Understanding Changes in Poverty brings
together different methods to decompose the contributions to
poverty reduction. A simple approach quantifies the
contribution of changes in demographics, employment,
earnings, public transfers, and remittances to poverty
reduction. A more complex approach quantifies the
contributions to poverty reduction from changes in
individual and household characteristics, including changes

Africa is rapidly urbanizing and will
lead the world’s urban growth in the coming decades.
Currently, Africa is the least‐urbanized continent,
accommodating 11.3 percent of the world’s urban population,
and the Sub‐Saharan region is the continent’s
least‐urbanized area. However, the region’s cities are
expanding rapidly, by 2050; Africa’s urban population is
projected to reach 1.2 billion, with an urbanization rate of

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

This book reviews the major developments
in and the lessons learned from the 21-year (1991-2012)
experience with private sector participation (PSP) in the
power sector in India. It discusses the political economy
context of the policy changes, looks at reform initiatives
that were implemented for the generation sector, describes
transmission and distribution segments at different points
in the evolution of the sector, and concludes with a summary

This Country Partnership Framework (CPF)
covers the five-year period FY16-20. Anchored in the
government’s medium-term development plan as outlined in a
January 2015 Cabinet of Ministers Program of Action, it also
reflects the analysis and recommendations of the World Bank
Group’s (WBG) 2015 Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) for
Uzbekistan and the lessons learned from the Completion
Report of the previous CPS. The CPF’s objectives and

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 study on “internally displaced population, gender and livelihoods in Kassala State, Eastern Sudan” was carried out to deepen the analytical work being conducted by the “Sustainable Livelihoods for Displaced and Vulnerable Communities in Eastern Sudan Project (SLDP)”.

This program document presents the World
Bank Group (WBG) FY17-22 Country Partnership Framework (CPF)
for Bulgaria. The timing of the new CPF follows the
preparation of theSystematic Country Diagnostic (SCD)
prepared in FY15, and informs the areas and objectives ofthe
CPF in support of the WBG’s twin goals to reduce poverty and
boost shared prosperity1 for the bottom forty percent of the
population. The CPF proposes to focus WBG support in

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

Comprehensive details about Mizoram state and its environmental and
social sensitivities. Mizoram Investment Plan under NERPSIP (GoI & World Bank Funding).

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

Private investment in agriculture in
developing countries, both domestic and foreign, has been on
the rise for nearly two decades. This paper focuses on
large-scale agricultural projects in developing countries,
involving the lease of farmland, which rose sharply after
the food crisis of 2008. It is important that such
investments are sustainable not only in the long term, but
also beneficial in the short term with minimal risks or