperity and
happiness, Yemen has become the most impoverished among the
Arab countries. The government of the united Yemen, formed
in 1990, has launched so far three five-year economic reform
plans with the goal of restoring Yemen's prosperity.
Have these efforts succeeded? What policies are needed to
further reduce poverty? The poverty assessment report aims

This regional study encompasses three
Central American countries: Nicaragua, Guatemala, and
Honduras. The focus of this report is Honduras. The
objective of the study is to understand how broad-based
economic growth can be stimulated and sustained in rural
Central America. The study identifies "drivers" of
sustainable rural growth and poverty reduction. Drivers are
defined as the assets and combinations of assets needed by

Following the endorsement of the Millennium Development Goals, there is an increasing demand for methods to track poverty regularly. This paper develops an economically intuitive and inexpensive methodology to do so in the absence of regular, comparable data on household consumption. The minimum data requirements for the methodology are the availability of a household budget survey and a series of surveys with a comparable set of asset data also contained in the budget survey. The methodology is illustrated using a series of Demographic Health Surveys from Kenya.

This review of the active portfolio of
World Bank projects aimed at improving urban environmental
quality was carried out during 2002-03 in order to assess
the level of commitment of the institution to urban
sustainability. The review focuses on the contributions of
key sectors to urban environmental improvements, in
particular on those belonging to the Infrastructure
Vice-Presidency, and on how projects are contributing to

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

The report provides detailed information
on the geographical distribution of poverty and
vulnerability throughout the country - i.e. regions,
provinces and communes. The information presented is
essential to understand poverty at the local level, and to
address it with appropriate sectoral or cross-sectoral
strategies. Further, when local poverty rates are analyzed
alongside public expenditure data, an initial assessment for

Despite sustained output growth since 1997, low-income Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries (CIS-7) have not experienced growth in employment, a phenomenon observed elsewhere in transitional economies and labeled as "jobless growth." The author addresses the causes of this phenomenon in the CIS-7. He argues that the lack of job creation is explained by a combination of structural factors, including capital-intensive growth, large potential for productivity gains among existing workers, and compartmentalized economies best depicted by a dual labor market framework.

The central theme addressed by this
evaluation, is whether the Bank ' s investment in
cities, improved the lives of the poor. This report is based
on a desk review of the Bank's urban portfolio. It
focuses on the results of the 99 operations completed in the
past 10 years. It uses the four pillars of livability, good
governance, bankability, and competitiveness of the Urban
Strategy Paper as the evaluation framework. At the project