Understanding Changes in Poverty brings
together different methods to decompose the contributions to
poverty reduction. A simple approach quantifies the
contribution of changes in demographics, employment,
earnings, public transfers, and remittances to poverty
reduction. A more complex approach quantifies the
contributions to poverty reduction from changes in
individual and household characteristics, including changes

Remarks delivered by Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank Group, discuss Ethiopia’s commitment to climate action, the role of industrialization in delivering development, and bringing these together for low-carbon, equitable growth. He speaks about the government’s promotion of low-carbon growth, poverty reduction, and climate resilience to tackle the impact of climate changes.

This report assesses the impact of
participation in farmer organizations (FOs) on food security
of rural households in Cambodia. The study is particularly
set out to following: (1) examine FOs’ roles and operation
and challenges for improving household’s food security; (2)
analyze household’s characteristics that determine
participation in FOs; (3) assess the impact of FOs on food
security and livelihood of the rural poor; and (4) provide

In conflict-prone situations, access to
markets is necessary to restore economic growth and generate
the preconditions for peace and reconstruction. Hence, the
rehabilitation of damaged transport infrastructure has
emerged as an overarching investment priority among donors
and governments. This paper brings together two distinct
strands of literature on the effects of conflict on welfare
and on the economic impact of transport infrastructure. The

Self-help groups (SHGs) are the most
common form of microfinance in India. The authors provide
evidence that SHGs, composed of women only, undertake
collective actions for the provision of public goods within
village communities. Using a theoretical model, this paper
shows that an elected official, whose aim is to maximize
re-election chances, exerts higher effort in providing
public goods when private citizens undertake collective

Private investment in agriculture in
developing countries, both domestic and foreign, has been on
the rise for nearly two decades. This paper focuses on
large-scale agricultural projects in developing countries,
involving the lease of farmland, which rose sharply after
the food crisis of 2008. It is important that such
investments are sustainable not only in the long term, but
also beneficial in the short term with minimal risks or

The last poverty assessment for Rwanda
was conducted in 1997. Three years after the genocide, the
country was characterized by deep and widespread poverty,
rock-bottom health indicators, and pervasive hunger and food
insecurity. In real terms, gross domestic product (GDP) per
capita was lower than it had been in 1960. In real terms,
the economy quadrupled between 1995 and 2013. Enrolment in
primary school is near universal and infant and child

This paper reviews international
practices for ‘bottom-up costing’ for medium-term
expenditure frameworks. Medium-term expenditure frameworks
are important because they incorporate the multi-annual
nature of the fiscal policy into the budget process,
mitigating its short-term bias. They also allow for the
incorporation of the effects of policy decisions and provide
for a comprehensive fiscal sustainability picture. However,

This document presents the Systematic
Country Diagnosis (SCD) for Mali. The SCD was prepared
following a consultative process within and outside the
World Bank. It identifies constraints and opportunities for
achieving the twin goals of ending poverty and improving
shared prosperity by 2030 while acknowledging (i) the need
for selectivity in pro-poor interventions, and (ii) the many
competing ‘binding’ reasons for poverty in Mali. The

This paper estimates the effect of
income inequality on real gross domestic product per capita
using a panel of 104 countries during the period 1970–2010.
The empirical analysis addresses endogeneity issues by using
instrumental variables estimation and controlling for
country and time fixed effects. The analysis finds that, on
average, income inequality has a significant negative effect
on transitional gross domestic product per capita growth and

This note is a summary of a report that
considers urban areas as the complement to rural areas that
will allow the Plurinational State of Bolivia to achieve the
goals set forth in its Patriotic Agenda for the Bicentennial
2025. The report uses data available at the national level
from censuses and household surveys from the National
Statistics Institute (INE) and the Social and Economic
Policy Analysis Unit of the Ministry of Development Planning

The international development community
is increasingly demanding better evidence on the
effectiveness of policies and programs across different
sectors. The forest sector is no exception. Governments and
donor agencies explicitly seek to link investment to proven
impact. Yet the evidence base necessary to inform
interventions in the forest sector that can successfully
enhance the livelihoods of the forest-dependent poor, foster