The Philippines by virtue of its geographic circumstances is highly prone to natural disasters, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tropical cyclones and floods, making it one of the most disaster prone countries in the world. This report seeks to document the impacts of natural disasters on the social and economic development of the Philippines; assess the country's current capacity to reduce and manage disaster risk; and identify options for more effective management of that risk.

Irrigation management transfer is an
important strategy among donors and governments to
strengthen farmer control over water and irrigation
infrastructure. This study seeks to understand whether
irrigation management transfer is meeting the promise of its
commitments. The authors use data from a survey of 68
irrigator associations and 1,020 farm households in the
Philippines to estimate the impact of irrigation management

This book explores the outstanding
issues in global agricultural trade policy and evolving
world production and trade patterns. Its coverage of
agricultural trade issues ranges from the details of
cross-cutting policy issues to the highly distorted
agricultural trade regimes of industrial countries and
detailed studies of agricultural commodities of economic
importance to many developing countries. The book brings

This report, Building Response
Strategies to Climate Change in Agricultural Systems in
Latin America, reports the results of action research to
identify and prioritize stakeholder driven, locally relevant
response options to climate change in Latin American
agriculture. The study has three primary objectives. The
first is to develop and apply a pilot methodology for
assessing agricultural vulnerability to climate change and

This paper investigates the impact of
international migration on technical efficiency, resource
allocation and income from agricultural production of family
farming in Albania. The results suggest that migration is
used by rural households as a pathway out of agriculture:
migration is negatively associated with the allocation of
both labor and non-labor inputs in agriculture, while no
significant differences can be detected in terms of farm

Agricultural and Rural Development (ARD)
is a fundamental component of Ethiopia's economic
growth and poverty reduction strategy. The agricultural
development strategy under Agriculture Development Led
Industrialization (ADLI) and Sustainable Development and
Poverty Reduction Program (SDPRP) focused on enhancing the
productive capacity of smallholder farmers, promoting crop
diversification, shifting to a market based system, ensuring

Opium, Afghanistan's leading
economic activity, lies at the heart of the challenges the
country faces in state building, governance, security, and
development. With their narrow law enforcement focus and
limited recognition of development, security, and political
implications, current global counter-narcotics polices
impose a heavy burden on Afghanistan. This paper first
provides a summary overview of Afghanistan's opium

Danang City is the capital and economic
hub of the central region of Vietnam. As in all of the major
urban centers of the country, Danang is currently
experiencing rapid urbanization fueled by consistent
economic growth and the resultant steady increase in
population, much through rural-urban migration. For this
reason, central and city government has been increasingly
concerned with the urban development and housing sectors.

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

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

This study is part of the second phase of a long-term programmatic work on poverty in Mexico, in three phases being carried out by the Bank at the request of the Government of Mexico.

The chapters, or "policy
notes," of this report, creating the foundations for
equitable growth in Mexico 2006-2012, are dedicated to
trying to solve parts of the puzzle as to why Mexico's
level of economic development has failed to approach the
level of its NAFTA trading partners, or the level of a
typical OECD member state. Each chapter of this new report
uses the 2000 policy notes as a reference. In this report,