Two of the great stylized predictions of
development theory, and two of the great expectations of
policy makers as indicators of progress in development, are
inexorable urbanization and inexorable formalization.
Urbanization is indeed happening, beyond the "tipping
point" where half the world's population is now
urban. However, formalization has slowed down significantly
in the past quarter century. Indeed, informality has been

A decade ago in Mozambique, a stakeholder workshop where the need to improve access to industrial and commercial land as a means to encourage investment was a topic of discussion, a government official came up to. In order to create new jobs, generate more income, and modernize the economy, many countries see an urgent need to encourage industrial and commercial investment, both domestic and foreign. However, investment in many sectors cannot take place unless land, along with other basic factors of production, is available.

This book rental housing lessons from
international experience and policies for emerging market
is an effort to bring rental housing to the forefront of the
housing agenda of countries around the world and to provide
general guidance for policy makers whose actions can have an
effect on where and how people live. It warns of the
challenges they face and provides guidelines on how to
develop or redevelop a sound rental sector. it can enable

The objective of the Nepal Investment Climate Assessment (ICA) is to evaluate the investment climate in Nepal in all its dimensions and promote policies to strengthen the private sector. The investment climate is made up of many dimensions that shape the opportunities for investments, employment creation, and growth of private firms. Such dimensions include factor markets, product markets, infrastructure services, and the macroeconomic, legal, regulatory, and institutional framework.

The report is organized into three
chapters: chapter two looks at the pace and patterns of
India's urbanization, providing a 100-year perspective
on demographic shifts and a 20-year perspective on the
spatial distribution of jobs across India's portfolio
of settlements. The review is based on a careful, spatially
detailed analysis of data from economic and demographic
censuses, annual surveys of industry, national sample

The purpose of this study is to provide in one place a set of papers that were written at various points in time over the last four years on poverty and the response to the recent economic crisis in Liberia. More precisely, the objective of the study is twofold. First it is to provide a basic diagnostic of both consumption-based poverty and human development (especially education and health) in the country using the 2007 CWIQ (Core Welfare Indicators Questionnaire) survey.

The sector review includes seven
chapters and one annex. This first chapter is an overview of
agriculture, irrigation and the purpose and content of this
report. The second chapter provides a review of the Bank s
own strategy and priorities for irrigation and drainage
within its portfolio of investments, from the time of its
2004 Strategy until the present. It also includes a short
summary of key lessons learned in this sector. The third

This paper uses small area estimation
techniques to update Vietnam's province and
district-level poverty map to 2009. It finds that poverty
rates continue to be highest in the northern and central
mountainous regions, where ethnic minorities make up a large
fraction of the population. Poverty has fallen in most
provinces and districts over this decade, but the pace of
poverty reduction has been least pronounced in those

This paper addresses policies aimed at
closing the rural-urban gap for one of the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs), the under-five mortality rate
(U5MR). The paper relies on the Maquette for MDG Simulations
(MAMS), a computable general equilibrium model, applied to
the database of an archetypical low-income country. The
scenarios, which focus on the period 2013-2030, include a
"business-as-usual" base scenario and policy

These Regulations are enacted in order to strengthen the management of urban and rural planning.

This report directly provide
recommendations for improvement of the quality of the
regional master socio-econsomic development plan and
national laud use plans for Vietnam, to the year 2020. It
provides analysis and assessment of the
reviewed-adjusted-ammended socio-economic development plan
for the Mekong Delta, which is aimed at improvement of the
quality and feasibility of regional socio-economic

Afghanistan is one of the poorest and
longest suffering countries among members of the World Bank,
and has been ravaged by chronic conflict and political
instability. Afghanistan's infrastructure has been
destroyed or degraded; its human resource base severely
depleted; and its social capital eroded. Despite existing
public administration structures, the majority of state
institutions are only beginning to function effectively, and