This study on Jharkhand in India
addresses the challenges faced by that new state of India
(founded in November 2000) to surmount adverse initial
conditions of low average income, very high incidence of
poverty, and little social development. In addition, initial
health and education indicators in Jharkhand were also
markedly unfavorable in comparison to both the all-India
average and the major Indian states. The paper points out

Despite significant changes in poverty
overall in Latin America, the proportion of indigenous
peoples living in poverty did not change much from the early
1990s to the present. While earlier work focused on human
development, much less has been done on the distribution and
returns to income-generating assets and the effect these
have on income generation strategies. The authors show that
low income and low assets are mutually reinforcing. For

This report is about balanced economic development in the Northeast of Thailand. It is about growth and poverty reduction, cities and villages, enterprises and workers, skills and education, infrastructure and trade, and rice and silk. Northeast economic development is only part of Thailand's development challenge, but it is among the most important. We look back at how the Northeast has fared in terms of growth, poverty reduction and social capital over the last decades relative to other regions in Thailand.

This paper uses a growth diagnostics
approach à la Hausmann, Rodrik, and Velasco (HRV) to
identify the most 'binding' constraints to private
sector growth in Mongolia - a small, low-income,
mineral-rich, transition economy. The approach of applying
the HRV methodology is useful in those cases where a lack of
data prevents us from estimating shadow prices to identify
the most 'binding' constraint to growth. We find

This final report is the fifth
deliverable for the World Bank funded project
'operational design for the project development fund
and for the viability gap fund'. Taking into account
feedback and further consideration of issues rose in the
previous Reports, it aims to: provide high level
recommendations on the overall Public Private Partnership
(PPP) framework in Pakistan, recognizing international best

The adoption of new agricultural
technologies may be discouraged because of their inherent
riskiness. This study implemented a randomized field
experiment to ask whether the provision of insurance against
a major source of production risk induces farmers to take
out loans to invest in a new crop variety. The study sample
was composed of roughly 800 maize and groundnut farmers in
Malawi, where by far the dominant source of production risk

The present report was prepared on the
basis of the findings of an international workshop held from
September 12-14, 2005, in Salvador da Bahia, and was
attended by delegations of three to five practitioners from
12 cities in Latin America, Africa and Asia. It had two main
objectives: (a) to share experiences on innovative solutions
to provide electricity services in poor peri-urban and urban
areas; and (b) to develop a body of knowledge to be

Using two rounds of nationally
representative household survey data in this study, the
authors measure the impact on poverty in Nepal of local and
international migration for work. They apply an instrumental
variable approach to deal with nonrandom selection of
migrants and simulate various scenarios for the different
levels of work-related migration, comparing observed and
counterfactual household expenditure distribution. The

Since the 1980s and early 1990s, the
World Bank has been supporting projects that involve
communities own development. This has been largely
manifested in the design and implementation of
community-based development (CBD) and community-driven
development (CDD) initiatives, with the latter gaining
increasing momentum in recent years. The purpose of this
study was to assess the development effectiveness of the

In view of its increasing importance,
and the dearth of information on return migration and its
impacts on source households, this study uses data from the
2005 Albania Living Standards Measurement Study survey and
assesses the impact of past migration experience of Albanian
households on non-farm business ownership through
instrumental variables regression techniques. Moreover,
considering the differences in earning potentials and

This report shows that after a decade of
moderate growth but little or no long term change in rural
poverty in Pakistan, agricultural output, rural incomes,
rural poverty and social welfare indicators all showed
marked improvements between 2001-02 and 2004-05. However,
longer term trends suggest there is little reason for
complacency. The agricultural GDP per capita growth rate
(1999- 2000 to 2004-05) was only 0.3 percent per year; rural

There is compelling evidence of the
importance of gender equality for poverty reduction and
sustainable growth. So it should come as no surprise that
most development actors-international agencies, bilateral
donors, and most developing countries, have an official
policy for promoting gender equality. Millennium Development
Goal 3 (MDG3) on gender equality and women's
empowerment is shared global commitment. With only seven