Poverty in Kosovo is widespread and has
remained persistent in the first half of this decade. The
evidence suggests that poverty is higher among those who
live in families that are large, have many unemployed
members, and have low education levels. The poor are also
geographically concentrated in rural areas and a few
regions. The main message of this report is that the slow
and volatile growth was doubly disadvantageous. The first

This report aims to assist the
government in improving implementation of the New Socialist
Countryside (NSC) program, especially in raising the
effectiveness of public expenditures, and the harmonization
of public finance. While this report pays particular
attention to rural aspects of public finance, it addresses
this topic within the overall framework of intergovernmental
finance that impacts both rural and urban areas. Similarly,

The overall objective of the
Comprehensive Assessment of the Agricultural Sector (CAAS)
is to provide an evidence base to enable appropriate
strategic policy responses by the Government of Liberia
(GoL) and its development partners in order to maximize the
contribution of the agriculture sector to the
Government's overarching policy objectives. Given the
strong relationship between growth in agricultural

Indonesia stands at the threshold of a new era and at an important juncture of its history. After the historic economic, political and social upheavals at the end of the 1990s, Indonesia has started to regain its footing. The country has largely recovered from the economic and financial crisis that threw millions of its citizens back into poverty in 1998 and saw it regress to a low-income status. Recently, it has once again crossed the threshold, making it one of the world's emergent middle-income countries.

This study is part of the second phase of a long-term programmatic work on poverty in Mexico, in three phases being carried out by the Bank at the request of the Government of Mexico.

Using data obtained from Living Standards Measurement Surveys of rural households, the socioeconomic trends in rural households is defined for a limited set of countries in the 90's and 2000's. These trends are studied in light of seven categories of rural economies: self-employed agriculture, employer agriculture (land owners), employee agriculture, self-employed not agriculture; employer not agriculture, employee not agriculture, not in the labor force. Relative differences in income, consumption and poverty are documented.

This study assesses the development
effectiveness of World Bank assistance in addressing
constraints to agricultural development in Africa over the
period of fiscal years 1991-2006. This Independent
Evaluation Group (IEG) review of World Bank assistance to
agriculture in Africa has a twofold purpose. First, it is a
pilot for the proposed IEG study on Bank-wide assistance in
agriculture scheduled for fiscal year 2009. Second, the

Beyond the City evaluates the
contribution of rural development and policies to growth,
poverty alleviation, and environmental degradation in the
rest of the economy, as well as in the rural space. This
title brings together new theoretical and empirical
treatments of the links between rural and national
development. New findings and are combined with existing
literature to enhance our understanding of the how rural

This paper estimates a model of a farm
that treats the choice of crops, livestock, and irrigation
as endogenous. The model is composed of a multinomial
choice of farm type, a binomial choice of irrigation, and a
set of conditional land value functions. The model is
estimated across over 2,000 farmers in seven Latin America
countries. The results quantify how farmers adapt their
choice of farm type and irrigation to their local climate.

Despite significant changes in poverty
overall in Latin America, the proportion of indigenous
peoples living in poverty did not change much from the early
1990s to the present. While earlier work focused on human
development, much less has been done on the distribution and
returns to income-generating assets and the effect these
have on income generation strategies. The authors show that
low income and low assets are mutually reinforcing. For

This paper analyzes the impact of
climate change on animal husbandry in Africa. It regresses
the net revenue from raising animals in small and large
farms across Africa on climate, soil, and other control
variables to test the climate sensitivity of livestock. The
study is based on a survey of over 9,000 farmers across 11
countries conducted by the World Bank and the Global
Environment Facility. From this dataset, 5,400 farms were

Real GDP per capita and capital stock in
Cote d'Ivoire grew strongly from 1960 to 1979, but have
declined ever since, for twenty-five years. As a result, the
country has traveled a full circle from economic success to
failure in little more than a generation. What are the
long-term factors behind this dismal growth story? Are the
Ivorian development problems mostly of recent origin? Or
there are more fundamental, economic factors that explain