During the past several months, the
Ministry of Environment, Housing and Territorial Development
of Colombia has been researching potential indicators that
would be useful to assess and possibly adopt among which
included the ecological footprint. This work was
commissioned in order to provide the Ministry with a deeper
understanding of the ecological footprint and to train a
number of its staff on the scope of the footprint in order

While polluted surface water is
encountered across most of China, few economic valuation
studies have been conducted on water quality changes.
Limited information about the economic values associated
with those potential water quality improvements or
deteriorations is a disadvantage for making proper choices
in water pollution control and clean-up activities. This
paper reports an economic valuation study conducted in

Lesotho began a structural economic
transformation in the early 1990s. The transformation has
brought higher, more secure incomes to households while the
government succeeded in dramatically improving access to
services such as education, health, water, and
transportation. Yet today, Lesotho faces a number of serious
development challenges, including a high rate of chronic
poverty, entrenched income inequality, and most troubling

This first World Bank for Results report
provides the Bank's shareholders, partners, and
external stakeholders with an integrated view of results and
performance in recent years. It serves as a companion to the
World Bank Corporate Scorecard. Aggregating results that
countries have achieved with Bank support against the
backdrop of global development results, the report also
assesses operational and organizational performance at the

Economic analyses of development
projects and policies often involve assigning an economic
value to changes in the risk of loss of human life. A
typical term used in the economic analyses is the value of
statistical life, which reflects the aggregation of
individuals' willingness to pay for fatal risk
reduction and therefore the economic value to society to
reduce the statistical incidence of premature death in the

Economic growth in Solomon Islands since
the end of civil conflict in 2003 has been driven by rapid
expansion of the forestry sector and large increases in
international aid flows. Stocks of natural forest logs are
nearing exhaustion and, as the security situation improves,
aid flows are likely to flatten off. The Solomon Islands
Government asked the World Bank to investigate future growth
prospects. This note summarizes the findings and presents a

This report presents the problem,
describes the analytical framework, the African and World
context and the characteristics that need to be present for
a responsible and effective urbanization. Chapter one
discusses the issues involved in measuring urban growth and
density and the problem of under-measuring density. Chapter
two introduces key aspects of the recent urbanization in
Tanzania, including migration, structure of economy and

This briefing note examines perspectives
on trust, authority, and responsibility for decision making
in Timor-Leste, using findings from the justice module
included in an extension of the 2007 Timor-Leste Survey of
Living Standards (TLSLS2) and a review of relevant
social-science literature. It is hoped that this report will
be a valuable resource for civil servants, civil society,
and donor agencies working in Timor-Leste. This note

This paper proposes a parametric
approach to estimating a dynamic binary response panel data
model that allows for endogenous contemporaneous regressors.
This approach is of particular value for settings in which
one wants to estimate the effects of an endogenous treatment
on a binary outcome. The model is next used to examine the
impact of rural-urban migration on the likelihood that
households in rural China fall below the poverty line. In

The situation within the water supply
and sanitation (WSS) sector in Mauritania is somewhat
contradictory: in spite of the weakness of the institutions
in charge of the sector and the lack of financing for
sanitation and, more recently, for the rural water supply
(RWS) subsector, significant improvements have been made in
the access rates since 1990. The institutional reform of the
RWS subsector, notably marked by the implementation of a

The last two decades have witnessed a
growing recognition of the importance of taking cultural and
ethnic diversity into consideration when designing and
implementing development programs. As societies around the
world have become more culturally diverse, and the role
culture plays in the formation of identity has become better
understood, governments are beginning to pay greater
attention to the management of cultural diversity and are

This report addresses the large flood
exposures of Central Europe and proposes efficient financial
and risk transfer mechanisms to mitigate fiscal losses from
natural catastrophes.. The report is primarily addressed to
the governments of the region which should build into their
fiscal planning, the necessary contingent funding
mechanisms, based on their exposures. While there exist
pan-European mechanisms such as the EU Solidarity Fund to