This paper provides an overview of land reform in South Africa from 1994 to 2011, with the focus on the land redistribution. The government policies and associated implementation since 1994 have not generated expected social and economic results for a number of reasons. Even where land has been transferred, it appears to have had minimal impact on the livelihoods of beneficiaries, largely because of inappropriate project design, a lack of necessary support services and shortages of working capital, leading to widespread underutilization of land.

Latin America is together with
Sub-Saharan Africa the most unequal region of the world.
This paper documents recent inequality trends in the Latin
American region, going beyond traditional measures of income
inequality. The paper also reviews some of the explanations
that have been put forward to understand the current
situation, and discusses why reducing income inequality
should be an important policy priority. In particular, the

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

In many poor countries, the recent
increases in prices of staple foods raise the real incomes
of those selling food, many of whom are relatively poor,
while hurting net food consumers, many of whom are also
relatively poor. The impacts on poverty will certainly be
very diverse, but the average impact on poverty depends upon
the balance between these two effects, and can only be
determined by looking at real-world data. Results using

Large numbers of agricultural labor
moved from the countryside to cities after the economic
reforms in China. Migration and remittances play an
important role in transforming the structure of rural
household income. This paper examines the impact of
rural-to-urban migration on rural poverty and inequality in
the case of Hubei province using the data of a 2002
household survey. Since remittances are a potential

All countries fund safety net programs
for the protection of their people. Though an increasing
number of safety net programs are extremely well thought
out, adroitly implemented, and demonstrably effective, many
others are not. This book aims to assist those concerned
with social policy to understand why countries need social
assistance, what kind of safety programs will serve those
best and how to develop such programs for maximum

Brazil's inequalities in welfare
and poverty across and within regions can be accounted for
by differences in household attributes and returns to those
attributes. This paper uses Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions at
the mean as well as at different quantiles of welfare
distributions on regionally representative household survey
data (2002-03 Household Budget Survey). The analysis finds
that household attributes account for most of the welfare

At the outset of China's reform
period, the country had a far higher poverty rate than for
Africa as a whole. Within five years that was no longer
true. This paper tries to explain how China escaped from a
situation in which extreme poverty persisted due to failed
and unpopular policies. While acknowledging that Africa
faces constraints that China did not, and that context
matters, two lessons stand out. The first is the importance

The analysis of the cost of
environmental degradation conducted as part of the country
environmental analysis (CEA) shows that the most costly
problems associated with environmental degradation are urban
and indoor air pollution; inadequate water supply,
sanitation, and hygiene; natural disasters (such as flooding
and landslides); and land degradation. The burden of these
costs falls most heavily on vulnerable segments of the

Bangladesh represents a success story
among developing countries. Poverty incidence, which was as
high as 57 percent at the beginning of the 1990s, had
declined to 49 percent in 2000. This trend accelerated
subsequently, reducing the poverty headcount rate to 40
percent in 2005. The primary contributing factor was robust
and stable economic growth along with no worsening of
inequality. Respectable GDP growth that started at the

The objective of this report is to
analyze the important roles of labor markets, employment,
productivity, and labor income in facilitating shared growth
and promoting poverty reduction in Bangladesh. First, the
report provides a background discussion of poverty, reform,
and growth in Bangladesh. Following that, it gives an
overview of the labor market, describing the country's
demographics, the institutional structure of the labor

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