This issues paper discusses a gender
assessment exercise carried out in April-June 2005. It
provides the government of Mali and its partners with
proposals aimed at improving policies and activities that
promote gender equity and equality (GEE). The study is
divided into four sections: Section 1 presents the national
context within which the study falls; Section 2 deals with
the gender profile in Mali; Section 3 addresses the

This note deals with the extent to
which, and the means by which, project level distributional
analysis of benefits can be undertaken and how poverty
impact indicators can be developed. Section 1 sets out the
issues associated with using traditional cost benefit
analysis for the appraisal of pro-poor projects. Section 2
discusses the techniques and analysis available to consider
the distributional consequences of a transport change,

The authors evaluate the impact of two
key factor market distortions in China on rural-urban
inequality and income distribution. They find that creation
of a fully functioning land market has a significant impact
on rural-urban inequality. This reform permits agricultural
households to focus solely on the differential between farm
and non-farm returns to labor in determining whether to work
on or off-farm. This gives rise to an additional 10 million

From what was historically known as
'Arabia Felix', a land of prosperity and
happiness, Yemen has become the most impoverished among the
Arab countries. The government of the united Yemen, formed
in 1990, has launched so far three five-year economic reform
plans with the goal of restoring Yemen's prosperity.
Have these efforts succeeded? What policies are needed to
further reduce poverty? The poverty assessment report aims

The report outlines the work of the
World Bank in addressing client countries with environmental
challenges, and, aims to ensure the lending program
integrates principles of environmental sustainability. It
highlights that the challenge of development assistance lies
in working with clients to implement policies, programs, and
investments that distribute the gains of development in an
equitable manner, by reducing poverty, and avoiding

This review of the active portfolio of
World Bank projects aimed at improving urban environmental
quality was carried out during 2002-03 in order to assess
the level of commitment of the institution to urban
sustainability. The review focuses on the contributions of
key sectors to urban environmental improvements, in
particular on those belonging to the Infrastructure
Vice-Presidency, and on how projects are contributing to

Over the past five years in Turkey, the
agricultural and rural sector has seen substantial change in
transfer policies which now place greater emphasis on
improved equity and investment. These have been summarized
in the earlier World Bank "Review of the Impact of the
Reform of Agricultural Sector Subsidization (2004), and
"Policy and Investment Priorities for Agricultural and
Rural Development" (2005). Currently, the structural

The report provides detailed information
on the geographical distribution of poverty and
vulnerability throughout the country - i.e. regions,
provinces and communes. The information presented is
essential to understand poverty at the local level, and to
address it with appropriate sectoral or cross-sectoral
strategies. Further, when local poverty rates are analyzed
alongside public expenditure data, an initial assessment for

Despite sustained output growth since 1997, low-income Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries (CIS-7) have not experienced growth in employment, a phenomenon observed elsewhere in transitional economies and labeled as "jobless growth." The author addresses the causes of this phenomenon in the CIS-7. He argues that the lack of job creation is explained by a combination of structural factors, including capital-intensive growth, large potential for productivity gains among existing workers, and compartmentalized economies best depicted by a dual labor market framework.

The central theme addressed by this
evaluation, is whether the Bank ' s investment in
cities, improved the lives of the poor. This report is based
on a desk review of the Bank's urban portfolio. It
focuses on the results of the 99 operations completed in the
past 10 years. It uses the four pillars of livability, good
governance, bankability, and competitiveness of the Urban
Strategy Paper as the evaluation framework. At the project

The main objective of this fiscal note
is to assist the Government of Andhra Pradesh (GoAP) in
meeting the challenges mentioned above. To this end, it
provides input into the state's rolling medium-term
fiscal framework exercise. The new Fiscal Responsibility and
Budget Management (FRBM) act requires that the government
will lay out in each financial year a medium-term fiscal
policy statement (together with three-year rolling targets

A "forest-hydrology-poverty
nexus" hypothesis asserts that deforestation in poor
upland areas simultaneously threatens biodiversity and
increases the incidence of flooding, sedimentation, and
other damaging hydrological processes. The authors use rough
heuristics to assess the applicability of this hypothesis to
Central America. They do so by using a simple rule of thumb
to identify watersheds at greater risk of hydrologically