Costa Rica stands out for being among the most politically stable, progressive, prosperous, and environmentally conscious nations in the Latin America and the Caribbean region. Its development model has brought important economic, social, and environmental dividends, with sustained growth, upward mobility for a large share of the population, important gains in social indicators, and significant achievements in reforestation and conservation. However, there are a number of development challenges that need to be addressed to maintain the country’s successful development path.

Policies that enable rural communities
to participate in expanding economic opportunities can be
central to inclusive growth in Myanmar. Rural communities
are home to the majority of Myanmar’s population, the
majority of its many ethnic groups, and 70 percent of its
poor. Development in rural areas is constrained by low
returns to agriculture, and significantly lower levels of
public service delivery and human development outcomes

Progress on reducing extreme poverty and
boosting shared prosperity need to be further enhanced in
the near-term by sustaining Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and
remittances growth, creating jobs, containing inflation, and
making progress on improving the quality of public service
delivery. Private investments need to increase significantly
to achieve the government’s 7 percent growth target for
FY16. Moving forward in the immediate future, stronger

Afghanistan is a deeply fragile and
conflict affected state. It has been in almost constant
conflict for over 35 years since the Soviet invasion of
1979. Today the country is at a crossroads in its
development with economic growth down sharply and poverty
incidence stubbornly high. Afghanistan faces tremendous
development challenges. Gross domestic product (GDP)
per-capita is among the lowest in the world, poverty is deep

Afghanistan’s per capita Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) grew at an average annual rate of 6.9 percent
during that period. In contrast, in 2007-08, 36 percent of
Afghans were poor, and four years later, still, more than
one in three Afghans did not have the buying power to
satisfy their basic food and non-food needs. Economic growth
in Afghanistan, therefore, is not in and of itself enough to
reduce poverty. To achieve poverty reduction, economic

Over the last 20 years, poor rural
farmers in Nigeria have seen the benefits of community
organization as a tool for local economic development under
the National Fadama Development Project series. They have
witnessed improvements in rural areas that have embraced a
more inclusive and participatory model of local economic
decision making. Many communities have come together under
the umbrella of new institutional arrangements for

Policy makers in developing countries,
including India, are increasingly sensitive to the links
between spatial transformation and economic development.
However, the empirical knowledge available on those links is
most often insufficient to guide policy decisions. There is
no shortage of case studies on urban agglomerations of
different sorts, or of benchmarking exercises for states and
districts, but more systematic evidence is scarce. To help

With 2015 marking the transition from
the Millennium to the Sustainable Development Goals, the
international community can celebrate many development
successes since 2000. Three key challenges stand out: the
depth of remaining poverty, the unevenness in shared
prosperity, and the persistent disparities in non-income
dimensions of development. First, the policy discourse needs
to focus more directly on the poorest among the poor. While

As part of the 2006-2011 National
Development Plan, the Plurinational State of Bolivia
launched two cash transfer programs and one youth labor
training program aimed at promoting the accumulation of
households’ human capital: the Juancito Pinto Educational
Grant, the Juana Azurduy Mother-Child Grant, and my first
decent job. The objective of this paper is to analyze the
effectiveness of the targeting mechanisms utilized in these

This issue includes the following
headings: Climate Change and Rural Livelihoods in
Bangladesh; Natural Disasters and Household Well-Being; Road
Improvement and Deforestation, Pathways toward Zero-Carbon
Electricity; The Need for Broader Information in Climate
Change Assessment; Effectiveness of Protected Areas; and
Vulnerability to Malnutrition in the West African Sahel

This systematic country diagnosis (SCD)
for Chad aims to identify how to achieve the twin goals of
ending poverty and improving shared prosperity. It
acknowledges both: (i) the need for selectivity in pro-poor
interventions, and (ii) the inherent difficulty to do so
given the many competing binding reasons for poverty.
Selectivity means the identification of principal
opportunities for sustainable poverty reduction in the next

The World Bank Group in 2013 made the elimination of extreme poverty by 2030 a central institutional focus and purpose. This evaluation examines how, and how well, the Bank Group has focused its support on poverty reduction over the past decade, and what lessons to draw from this moving forward. The lessons aim to strengthen the Bank’s country diagnostics, improve the design of country strategies, and build greater learning opportunities from program experience.