Brazil's inequalities in welfare
and poverty across and within regions can be accounted for
by differences in household attributes and returns to those
attributes. This paper uses Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions at
the mean as well as at different quantiles of welfare
distributions on regionally representative household survey
data (2002-03 Household Budget Survey). The analysis finds
that household attributes account for most of the welfare

This report reviews China's water
scarcity situation, assesses the policy and institutional
requirements for addressing it, and recommends key areas for
strengthening and reform. It is a synthesis of the main
findings and recommendations from analytical work and case
studies prepared under the World Bank Analytical and
Advisory Assistance (AAA) program entitled 'Addressing
China's Water Scarcity: from Analysis to Action.'

The measurement of inequality of
opportunity has hitherto not been attempted in a number of
countries because of data limitations. This paper proposes
two alternative approaches to circumventing the missing data
problems in countries where a demographic and health survey
and an ancillary household expenditure survey are available.
One method relies only on the demographic and health survey,
and constructs a wealth index as a measure of economic

This paper evaluates the impact of the
Thailand Village and Urban Revolving Fund on household
expenditure, income, and assets. The revolving fund was
launched in 2001 when the Government of Thailand promised to
provide a million baht (about $22,500) to every village and
urban community in Thailand as working capital for
locally-run rotating credit associations. The money about
$2 billion in total was quickly disbursed to locally-run

This study builds a profile of the
status of poverty and vulnerability in Malawi. Malawi is a
small land-locked country, with one of the highest
population densities in Sub-Saharan Africa, and one of the
lowest per capita income levels in the world. Almost 90
percent of the population lives in rural areas, and is
mostly engaged in smallholder, rain-fed agriculture. Most
people are therefore highly vulnerable to annual rainfall

This report " Country Social
Analysis (CSA) " focused on ethnicity and development
in Vietnam is a provocative analysis of marginality in
contemporary Southeast Asia. It seeks to understand the
macro social and political processes, and provides an
analysis of how social, political, and cultural factors
influence the opportunities and constraints to more
equitable, inclusive development. This study provides

At the outset of China's reform
period, the country had a far higher poverty rate than for
Africa as a whole. Within five years that was no longer
true. This paper tries to explain how China escaped from a
situation in which extreme poverty persisted due to failed
and unpopular policies. While acknowledging that Africa
faces constraints that China did not, and that context
matters, two lessons stand out. The first is the importance

The overall goal of the analysis
presented in this report is to advance the understanding and
integration in operational terms of environmental water
allocation into integrated water resources management. The
specific objectives of this report are the following: 1)
document the changing understanding of environmental flows,
by both water resources practitioners and by environmental
experts within the Bank and in borrowing countries; 2) draw

China has seen a huge reduction in the
incidence of extreme poverty since the economic reforms that
started in the late 1970s. Yet, the growth process has been
highly uneven across sectors and regions. The paper tests
whether the pattern of China´s growth mattered to poverty
reduction using a new provincial panel data set constructed
for this purpose. The econometric tests support the view
that the primary sector (mainly agriculture) has been the

In late 2008 the Republic of Armenia
requested the Bank's assistance to mitigate the impact
of the global financial crisis. This technical note
describes how the Lifeline Road Improvement Project (LRIP)
was prepared and implemented as a Rapid Response Project,
prepared in only six weeks. This project saw over 150 km of
roads improved and almost 12,000 person-months of employment
generated during an eight month period between May to

Municipalities in Mozambique were
established by law in 1997 and elected in 1998 for the first
time, only a few years after the peace agreement. Most
inherited archaic and dysfunctional remnants of colonial and
central government systems and infrastructure, and as such
limited progress was achieved in transforming them into
functioning local governments during the first mandate
(1998-2002). During the second mandate (2003-2008), however,

This document builds upon several recent
studies and reports carried out in the 2006-2007 period. The
first note, entitled analysis of housing supply mechanisms
(World Bank), analyzes the situation of housing supply in
urban areas in Egypt, including the study of existing formal
and informal mechanisms for the delivery of urban housing,
the institutions responsible for supply and regulation, the
characteristics of the formal and informal stock, and the