Community-driven reconstruction (CDR) is an approach to post-war reconstruction that gives discretion to local community councils in establishing priorities and overseeing the implementation of reconstruction and development activities. A series of methodologically exceptional studies has raised...

European official development assistance to Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries increased sharply after 2011, ostensibly in support of the social, economic, and above all political changes demanded by the Arab uprisings. The subsequent turn to development policies driven by...

This paper examines urbanization trends, the growth of Colombo and its present state of development. It looks at the approaches to the planned interventions in the city and demonstrates how a uni-directional urban development has had a detrimental impact upon healthy growth and quality of life...

Prioritizing public investments requires information on relative returns that are difficult to derive from disparate evaluation studies. This paper presents a 'hybrid' approach that combines ex post evaluation data with an economy-wide model for experimenting ex ante with alternative investment...

Unlike existing studies, we adopt a multi-sectoral approach and consider the full range of climate projections. Biophysical damages are translated into economic costs using a dynamic economywide model. Our results for Vietnam indicate that the negative impacts on agriculture and roads are...

The World Bank's health sector projects in Timor-Leste - the Health Sector Rehabilitation and Development Project and the Second Health Sector Rehabilitation and Development Project - have been among the few successful operations it has funded in that country. This paper examines the factors...

The European Union (EU) has set targets for gradually reducing greenhouse gas emissions through 2050. One of the instruments involved is the 2009 Renewable Energy Directive, which specifies a 20 per cent renewable energy target for the EU by 2020. This paper reviews tensions and institutional...

Uganda has seen impressive economic growth and substantial poverty reductions over the past few decades. Today, official headcount poverty stands at about 20 per cent. However, recent research relying on non-monetary wealth indicators challenges official poverty statistics and suggests that...

Regional power pools present a significant and potentially defining opportunity for African power systems to develop domestic energy resources, improve system reliability, and contribute to overall economic development. Hydropower is expected to play a significant role in many regional power...

High levels of inflexible bilateral trade in southern Africa have limited the participation in the competitive short-term markets, leading to inefficient use of energy infrastructure and blocking the South African Power Pool's long-term goal of transitioning from a cooperative to competitive...