Bangladesh has made recent progress in reducing poverty, but still faces the reality that roughly half its citizens live in deprivation. This report examines the record of advances during the 1990s, major challenges still to be overcome and priority measures to accelerate poverty reduction. The...

The present report, and the source of its findings, summarizes the results of research conducted in Brazil in 2003-2004. It is the second of two World Bank sponsored studies on the Brazilian judicial system. Its findings, while provocative, were obviously limited in their generalization, and as...

In Bangladesh the official poverty rates are produced at the national and division levels only using household income and expenditure survey (HIES) data. While the division map illustrates a clear east-west division, the Upazila map unveils large variations in poverty incidence within the east...

This paper contains three volumes presenting the Vietnam Reading and Mathematics Assessment Study conducted in 2001. The first volume sets the study in its country context, describes its genesis, outlines the methodology, and summarizes the results. The main purpose is to show how the analysis...

New businesses are likely to have been even more severely affected by the crisis than mature businesses, even in non crisis times, new and young firms tend to be more constrained than older firms which often have established reputations and enjoy easier access to finance. Given the sudden...

This report presents a detailed analysis of household poverty and its drivers - family, labor and human capital outcomes, social assistance transfers, and geography - based on new expenditure based poverty measures. The report is the culmination of a comprehensive year-long Aus AID funded...

This study has two objectives, the first of which is to revise the national poverty lines of Armenia. The Government of Armenia expressed its desire for revised poverty lines that more accurately reflect the current consumption and expenditure patterns of the population. The work was jointly...