The strategic / sectoral social and
environmental assessment of power development options (SSEA)
offers an overview analysis of major regional power
development options and regional transmission
interconnections in the Nile Equatorial Lakes region in
Eastern Africa. The assessment provides a solid foundation
for planning the development of the power sectors of the
region as it contains a proposed development strategy and a

Lao PDR economic performance has
continued to improve during 2006. Real GDP grew at 7.0
percent in 2005 and is now expected to be slightly higher at
7.3 percent in 2006. This growth is in large part due to
foreign investment inflows in mining and hydro-power and
growing mineral exports, but the share of non-mining
contributions has increased this year, reaching 4.9 out of
7.3 percent. Agriculture, manufacturing and services sectors

The strategic / sectoral social and
environmental assessment of power development options (SSEA)
offers an overview analysis of major regional power
development options and regional transmission
interconnections in the Nile Equatorial Lakes region in
Eastern Africa. The assessment provides a solid foundation
for planning the development of the power sectors of the
region as it contains a proposed development strategy and a

States can do much to tap
community-level energies, and resources for development, if
they seek to interact more synergistically with local
communities. The broader spin-off is creating a
developmental society, and polity. Using case studies from
Asia and Latin America, the authors show how: 1) State
efforts to bring about land reform, tenancy reform, and
expanding non-crop sources of income, can broaden the

This note reviews the performance of key
sectors of the Kenyan economy after the power-sharing
arrangement of 2008. Declines in the agricultural,
manufacturing, and services sectors considered in this note
are estimates. Data collected and information interpreted
provides picture of the broad orders of magnitude
anticipated of the economic decline. Assuming that the
power-sharing arrangement holds and the country returns to

Latin America missed opportunities for
rapid resource-based growth that similarly endowed
countries-Australia, Canada, Scandinavia-were able to take
advantage of. Fundamental to this poor performance was
deficient technological adoption driven by two factors.
First, deficient national "learning" or
"innovative" capacity, arising from low investment
in human capital and scientific infrastructure, led to weak

Environmental degradation can inflict
serious damage on poor people because their livelihoods
often depend on natural resource use and their living
conditions may offer little protection from air, water, and
soil pollution. At the same time, poverty-constrained
options may induce the poor to deplete resources and degrade
the environment at rates that are incompatible with
long-term sustainability. In such cases, degraded resources

Reviewing cross-country experience with
sugar policies, and policy reform, the authors conclude that
long-standing government interventions - rooted in
historical trade arrangements, fear of shortages, and
conflicting interests between growers, and sugar mills -
often displace both the markets, and the institutions
required to produce efficient outcomes. Arrangements rooted
in colonial eras, still shape policies, and trade in the

Using plot-level data, the authors
estimate a bi-variate probit model to explain land clearing,
and the siting of protected areas in North Thailand in 1986.
Their model suggests that protected areas (national parks,
together with wildlife sanctuaries) did not reduce the
likelihood of forest clearing, but wildlife sanctuaries may
have reduced the probability of deforestation. Road
building, by reducing the impedance-weighted distance to

The standard approach for fitting a
Cobb-Douglas production function to micro data with zero
values is to replace those values with "sufficiently
small" numbers to facilitate the logarithmic
transformation. In general, the estimates obtained are
extremely sensitive to the transformation chosen, generating
doubts about the use of a specification that assumes that
all inputs are essential (as the Cobb-Douglas does) when

The main objective of the study is to
provide the Government of Senegal the analyses and
information to implement policies towards reducing the rural
poor's vulnerability. While during the latest years,
economic growth reduced poverty in the country, this has
been less noticeable among the rural population, who
actually account for 6 million people over a total
population of 10 million. The rural economy remains

This sector report on Challenges and
Priorities for Rural Development analyzes why Upper Egypt
has lagged behind the rest of the country and to help the
Government of Egypt and stakeholders to define a framework
for interventions to promote broad-based economic growth and
human development that will reach the poor and improve
welfare in rural Upper Egypt. To achieve this objective, the
strategic framework for intervention proposed here has two