Ethiopia's real gross domestic product (GDP) growth, while still strong, decelerated to 7.7 percent in FY2018. A slowdown in industrial growth, mainly driven by lower growth in construction due to foreign exchange shortages and higher prices of imported construction materials, coupled with...

"This paper identifies and estimates the strength of the reduction in poverty linked to improved opportunities for women in the expanding maquila sector. A simulation exercise shows that, at a given point in time, poverty in Honduras would have been 1.5 percentage points higher had the maquila...

Poverty, environment, social development, and gender are important cross-cutting themes of the World Bank and government investment programs, especially within the Sustainable Development Network (SDN). For developing sectoral strategies and programs, economic, environment and social assessments...

Lesotho began a structural economic transformation in the early 1990s. The transformation has brought higher, more secure incomes to households while the government succeeded in dramatically improving access to services such as education, health, water, and transportation. Yet today, Lesotho...

Identifying opportunities to increase agricultural productivity and incomes is an important priority for rural development. Progress toward poverty reduction continued in recent years, but the contribution of the agriculture sector was weak, mainly because productivity improvements were...

Following ten years of relatively robust economic growth, Kenya achieved lower-middle-income country status in 2014. The remarkable expansion of telecommunications and mobile financial services shifted Kenya's economic paradigm to an extent rarely seen in developing countries. Poverty rates...