This Country Partnership Framework (CPF)
covers the five-year period FY16-20. Anchored in the
government’s medium-term development plan as outlined in a
January 2015 Cabinet of Ministers Program of Action, it also
reflects the analysis and recommendations of the World Bank
Group’s (WBG) 2015 Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) for
Uzbekistan and the lessons learned from the Completion
Report of the previous CPS. The CPF’s objectives and

Central America is undergoing an
important transition, with urban populations increasingat
accelerated speeds, bringing pressing challenges as well as
opportunities to boost sustained,inclusive and resilient
growth. Today, 59 percent of Central America's
population lives in urban areas, but it is expected that
within the next generation 7 out of 10 people will live in
cities, equivalent to adding 700,000 new urban residents

This Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) is designed to assess the key constraints and opportunities facing Mozambique as it strives to sustain robust growth and macroeconomic stability while accelerating poverty reduction and promoting greater economic inclusiveness. The SCD is organized into six chapters. Chapter two describes the evolution of poverty and inequality, explores their regional and demographic dimensions, and identifies strategies for accelerating poverty reduction.

This Country Partnership Framework (CPF)
for Tunisia, prepared jointly by International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), International Finance
Corporation (IFC) and Multilateral Investment Guarantee
Agency (MIGA) covers the period Fiscal Year (FY) 2016
through FY 2020. The CPF is anchored in the Government of
Tunisia’s September 2015 Note d’Orientation Stratégique and
the WBG’s October 2015 Strategy for the Middle East and

Cameroon is a lower-middle income country with social indicators and levels of poverty which are below those for comparator countries. Large and rising inequalities between north and south, inefficiencies in public resource allocation and an adverse business environment explain this. While insecurity due to Boko Haram activities and rapidly rising public debt constrain efforts at poverty reduction, there exists a huge potential for economic growth and poverty reduction. This potential remains mostly untapped.

Groundwater is a vital yet threatened
resource in much of South Asia. This paper develops a model
of groundwater transactions under payoff uncertainty arising
from unpredictable fluctuations in groundwater availability
during the agricultural dry season. The model highlights the
trade-off between the ex post inefficiency of long-term
contracts and the ex ante inefficiency of spot contracts.
The structural parameters are estimated using detailed

Latin America and the Caribbean (LCR)
will be center stage in the global development debate as
leaders from around the world convene in Lima, Peru for the
annual meetings of the World Bank Group and International
Monetary Fund. Critical progress in poverty reduction has
been made in the region over the last decade. The region’s
bottom 40 percent of the population saw growth eclipsing
that seen by the group in every other region in the world.

Land rights and the systems that
administer them can vary significantly across the world and
within countries (World Bank 2003). For a number of reasons,
land rights may be unclear or insecure. Securing land rights
plays an important role in driving economic growth and
poverty reduction. In recent years there has been increasing
awareness of the relevance of land tenure issues to food
security, climate change, rapid urbanization, informality,

The Philippine Economic Update (PEU)
provides an update on key economic and social developments,
as well as policies over the past six months. It also
presents findings from recent World Bank studies on the
Philippines. It places them in a longer term and global
context, and assesses the implications of these developments
and policies on the outlook for the Philippines. Its
coverage ranges from the macro-economy and financial markets

Over the past quarter century, Vietnam’s
agricultural sector has made enormous progress. Vietnam’s
performance in terms of agricultural yields, output, and
exports, however, has been more impressive than its gains in
efficiency, farmer welfare, and product quality. Vietnamese
agriculture now sits at a turning point. The agricultural
sector now faces growing domestic competition - from cities,
industry, and services - for labor, land, and water. Rising

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) is a constitutionally recognized semiautonomous region in northern Iraq. Its government, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), based in Erbil, has the right, under the Iraqi constitution of 2005, to exercise legislative, executive, and judicial powers according to the constitution, except in what is listed therein as exclusive powers of the federal authorities. The Iraqi constitution defines the Kurdistan Region as a federal entity of Iraq. KRG has a parliamentary democracy with a regional assembly that consists of 111 seats.

Access to adequate housing is critically
important to the health and wellbeing of the world’s
population. Yet, despite the fact that this statement is
part of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human
Rights and has been on the global policy agenda for many
years, hundreds of millions of people continue to live in
inadequate conditions with little or no access to decent
housing. The demand for housing solutions will increase as