The objective of the Botswana Investment
Climate Assessment (ICA) is to evaluate the investment
climate in Botswana in all its operational dimensions and
promote policies to strengthen the private sector. The
investment climate is made up of the many location specific
factors that shape the opportunities and incentives for
firms to invest productively, create jobs, and expand. These
factors include macroeconomic and regulatory policies; the

This report studies the impact that gender differences in Bangladesh have on access to energy and energy services and the consequences of these impacts based on review of recent literature on the matter. The report concludes that the structural gender differences that arise from cultural and religious norms can lead to various impacts in access to energy services which in turn can have long term consequences on women and all these factors must be considered while designing rural energy- gender projects.

Just as equality of opportunity becomes an increasingly prominent concept in normative economics, the authors argue that it is also a relevant concept for positive models of the links between distribution and aggregate efficiency. Persuasive microeconomic evidence suggests that inequalities in wealth, power, and status have efficiency costs. These variables capture different aspects of people's opportunity sets, for which observed income may be a poor proxy.

Temporary economic migration is undertaken largely in response to resource constraints. This is evident in the volume of remittances sent back by migrants to their families of origin. In agricultural settings, where those left behind are likely to face considerable exposure to uninsured income risk, such resource flows should translate into better risk bearing capacity. In this paper the author takes up this question by asking whether economic migration allows households to avoid costly risk coping strategies.

Increasing the schooling attainment of girls is a challenge in much of the developing world. The authors evaluate the impact of a program that gives scholarships to girls making the transition between the last year of primary school and the first year of secondary school in Cambodia. They show that the scholarship program had a large, positive effect on the school enrollment and attendance of girls. Their preferred set of estimates suggests program effects on enrollment and attendance at program schools of 30 to 43 percentage points.

The present report was prepared upon the
request of the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic to inform
policy decisions on reforming the existing safety net. The
report aims at providing analytical underpinning of the
country's ongoing safety net reform, along with venue
for policy discussions with the Government and stakeholders
on the immediate as well as on the longer-term challenges
related to designing and implementing of a modern national

With the exception of Sub-Saharan
Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean has been one of the
regions of the world with the greatest inequality. This
report explores why the region suffers from such persistent
inequality, identifies how it hampers development, and
suggests ways to achieve greater equity in the distribution
of wealth, incomes and opportunities. The study draws on
data from 20 countries based on household surveys covering

The World Bank's revised forest
policy came into being in 2002 and covers all types of
forests. It has the following key objectives: (i) harnessing
the potential of forests to reduce poverty in a sustainable
manner; (ii) integrating forests effectively into
sustainable development; and (iii) protecting vital local
and global environmental services and values. The policy
enables the bank to fully engage in forestry throughout the

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

This publication offers crucial lessons
for policy makers and development experts who may be
considering using small area poverty maps as tools of
economic development and helps add to our array of tools for
dealing with the political economy issues of poverty. It
represents a major contribution to a little understood
aspect of the well-known adage "location, location,
location," demonstrating that the conceptualization of

Although sharecropping has long
fascinated economists, the determinants of this contractual
form are still poorly understood and the debate over the
extent of moral hazard is far from settled. The authors
address both issues by emphasizing the role of landlord
supervision. When tenant effort is observable, but at a cost
to the landlord, otherwise identical share-tenants can
receive different levels of supervision and have different

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