Solomon Islands is a small, remote archipelago in the South Pacific that faces a fairly unique set of development challenges. Solomon Islands is now at a critical juncture in its development trajectory. Neither the economic geography nor the present political economy of Solomon Islands is...

There is a need to further examine and enhance knowledge concerning the relationship among El Nino and La Nina cycles, drought events, and grain production in the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Kazakhstan (RUK) region, which accounts for more than one third of total wheat exports. This report...

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is a classic example of the paradox of plenty, since the country is extremely rich in natural resources while its population is extremely poor. It is the largest country in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) with a total surface area of about 234 million hectares...

One of the key objectives of this first SCD of the Republic of Congo is to serve as an essential input to the Country Partnership Framework. The SCD is not intended to carry out substantial new analytical work, but rather to draw upon and synthesize the existing evidence. A substantial amount of...

In 2006-07, the Water and Sanitation Program-South Asia (WSP-SA) initiated a research toidentify barriers to service delivery for the urban poor. The research included a review ofvarious initiatives from across the globe that have resulted in improved service delivery for theurban poor and...

Angola is endowed with significant natural wealth, but it will need to better manage these resources and reinvest them into other forms of capital to establish a sustainable development path. Before independence, the country was a relatively advanced economy with diverse exports, although its...

About 80 percent of the poor households in Timor-Leste live in rural areas and are dependent on agriculture for their livelihood. It is therefore widely acknowledged that growth in the agriculture sector is an important channel through which poverty can be reduced in the country. That...

Jordan is an upper middle income country which has proven remarkably resilient despite decades of turmoil in its neighborhood. Even with economic stability in the face of massive shocks, the Jordanian government - reflecting the views of the population - has made clear the need for improvement...

Maldives is an island nation scattered in the Indian Ocean comprising 1,190 small coral islands of which 190 are inhabited by a local population of 341,000. Maldives' unique archipelagic coral island provides the country with an extremely rich and diverse marine ecological system. With more...

The objective of this Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) is to identify the priority constraints Bolivia faces in sustaining its gains on reducing poverty and enhancing shared prosperity over the next years. It will analyze the dynamics behind the progress achieved in the past decade on...