After five consecutive years of robust growth, the total value of the global carbon market stalled at $142 billion. Suffering from the lack of post-2012 regulatory clarity, the value of the primary Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) market fell by double-digits for the third year in a row, ending lower than it was in 2005, the first year of the Kyoto protocol. The Assigned Amount Unit (AAU) and the United States Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) markets shrank as well.

This paper constitutes the third and final volume of a series of assessments of the World Bank Group's engagement with climate change issues. The first focused on World Bank involvement in policy issues related to greenhouse gas mitigation. It was mainly concerned with the potential for energy price reform and energy efficiency policies to yield dividends in growth, fiscal savings, and climate change mitigation. The second volume examined project-level lessons related to greenhouse gas mitigation.

The carbon market endured its most challenging year to date in 2009. The global economic crisis, which started in late 2008 and intensified early in 2009, negatively impacted both the demand and supply sides of the market. As industrial output plummeted the demand for carbon assets fell. Yet even as global GDP declined by 0.6 percent in 2009, and at a more perilous rate of 3.2 percent in industrialized economies, the carbon market demonstrated resilience.

This paper summarizes the policy-relevant insights of a generation of research on scale economies. Scale economies in production are of three types: internal economies associated with large plants, localization economies that come from sharing of inputs and infrastructure and from greater competition among firms, and urbanization economies that are generated through diversity and knowledge spillovers. The benefits (and costs) of localization and urbanization are together called “external (dis) economies” because they arise due to factors outside any single household, farm or firm.

Climate resilient cities a primer on reducing vulnerabilities to disasters is prepared as a guide for local governments in the East Asia Region to better understand the concepts and consequences of climate change; how climate change consequences contribute to urban vulnerabilities; and what is being done by city governments in East Asia and around the world to actively engage in learning, capacity building, and capital investment programs for building sustainable, resilient communities.

This book covers the early years of the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), commonly known as the World Bank when it first confronted the issue of development as a fundamental part of its mission. The book is mainly concerned with how the Bank interpreted its mission and, more specifically, how its mission was born: what events shaped it, what cultural and ideological background influenced it and what was the historical context in which it arose.

China and India have grown rapidly in importance in the global economy over the past two decades the same period in which hardware and software have become important tradable products in the global economy. China has reached global scale in the hardware industry but not in software; India has achieved the reverse. These recent developments offer new insights into the ways in which new industries can take root and flourish within the broader context of developing economies.

An efficient and affordable access to
jobs, education and services is considered a fundamental
element for development. However, the mobility conditions in
the cities have deteriorated because of the increasing
motorization and urbanization. The number of new cars that
enter the cities every year outpaces the construction of new
roads, aggravating the existing congestion issues.
Therefore, the urban models that revolve around highways and

This paper analyses the effect of a set of irrigation rehabilitation projects conducted over the last 10 years in Peru. The projects were conducted without the aim or the tools for a full-fledged impact evaluation. Nevertheless, this paper attempts an evaluation through the use of alternative data sources such as household surveys and geographic information, a strategy of identification of beneficiaries and control households based on spatial proximity to the projects' sites, and an econometric approach consisting of a double-differencing technique.

As a largely rural society, most people in Nepal still depend upon agriculture as their major livelihood strategy. Therefore, it is important to improve the allocation efficiency of limited public expenditures to promote agricultural growth and poverty reduction. However, evaluating the returns of public investment is limited by methodological challenges. We use hedonic and panel data methods to examine the returns to different types of rural public investments including roads, irrigation and extension advice.

Release of the final report of the International Comparison Program (ICP) and publication of new estimates of purchasing power parities (PPPs) in World Development Indicators 2008 are an important statistical milestone. The estimates offer a consistent and comprehensive set of data on the cost of living in developed and developing countries, the first since 1997, when the results of the previous ICP data collection were published in World Development Indicators. The 2005 data cover 146 countries and territories, 29 more than the last round in 1993, and many for the first time.

Over the past year, the global economy has cooled significantly, a far cry from the boom just a year ago in various countries and across markets. At the same time, the scientific community communicated the heightened urgency of taking action on climate change. Policymakers at national, regional, and international levels have put forward proposals to respond to the climate challenge. The most concrete of these is the adopted European Union (EU) climate and energy package (20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020), which guarantees a level of carbon market continuity beyond 2012.