The 2009 World Development Report (WDR) on economic geography aroused interest among policymakers in Thailand and led to an agreement between the Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB) and the East Asia Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Unit of the World...

This note provides a short overview of urban land and housing market performance in Punjab Province of Pakistan. It describes the characteristics of well-functioning urban land and housing markets and argues that, at present, the Punjab's urban land and housing markets are not performing well....

Afghanistan is one of the poorest and longest suffering countries among members of the World Bank, and has been ravaged by chronic conflict and political instability. Afghanistan's infrastructure has been destroyed or degraded; its human resource base severely depleted; and its social capital eroded....

"In the 1980s the Thai government tried to legalize squatters by issuing special titles that restricted the sale and rental of the land. Using data from 2,874 farming households collected in 1997, the author finds that in places where these government titles where issued, leased plots are more...

"The author addresses the labor markets in rural and semi-urban Mexico. The empirical analyses show that non-farm income shares increase with overall consumption levels and, also, with time. Rural-dwellers in lower quintiles of the consumption distribution tend to earn a larger share of their...

This report focuses on a central element of Ethiopia's challenge: the urban labor market. The headlines, which are detailed in the report, are dramatic, and include the following: open unemployment has been persistently high and average duration is long, though recent trends suggest improved...