This World Bank Annual Report for FY2006 notes that the past year saw both progress and continued challenges in the global fight against poverty and inequality. The Report discusses the following topical highlights: Debt relief for the poorest countries; targeting development in Africa; addressing...

Infrastructure at the Crossroads brings together lessons from the last two decades of World Bank engagement in infrastructure. It analyzes trends in the Bank's infrastructure lending, describes the evolution of the external environment and the Bank's own strategic priorities, and presents...

Infrastructure development in the past was often implemented without adequately taking into consideration the possible negative environmental and social impacts. Drawing from the experience of the Bumbuna Hydropower project in Sierra Leone, this paper proposes to complement safeguard policies by...

Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) is an approach used increasingly by governments, civil society organizations, the World Bank, and other development partners to examine the distributional impacts of policy reforms on the well-being of different stakeholders groups, particularly the poor...

In a context of increased primary school enrollment rates, secondary education is appearing as the next big challenge for Latin American and East Asian countries. This report seeks to undertake a detailed diagnostic of secondary education in these two regions, understand some of the main...

Most people agree that a good investment climate is essential for growth and poverty reduction. Less clear is how to achieve it. Many reforms are complex, involving more than technical design and content. They are both political, facing opposition from organized and powerful groups-and...

This book identifies the binding constraints to growth of Morocco. It applies an innovative procedure known as "growth diagnostic" and has a central finding. The Moroccan economy suffers from a too slow process of structural transformation for achieving higher growth, especially for its exports...

Using recent advances in modeling climate-related risks and adjusting state of the art catastrophic risk modeling techniques to drought, the study conducts an innovative long-term assessment of drought risks in Andhra Pradesh, India, and suggests strategies to reduce their impact, under several...