Albania has undertaken major reforms in
its system of local government finance since 2000. What had
been a system in which local functions were ambiguous and
financing was largely provided through tightly controlled
earmarked grants is now one in which functions are
relatively clear and local governments have more autonomy
over the allocation of funds. A new system of competitive
grants for infrastructure investment has been introduced.

This report, which has been prepared by
the World Bank in cooperation with the National Statistical
Committee, provides an assessment of poverty in the Kyrgyz
Republic using the most recent data available. The objective
of this report is to understand to what extent economic
growth has reduced poverty and led to improved living
conditions for the population during 2000-2005. The report
also attempts to answer three questions about the Kyrgyz

This report on Albania urban sector
review focuses on trends and issues that have come to the
fore with rapid urbanization and with the recent
decentralization of major responsibilities to local
governments. Continuing the achievements and addressing the
problems will require actions by local governments and, just
as importantly, by the central government, which sets the
legal and regulatory conditions for local governance and the

This sector report claims that in the
three years between 2002 and 2005 alone, almost 235,000
people have moved out of poverty in Albania. Strong economic
growth and large inflow of remittances are at the center of
this impressive achievement. However, low productivity of
predominantly small family farms has put a drag on rural
growth prospects. Moreover, Ndihma Ekonomike (NE) program,
the means-tested income support program is small in scale,

The present report was prepared on the
basis of the findings of an international workshop held from
September 12-14, 2005, in Salvador da Bahia, and was
attended by delegations of three to five practitioners from
12 cities in Latin America, Africa and Asia. It had two main
objectives: (a) to share experiences on innovative solutions
to provide electricity services in poor peri-urban and urban
areas; and (b) to develop a body of knowledge to be

This publication offers crucial lessons
for policy makers and development experts who may be
considering using small area poverty maps as tools of
economic development and helps add to our array of tools for
dealing with the political economy issues of poverty. It
represents a major contribution to a little understood
aspect of the well-known adage "location, location,
location," demonstrating that the conceptualization of

Delivering on the Promise of Pro-Poor
Growth contributes to the debate on how to accelerate
poverty reduction by providing insights from eight countries
that have been relatively successful in delivering pro-poor
growth: Bangladesh, Brazil, Ghana, India, Indonesia,
Tunisia, Uganda, and Vietnam. It integrates growth analytics
with the microanalysis of household data to determine how
country policies and conditions interact to reduce poverty

This report is part of the Armenia
Programmatic Poverty Assessment work. It is jointly produced
by the National Statistics Service (NSS) of the Republic of
Armenia and the World Bank. Armenia has achieved impressive
economic growth and poverty reduction since the late 1990s.
The country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has grown at
an astounding annual rate of over 11 percent since 2002. The
main objectives of Armenia poverty are: (i) to inform policy

Half of the moderately poor, and one third of the extremely poor now live in urban areas in Mexico. While cities offer a number of opportunities and specific challenges for the poor, low quality and high costs restrict real access to basic public services. Yet, the urban-rural distinctions need to be seen as a continuum, where depth and characteristics of poverty vary with settlement size. The objective of this report is to inform the design of urban poverty interventions. It is organized as follows.

Rural poverty remains a crucial part of the poverty picture in Argentina. This paper used a rural dataset collected by the World Bank in 2003. Findings show that extreme income poverty in rural areas reached 39 percent of the people or 200,000-250,000 indigent families.

This paper addresses the deceptively simple question: What is the rural population of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)? It argues that rurality is a gradient, not a dichotomy, and nominates two dimensions to that gradient: population density and remoteness from large metropolitan areas. It uses geographically referenced population data (from the Gridded Population of the World, version 3) to tabulate the distribution of populations in Latin America and in individual countries by population density and by remoteness.

The paper examines the ways in which recent economic growth has been uneven in China and India and what this has meant for inequality and poverty. Drawing on analyses based on existing household survey data and aggregate data from official sources, the authors show that growth has indeed been uneven-geographically, sectorally, and at the household level-and that this has meant uneven progress against poverty, less poverty reduction than might have been achieved had growth been more balanced, and an increase in income inequality.