This report focuses on two competing forces: the Soviet industrial legacy and

Watershed management has come to be
recognized as a critical issue in the Nile Basin. Upstream
land use can cause degradation and soil erosion, resulting
in lower agricultural yields locally and causing
sedimentation downstream. The increased sediment load causes
economic problems by reducing water quality, and irrigation
and hydropower potential, as well as increasing flooding.
This note shows how, through Basin-wide cooperation, the

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,

After years of strong performance in the
run-up to the European Union (EU) accession, Bulgaria’s
growth has slowed down and poverty remains the highest in
the EU. Bulgaria achieved the highest recorded growth rates
between 2000-08 on the back of exceptionally high capital
inflows, structural reforms, sound fiscal management and the
prospects of EU accession. Employment boomed and poverty
fell steeply. Since 2008 – the year of global economic

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

This study was undertaken under the
leadership of the Ministry of Finance and Economic
Development (MOFED) to assess fiduciary risks in using
country financial management (FM) systems in full, or in
part, for implementing Donor and Bank-financed investment
projects in Zimbabwe and to identify risk mitigation
measures required for such use. Fiduciary risk is the risk
that Bank funds (or donor funds) will not be used for their

This paper informs the national and
international policy discussions related to the adoption of
the United Nations Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and
Forest Degradation Programme. Effective program instruments
must carefully consider incentives, opportunity costs, and
community interactions. A choice experiment survey was
applied to rural Ethiopian communities to understand
respondents’ preferences toward the institutional structure

Africa is rapidly urbanizing and will
lead the world’s urban growth in the coming decades.
Currently, Africa is the least‐urbanized continent,
accommodating 11.3 percent of the world’s urban population,
and the Sub‐Saharan region is the continent’s
least‐urbanized area. However, the region’s cities are
expanding rapidly, by 2050; Africa’s urban population is
projected to reach 1.2 billion, with an urbanization rate of

This paper examines the micro and macro
correlates of aid project outcomes in a sample of 3,821
World Bank projects and 1,342 Asian Development Bank
projects. Project outcomes vary much more within countries
than between countries: country-level characteristics
explain only 10–25 percent of project outcomes. Among macro
variables, country growth and the policy environment are
significantly positively correlated with project outcomes.

This paper decomposes the gender gap in
pay in the Russian Federation along the earnings
distribution for the period 1996–2011. The analysis uses a
reweighted, recentered influence function decomposition that
allows estimating the contribution of each covariate on the
wage structure and composition effects along the earnings
distribution. The paper finds that women are in flat career
paths compared with men; the importance of observable

In this context, this note summarizes
the findings of a recent World Bank, SACU Secretariat
assessment of regional trade facilitation based on the Trade
and Transport Facilitation Assessment (TTFA) methodology.
The assessment looks at regional trade facilitation through
the lens of value chains, with the objective to understand
how the region’s trade and transport environment could be
improved to facilitate more extensive and deeply integrated

This paper uses an original database of
469 politically connected firms under the Mubarak regime in
Egypt to explore the economic effects of close
state-business relations. Previous research has shown that
political connections are lucrative. The paper addresses
several questions raised by this research. Do connected
firms receive favorable regulatory treatment? They do:
connected firms are more likely to benefit from trade