Rural-urban migration is playing an
increasingly important role in shaping the economic and
demographic landscape of Chinese cities. Over the past two
decades, China has transformed itself from a relatively
immobile society to one in which more than 10 percent of the
population are migrants. China's mobility rate is still
low compared with that of advanced industrial economies, the
sheer size of the migrant flows and their dramatic economic

The main purpose of this study is to
assess the changing landscape of agricultural protection and
taxation patterns in the region. The study is based on the
EU-10 sample, plus Turkey, as well as seven countries in the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS): Kazakhstan, the
Kyrgyz Republic, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan (the CIS-7). In
2000-04, these countries accounted for 89 percent of the

Bringing management of the radio
spectrum closer to markets is long overdue. The radio
spectrum is a major component of the infrastructure that
underpins the information society. Spectrum management,
however, has not kept up with major changes in technology,
business practice, and economic policy that have taken place
worldwide during the last two decades. For many years
traditional government administration of the spectrum worked

This paper studies nonmarket
institutions that facilitate exports. In Malawi, as in many
other developing countries, farmers face numerous
constraints that disconnect them from export markets. The
paper explores the role of a local institution, the burley
tobacco clubs, in bridging smallholders to exports. Burley
clubs potentially enable farmers to increase their tobacco
farming productivity by providing services related to

Energy for heating, cooling, lighting,
mechanical power, and various chemical processes is a
fundamental requirement for both daily life and economic
development. The negative impact on the environment of
current energy systems is increasingly alarming, especially
the global warming consequences of burning fossil fuels. The
future requires change through the development and adoption
of new supply technologies, through a successful search for

This assessment, reflecting
poverty's many dimensions in Mozambique, combines
multiple disciplines and diagnostic tools to explore
poverty. It draws on a combination of approaches and tools
from three separate analytical diagnostics developed by the
World Bank: poverty assessment, country gender assessment,
and country social analysis. It uses monetary, human, and
social indicators and combines quantitative and qualitative

The workshop brings diverse perspectives
from outside the World Bank, providing a forum in which to
exchange ideas and debate in the course of developing the
World Development Report (WDR). Participants at the 2006
Berlin Workshop gathered to discuss challenges and successes
pertaining to agriculture and development. Agriculture is
the major sector contributing to economic development in
many poor countries. Three out of every four poor people in

The World Bank Group's clean energy
for development investment framework action plan has
outlined some of the key activities it intends to undertake
in the area of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and
helping client countries adapt to changes in climate. One of
these activities focuses on an analysis of the role of
low-carbon energy technologies in climate change mitigation.
This report provides an initial analysis of this issue. The

Several studies addressing the supply
and demand for food in China suggest that the nation can
largely meet its needs in the coming decades. However,
these studies do not consider the effects of climate change.
This paper examines whether near future expected changes in
climate are likely to alter this picture. The authors
analyze the effect of temperature and precipitation on net
crop revenues using a cross section consisting of both

This paper provides the results of an
international survey of practitioners with experience in
facilitating the participation of African smallholder
farmers in supply chains for higher-value and/or
differentiated agricultural products. It explores their
perceptions about the constraints inhibiting and the impacts
associated with this supply chain participation. It also
examines their perceptions about the factors affecting the

This paper examines broadly the
intergovernmental structure in the Middle East and North
Africa region, which has one of the most centralized
government structures in the world. The authors address the
reasons behind this centralized structure by looking first
at the history behind the tax systems of the region. They
review the Ottoman taxation system, which has been
predominantly influential as a model, and discuss its impact

This paper develops and tests a proposed
methodology that puts forward a new integrated method for
evaluating the performance of development finance
institutions. This methodology applies assessment criteria
that take into account both the social objective that the
development finance institution addresses and the subsidies
it received in order to achieve such an objective. This
methodology is applied to two pilot case studies-Banadesa