The authors describe and analyze water resources reform and decentralization of river basin management in the state of Ceara, Northeast Brazil, the poorest part of the country. The Jaguaribe river basin is located entirely within the state of Ceara. With a drainage area of 72,560 square kilometers, it covers almost half of the state's territory. The basin has 80 municipalities and more than 2 million people, about half rural and half urban, in primarily small towns, representing about a third of Ceara's population.

Despite the impressive performance of
the economy in the last five years, however, poverty in
Albania has remained high, and per capita income, at around
US$1,230 in 2002, has remained one of the lowest among
transition economies. In an effort to adopt policies to
share widely the benefits of growth, and reduce poverty, the
Government outlined a poverty alleviation strategy in the
2000 Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (I-PRSP), and

A major objective of this report is to provide a deeper, more policy relevant understanding of the welfare impacts of the coffee crisis - including the effects of the crisis on household income, consumption, poverty, as well as on basic human development outcomes, such as education and child nutrition. To do this, the study has generated a body of new empirical evidence, drawing from an unusually rich collection of household survey data from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

This book is organized as follows:
Introduction: Is Geography Destiny? Chapter 1 discuses The
Channels of Influence of Geography: Latin America from an
International Perspective. Chapter 2 discusses The Other
Side of The Mountain: The Influence of Geography Within
Countries. Chapter 3 discusses Policies to Overcome the
Limitations of Geography

The importance of distributional issues in policymaking creates a need for empirical tools to assess the social impact of economic shocks and policies. This paper reviews some of the modeling approaches that are currently in use at the World Bank and other international financial institutions. The specification of these models is dictated by the issues at stake, the knowledge about the nature of the process involved, and the availability and reliability of relevant data. Furthermore, shocks and policies have macroeconomic, structural, and distributional implications.

Bangladesh has marked considerable
progress since independence in 1971 despite its dire initial
conditions. Real per capita income is about 60percent higher
now than in 1971. The share of population in poverty
currently stands at about 50 percent, compared with over 70
percent in the early 1970s. Even more impressive has been
the progress in improving the social and human dimensions of
poverty. Bangladesh's faster gains in human development

Fueled by fast-expanding demand, the production of meat and milk in the developing world has doubled in recent decades, and this trend is expected to continue. This expanding sector can provide income, employment, and high quality nutrition for vulnerable groups, and in many areas of the world, essential soil fertility inputs.

Urban growth is, in all parts of the
world, inevitable and welcomed. Despite concerns that local
governments will not be able to address those issues
associated with increased urban population, the number of
people living in urban centers will sur-pass those of the
rural population by 2030. Since productivity levels are
consistently higher in urban areas than in rural settings,
this would seem a reason to rejoice since it suggests more

In 2002, half of Mexico's
population lived in poverty and one fifth in extreme
poverty, slightly lower than before the 1994-1995 crisis.
Mexico has made major progress in some poverty dimensions
-health, nutrition and education outcomes, access to basic
health and education services, electricity, water and (to a
lesser extent) sanitation. Large increases in government
spending enabled key social programs to expand. Programs

This regional study encompasses three
Central American countries: Nicaragua, Guatemala, and
Honduras. The focus of this report is Honduras. The
objective of the study is to understand how broad-based
economic growth can be stimulated and sustained in rural
Central America. The study identifies "drivers" of
sustainable rural growth and poverty reduction. Drivers are
defined as the assets and combinations of assets needed by

Following the endorsement of the Millennium Development Goals, there is an increasing demand for methods to track poverty regularly. This paper develops an economically intuitive and inexpensive methodology to do so in the absence of regular, comparable data on household consumption. The minimum data requirements for the methodology are the availability of a household budget survey and a series of surveys with a comparable set of asset data also contained in the budget survey. The methodology is illustrated using a series of Demographic Health Surveys from Kenya.

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