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 global monitoring report 2008 comes
at an important time. This year marks the halfway point in
the effort to achieve the millennium development goals
(MDGs) by 2015. This is also an important year to work
toward a consensus on how the world is going to respond to
the challenge of climate change, building on the foundation
laid at the conference in Bali in December 2007.
Successfully meeting this challenge will be essential for

Irrigation has made a major contribution
to poverty reduction in the past decades, enabling higher
yields and better nutrition. Despite these achievements,
large-scale irrigation schemes have usually yielded low
returns and attracted negative publicity because of their
adverse environmental and social impacts. As a result, the
Bank has largely switched its support for irrigation away
from new construction toward rehabilitation and policy

Income inequality in China has risen
rapidly in the past decades across regions, between rural
and urban sectors, and within provinces. The dynamics of
divergence across these sub-national areas have taken the
form of a "race to the top" - meaning that all
segments of the population, including the poor with low
education in lagging inland rural areas, have experienced
gains in average income. The largest gains have been

This report seeks to identify changes in
human development outcomes in a period of deepening
decentralization and to suggest how the country's
decentralized governance structure will be improved to
increase access to, as well as the quality of, relevant
services. The report states decentralized governance
structure helped facilitate improvements in service delivery
and human development outcomes. The report argues that while

This paper analyzes poverty in Haiti
based on the first Living Conditions Survey of 7,186
households covering the whole country and representative at
the regional level. Using a USD1 a day extreme poverty line,
the analysis reveals that 49 percent of Haitian households
live in absolute poverty. Twenty, 56, and 58 percent of
households in metropolitan, urban, and rural areas,
respectively, are poor. At the regional level, poverty is

This paper examines the determinants of
remittance behavior for Vietnam using data from the 2004
Vietnam Migration Survey on internal migrants. It considers
how, among other things, the vulnerability of a
migrant's life at the destination, their link to
relatives back home, and the time spent at the destination
affect remittances. The paper finds that migrants act as
risk-averse economic agents and send remittances back to the

This paper compares how results using
various methods to construct asset indices match results
using per capita expenditures. The analysis shows that
inferences about inequalities in education, health care use,
fertility, child mortality, as well as labor market outcomes
are quite robust to the specific economic status measure
used. The measures-most significantly per capita
expenditures versus the class of asset indices-do not,

There is a general consensus that most
of the poor in developing countries are net food buyers and
food price increases are bad for the poor. This could be
expected of urban poor, but it is also often attributed to
the rural poor. Recent food price increases have increased
the importance of this issue, and the possible policy
responses to these price increases. This paper examines the
characteristics of net food sellers and buyers in nine

This report reviews Community Driven
Development (CDD) projects in Lao People's Democratic
Republic (PDR) to determine their effectiveness in
channeling resources to communities for poverty reduction.
The study examines three CDD projects in depth: the Poverty
Reduction Fund, the Village Investment for the Poor (both
supported by the World Bank), and the Government-financed
Village Development Fund. Through close analysis of these

The importance of the tertiary road
sector in contributing to economic development and poverty
alleviation efforts cannot be understated. In Albania,
forty-nine percent of rural producers have stated that a
lack of adequate transportation, primarily good roads, was
their biggest marketing problem. In Bosnia and Herzegovina,
there is discontent about the quality of the regional and
tertiary roads, with complaints about the low quality of

The case studies in this book were
developed as part of a year-long learning process initiated
by the World Bank in 2003-4 to examine large scale poverty
reduction programs in a wide range of developing countries
around the world. This volume presents 12 of the case
studies from South Asia. . The last two decades saw
substantial change in the countries of South Asia. All
countries of the subcontinent experienced more rapid growth