This paper informs the national and
international policy discussions related to the adoption of
the United Nations Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and
Forest Degradation Programme. Effective program instruments
must carefully consider incentives, opportunity costs, and
community interactions. A choice experiment survey was
applied to rural Ethiopian communities to understand
respondents’ preferences toward the institutional structure

This paper uses an original database of
469 politically connected firms under the Mubarak regime in
Egypt to explore the economic effects of close
state-business relations. Previous research has shown that
political connections are lucrative. The paper addresses
several questions raised by this research. Do connected
firms receive favorable regulatory treatment? They do:
connected firms are more likely to benefit from trade

The report Africa Can Help Feed Africa
(World Bank 2012) showed that increasing food staples1
supply can be met by better connecting African markets to
each other. That report called for a stronger focus on
removing trade barriers and building on the forces of
regional integration. This report builds on the lessons of
Africa Can Help Feed Africa by looking into the specific
circum¬stances met in West Africa, home to one-third of the

This paper provides field
experiment–based evidence on the potential additional forest
carbon sequestration that cleaner and more fuel-efficient
cookstoves might generate. The paper focuses on the Mirt
(meaning “best”) cookstove, which is used to bake injera,
the staple food in Ethiopia. The analysis finds that the
technology generates per-meal fuel savings of 22 to 31
percent compared with a traditional three-stone stove with

This report focuses on two competing forces: the Soviet industrial legacy and

About 70 percent of electricity users in
Southeastern Turkey are not used to paying for electricity,
partially due to the protracted situation of conflict and
lack of trust between citizens and the government in the
region. Historic tension throughout the 1990s caused an
inability for the government to invest in electricity
infrastructure and has resulted in low service quality. A
large portion of consumers did not pay for electricity use

This study estimates the impact of
Kenya’s post-election violence on individual risk
preferences. Because the crisis interrupted a longitudinal
survey of more than five thousand Kenyan youth, this timing
creates plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to civil
conflict by the time of the survey. The study measures
individual risk preferences using hypothetical lottery
choice questions, which are validated by showing that they

This report summarizes the knowledge
shared and issues raised during a conference convened by the
World Bank on the above topic held on November 3-5, 2014 in
Manila, Philippines. Building on earlier conferences on this
topic, the conference aimed to raise awareness about, and
share good practice on, building a social protection system
that integrates disaster risk management and climate change
adaptation. It brought together 17 country delegations from

Self-help groups (SHGs) are the most
common form of microfinance in India. The authors provide
evidence that SHGs, composed of women only, undertake
collective actions for the provision of public goods within
village communities. Using a theoretical model, this paper
shows that an elected official, whose aim is to maximize
re-election chances, exerts higher effort in providing
public goods when private citizens undertake collective

This paper decomposes the gender gap in
pay in the Russian Federation along the earnings
distribution for the period 1996–2011. The analysis uses a
reweighted, recentered influence function decomposition that
allows estimating the contribution of each covariate on the
wage structure and composition effects along the earnings
distribution. The paper finds that women are in flat career
paths compared with men; the importance of observable

The Government of Punjab, through
Government of India’s (GoI) Department of Economic Affairs
(DEA) had requested the World Bank to provide non-lending
technical assistance (NLTA) to provide high quality basic
urban civic amenities to the residents of cities of Ludhiana
and Amritsar in the areas of: water supply, sewerage, storm
water drainage, solid waste management, and modern urban
transport system. The study is expected to recommend

Drawing on international trade data,
this paper uses the product space approach to analyze
changes in Morocco’s goods exports in 1990–2010 and future
export priorities. The level of Morocco’s gross domestic
product and its moderate growth match the predictions of
product space analysis, informed by changes in the income
potential of Morocco’s export basket, reflecting relatively
strong capabilities (a high density) in products with