There have been numerous episodes of
widespread adoption of improved seed and long-term
achievements in the development of the maize seed industry
in Sub-Saharan Africa. This summary takes a circumspect view
of technical change in maize production. Adoption of
improved seed has continued to rise gradually, now
representing an estimated 44 percent of maize area in
Eastern and Southern Africa (outside South Africa), and 60

This paper develops an innovative 21
sector computable general equilibrium model of Armenia to
assess the impact on Armenia of a Deep and Comprehensive
Free Trade Agreement with the European Union, as well as
further regional or multilateral trade policy commitments.
The analysis finds that such an agreement with the European
Union will likely result in substantial gains to Armenia,
but shows that the gains derive from the deep aspects of the

This paper investigates the impact of
remittances on financial inclusion. This is an important
issue given recent studies showing that financial inclusion
can have significant beneficial effects on households. Using
household-level survey data for El Salvador, the authors
examine the impact of remittances on households' use of
savings and credit instruments from formal financial
institutions. They find that although remittances have a

Infrastructure investments are typically
long-term. As a result, observed benefits to households and
communities may vary considerably over time as short-term
outcomes generate or are subsumed by longer-term impacts.
This paper uses a new round of household survey as part of a
local government engineering department's rural road
improvement project financed by the World Bank in Bangladesh
to compare the short-term and long-term effects of rural

They are being hailed as the new Holy
Grail of economic development. The success of special
economic zones (SEZ) in general and specialized ones in
particular (industrial and technology parks) in countries as
diverse as Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland,
Ireland, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and
more recently, China; Korea; Taiwan, China; or Mauritius,
has led several African leaders to launch new similar

Large-scale disasters regularly affect
societies over the globe, causing large destruction and
damage. After each of these events, media, insurance
companies, and international institu-tions publish numerous
assessments of the "cost of the disaster." However
these assessments are based on different methodologies and
approaches, and they often reach different results. Besides
methodological differences, these discrepancies are due to

In broad terms, the sources of economic
growth are well understood, but relatively few countries
have succeeded in effectively harnessing this knowledge for
policy purposes so as to sustain high rates of growth over
an extended period of time. Among the ones that have done
so, China stands out. Its gross domestic product (GDP)
growth rate, which averaged almost 10 percent between 1978
and 2008, is unmatched. Even more remarkable is the

The objective of this Agriculture Public
Expenditure Review (AgPER) is to provide an assessment of
the present situation and to offer recommendations to
improve the effectiveness and efficiency of public spending
in agriculture in Mozambique. The report provides a
sectorwide picture of the magnitude and structure of public
spending for agriculture in Mozambique over the past six
years, and an overall assessment of the budget process in

This Country Economic Memorandum (CEM)
is the first for Burundi since the 1980s. It has been
developed in collaboration with the government of Burundi.
The CEM has been prepared in cooperation with the African
development bank and the U.K. department for international
development. Burundi is one of the poorest countries in the
world, and has suffered from many years of civil conflict
and its consequences. In the last years, peace has been

Kosovo's economic growth in the
past decade has been solid, yet, with a gross domestic
product (GDP) per capita of 1,760, the country remains one
of the poorest in Europe. The end of the conflict, output
was growing at double-digit rates, driven by the
donor-funded reconstruction efforts. Since 2005, annual
growth has decelerated to below 5 percent. However, the
other countries in Southeast Europe have been growing

The goal of the Congo, Democratic
Republic of (DRC's) trade policy is to create a
regulatory, fiscal and institutional environment in which
domestic and foreign trade can develop unhindered, opening
up the country's vast territory and integrating it into
regional and international trade channels. In this respect,
the analyses in this report highlight three priorities: (i)
to streamline and reduce port taxation; (ii) to conclude the

The objective of this Country
Environmental Analysis (CEA) is to highlight the underlying
challenges and opportunities for Indonesia's
environment and management of its natural resources in order
to guide the World Bank support to Indonesian institutions
for more sustainable development. Rather, the CEA sets the
broader context (chapter one) and economic costs of
environmental degradation (chapter two) in order to identify