The overall objective of the
Comprehensive Assessment of the Agricultural Sector (CAAS)
is to provide an evidence base to enable appropriate
strategic policy responses by the Government of Liberia
(GoL) and its development partners in order to maximize the
contribution of the agriculture sector to the
Government's overarching policy objectives. Given the
strong relationship between growth in agricultural

Poverty and Social Impact Analysis
(PSIA) is an approach used increasingly by governments,
civil society organizations, the World Bank, and other
development partners to examine the distributional impacts
of policy reforms on the well-being of different
stakeholders groups, particularly the poor and vulnerable.
PSIA has an important role in the elaboration and
implementation of poverty reduction strategies in developing

This study answers the key questions on marine protected areas (MPAs) by assessing country experience with these and other tools along the marine management area continuum that have been adopted to address loss of biodiversity and fisheries and other marine resource degradation, which have eroded traditional use rights and cultural identify.

Agricultural water management is a vital
practice in ensuring reduction, and environmental
protection. After decades of successfully expanding
irrigation and improving productivity, farmers and managers
face an emerging crisis in the form of poorly performing
irrigation schemes, slow modernization, declining
investment, constrained water availability, and
environmental degradation. More and better investments in

This regional study encompasses three
Central American countries: Nicaragua, Guatemala, and
Honduras. The focus of this report is Honduras. The
objective of the study is to understand how broad-based
economic growth can be stimulated and sustained in rural
Central America. The study identifies "drivers" of
sustainable rural growth and poverty reduction. Drivers are
defined as the assets and combinations of assets needed by

A decade and a half of relative peace and political stability, broad economic reforms, and far-reaching political decentralization have brought Ethiopia back from one of its lowest levels of income per capita to one of its highest levels over the past forty years. At the same time, Gross Domestic Product per capita today is still only slightly above the levels reached in the early 1970 underscoring the deep-rooted and complex nature of poverty in Ethiopia.

This paper addresses labor markets in
Haiti, including farm and nonfarm employment and income
generation. The analyses are based on the first Living
Conditions Survey of 7,186 households covering the whole
country and representative at the regional level. The
findings suggest that four key determinants of employment
and productivity in nonfarm activities are education,
gender, location, and migration status. This is emphasized

This report summarizes the findings of a
study undertaken by the World Bank at the request of the
Government of Rwanda. The study had three main objectives:
(i) Validate the argument that agriculture has potential to
become a leading engine of pro-poor growth in Rwanda and
identify potential sources of rapid and sustainable growth
within the agricultural sector; (ii) identify key actions
that will be needed to unlock these sources of agricultural

Population growth combined with economic growth will increasingly stress water resources and this has the potential to be the dominant environmental and possibly the most important development issue facing Bangladesh in the coming half century.

This paper investigates the role of
services in the household response to trade reforms in
Vietnam. The relative response of the households and income
growth after a major trade liberalization in rice are
analyzed aiming to answer the following questions: What type
of households, in which locations, having access to what
type of services, benefited more from the reforms? It
focuses on services that have an impact on transaction costs

This report for Iraq - country water
resources assistance strategy (CWRAS) addresses these
objectives in two parts. The first part, which is largely
descriptive, reviews existing conditions and summarizes
Iraq's considerable accomplishments over the past
decades in developing and managing water resources. The
second part investigates challenges and priorities-how to
balance the needs of short-term reconstruction and the

This paper investigates the impacts of cotton marketing reforms on farm productivity, a key element for poverty alleviation, in rural Zambia. The reforms comprised the elimination of the Zambian cotton marketing board that was in place since 1977. Following liberalization, the sector adopted an outgrower scheme, whereby firms provided extension services to farmers and sold inputs on loans that were repaid at the time of harvest. There are two distinctive phases of the reforms: a failure of the outgrower scheme, and a subsequent period of success of the scheme.