This economy profile presents the Doing
Business indicators for Yemen. In a series of annual
reports, Doing Business assesses regulations affecting
domestic firms in 189 economies and ranks the economies in
10 areas of business regulation, such as starting a
business, resolving insolvency and trading across borders.
This year's report data cover regulations measured from
June 2012 through May 2013. The report is the 11th edition

Following the transition to democracy in
2008, two very important political developments took place.
These were the announcement of the 7th National Finance
Commission Award, which was agreed upon in December 2009 in
Lahore, Pakistan, and the unanimous ratification by
Parliament of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution in
April 2010. Both developments have the potential of
fundamentally restructuring the way Pakistan is governed in

This Policy Memorandum provides policy
advice to the government of Liberia (GOL) in an effort to
mainstream gender issues in policies, programs, and projects
supporting agricultural production and value-chain
development. It is organized as follows. Section I reviews
women's roles in Liberian agriculture and agricultural
value chains, drawing on a variety of data sources,
including the 2007 Core Welfare Indicator Questionnaire

This paper discusses the social impacts
of Costa Rica's Payments for Environmental Services
(PSA) program and their effect on rural poverty. Although
the analysis is hampered by significant information gaps, we
believe that the PSA Program has probably managed to have an
impact on the poor. This impact is almost certainly positive
on the poor who were able to participate, but is difficult
to quantify. However, except for very few cases, it seems

Este texto analiza la modalidad de interrelation hispano/chilena-mapuche/huilliche en territorio valdiviano durante la colonia tardía y propone el concepto de "colonización fronteriza", a través del cual se busca diferenciar dicha región de otros procesos de interrelation hispano-indígena en Chile. En vista de este objetivo, el estudio se centra en el proceso de conformación de propiedad privada de la tierra, identificando algunas de las transformaciones que esto produce en la región valdiviana hacia fines del siglo XVIII.

The accumulation of decent housing matters both because of the difference it makes to living standards and because of its centrality to economic development. The consequences for living standards are far-reaching. In addition to directly conferring utility, decent housing improves health and enables children to do homework. It frees up women's time and enables them to participate in the labor market. More subtly, a home and its environs affect identity and self-respect.

The authors use data from Ethiopia to
empirically assess determinants of participation in land
rental markets, compare these to those of administrative
land reallocation, and make inferences on the likely impact
of households' expectations regarding future
redistribution. Results indicate that rental markets
outperform administrative reallocation in terms of
efficiency and poverty. Households who have part-time jobs

The extent to which households should be
allowed to transfer their land rights in post-socialist
transition economies is of considerable policy interest. The
authors use data from Vietnam, a transition country that
allows rental and sales of land use rights, to identify
factors conducive to the development of land markets and to
assess the extent to which land transfers enhance productive
efficiency and transfer land to the poor. They find that

Island courts have been in operation in
Vanuatu since 1984. Official documents have hitherto
provided little information on their practical operations or
utility, and our preliminary research in 2010 found that not
much was known at the state governance level about their
real circumstances. In 2011, we conducted fieldwork research
on five islands, Efate, Santo, Malekula, Epi, and Tanna, to
provide better information on the practical operations of

This document proposes a set of
generally applicable recommendations and good practices for
creating a Mineral Rights Cadastre (MRC), an administrative
body responsible for overseeing the process of granting and
managing mineral licenses throughout a country. The document
reviews lessons learned from World Bank-funded projects
aimed at reforming mineral rights management and assesses
the impacts and benefits of the implemented changes. The

Poverty reduction strategies (PRSs)
provide a central framework for macroeconomic, structural,
and social policies in developing countries. Because of the
numerous and complex links between environment and poverty,
it is important that environmental issues are taken into
account in the PRS process. This paper follows six previous
assessments of the degree of mainstreaming environment in
the PRS process using a similar methodology to present

The current assessment builds on
previously published reviews of poverty reduction strategy
programs (PRSPs), and is the sixth report in a series. This
paper aims at presenting a clearer picture of how PRSPs
influence the developmental agenda in 11 African countries
by assessing the level of environmental mainstreaming in the
Poverty Reduction Strategy Process. The paper includes the
following headings: introduction; framework for assessment;