Sana'a is located in an upland
basin at an altitude of 2300 meters within a mountainous and
semi-arid region of Yemen. Because of its high altitude, the
city enjoys a moderate climate year around. The main rainy
season is in summer. The nearest port is Hodeidah, roughly
250 kilometers away. Bound by mountains and steep slopes to
the east and west, the city has few options but to expand
primarily along its north and south axes within its basin.

Costa Rica's Program of Payments
for Environmental Services (Pago de Servicios Ambientales,
PSA) provides a unique opportunity to evaluate direct
payments as a conservation policy tool. This paper reports
evidence on how much more forest has been conserved in Costa
Rica as a result of PSA contracts with landowners. Such
evidence requires estimating a counterfactual outcome: how
much forest would have been preserved if there had been no

A guest post by Dr. Steven Lawry, Global Lead, Land Tenure & Property Rights, DAI
A recent systematic review—funded by the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID)—of quantitative and qualitative literature on the effects of tenure formalization in developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, confirmed theories that formal registration of individual land rights increases investment, productivity, and household consumption.

As the world is urbanizing, many cities
are grappling with a population that is growing rapidly,
thereby increasing demand for land and housing. This
pressure on land and housing markets often is exacerbated by
inappropriate or inadequate policies. The result is a supply
of well-located land and housing that falls well short of
demand and the proliferation of poorly serviced informal
settlements, many of which are located far from jobs, city

Although the potentially negative
impacts of credit constraints on economic development have
long been discussed conceptually, empirical evidence for
Africa remains limited. This study uses a direct elicitation
approach for a national sample of Rwandan rural households
to assess empirically the extent and nature of credit
rationing in the semi-formal sector and its impact using an
endogenous sample separation between credit-constrained and

Whether the negative relationship
between farm size and productivity that is confirmed in a
large global literature holds in Africa is of considerable
policy relevance. This paper revisits this issue and
examines potential causes of the inverse productivity
relationship in Rwanda, where policy makers consider land
fragmentation and small farm sizes to be key bottlenecks for
the growth of the agricultural sector. Nationwide plot-level

This paper uses farm panel data from
Indonesia to examine dynamic patterns of land use, capital
investments, and wages in agriculture. The empirical
analysis shows that an increase in real wages has induced
the substitution of labor by machines among relatively large
farmers. Large farmers tend to increase the scale of
operation by renting in more land when real wages increase.
Machines and land are complementary if the scale of

Many firms in the developing world --
including a majority of micro, small, and medium enterprises
-- operate in the informal economy. The informal firms face
a variety of constraints, making it harder for them to do
business and grow. Lack of access to finance is often cited
as the biggest operational constraint these firms face. This
paper documents the use of finance and financing patterns of
informal firms, highlights differences between use of

SUMMARY:
"Since President

Thein

Sein

came

to

power

in

2011,

political

and

economic

reforms

in

Myanmar

have

led

to

greater

freedoms

and

unprecedented

optimism

for

the

country’s

future.

However,

in

communities

throughout

Myanmar,

authorities

continue

to

apply

repressive

laws

and

employ

practices

common

Albania's rapid growth in the
decade up to the 2008 global financial crisis propelled it
to middle-income status and helped to reduce poverty. The
global financial crisis in 2008 slammed the brakes on
Albania's largely domestic-demand-driven growth. The
government has accumulated sizable arrears in payments for
public works and value-added tax (VAT) refunds. In a
baseline scenario of no policy reforms, Albania's

A guest post by Nayna J Jhaveri, Ph.D., Resource Tenure Specialist, Tetra Tech

This paper starts with a brief
perspective on urban transport in developing countries,
followed by a detailed presentation of an overall framework
for making projects in this sector. Additional details on
cities and projects used as case studies are given in the
accompanying tables. The challenge for the Bank is to assist
client cities in providing transport infrastructure and
services that respond to demographic, spatial and economic