This First Phase Report on Sierra Leone
growth poles is the result of a 9 months consultative
process led by the Office of the President which
specifically requested that the output of this diagnostic be
in an engaging format. The fundamental concept of growth
poles is that they exploit agglomeration economies and
spillover effects to spread resulting prosperity from the
core of the pole to the periphery. At the basis of this

After more than 35 years, the elected
local government system in Lesotho was reestablished in 2005
through the election of the Local Authorities, i.e. the
Community and District Councils (CCs and DCs). Across the
political spectrum, the political will to move forward was
at its peak. An exemplary campaign to educate the entire
population as to the purposes and functioning of the new
Local Authorities, and the electoral process preceded the

States can do much to tap
community-level energies, and resources for development, if
they seek to interact more synergistically with local
communities. The broader spin-off is creating a
developmental society, and polity. Using case studies from
Asia and Latin America, the authors show how: 1) State
efforts to bring about land reform, tenancy reform, and
expanding non-crop sources of income, can broaden the

Most analyses of property rights and
economic development point to the negative influence of
insecure property rights on private investment. The authors
focus instead on the largely unexamined effects of insecure
property rights on government policy choices. They identify
one significant anomaly-dramatically higher public
investment in countries with insecure property rights-and
use it to make the following broad claims about insecure

Recent studies have used homicide rates,
police statistics, and crime victimization surveys to
pinpoint violent areas. The author argues that these useful
measures of crime, and violence underestimate certain types
of violence (especially non-economic violence) and key
dimensions of violence (especially age, and gender). A
composite index based on monitoring, and surveillance of
homicides, crime statistics, and victimization surveys can

The authors analyze how property rights
affect the allocation of firms' available resources
among different types of assets. In particular, they
investigate empirically for a large number of countries
whether firms in environments with more secure property
rights allocate available resources more toward intangible
assets and consequentially grow faster. The authors find
that improved asset allocation due to better property rights

Using panel data from a unique survey of
public primary schools in Uganda, The authors assess the
degree of leakage of public funds in education. The survey
data reveal that on average during 1991-95 schools received
only 13 percent of the central government's allocation
for the schools' nonwage expenditures. Most of the
allocated funds were used by public officials for purposes
unrelated to education or captured for private gain

Most efforts to trace the effects of
income inequality on growth have focused on redistribution.
However, empirical investigation has not substantiated
either the positive association of income inequality with
redistribution or the negative association of redistribution
with economic growth. The authors analyze the effects of
inequality in the broader context of social polarization.
They argue that social polarization, whether rooted in

The Country Opinion Survey for FY2013 in Botswana assists the World Bank Group (WBG) in gaining a better understanding of how stakeholders in Botswana perceive the WBG.

This report aims to update knowledge of
gender disparities in Ethiopia using the latest household
survey data. The aim of this analysis is to support ongoing
efforts to implement Plan for Accelerated and Sustained
Development to End Poverty (PASDEP) vision. The significant
progress in addressing key dimensions of gender disparities
such as education shown in this report as well as in the
recent annual progress report on the implementation of

This report shows that some investors
still perceive Aceh as a risky place to do business, despite
being relatively peaceful for almost four years. Security
incidents, relatively common in post-conflict environments,
deter businesses and individuals from investing in Aceh,
robbing the economy of necessary capital and innovation.
Other consequences of the conflict, including forms of
illegal taxation, also hurt investment. The Government of

This Investment Climate Policy Note
(ICPN) identifies the main constraints to the development of
the private sector in the Republic of Congo, based on a
survey of enterprises operating in the manufacturing and
services sectors, in Pointe Noire and Brazzaville, and to
propose specific short term recommendations to address these
constraints. The ICPN emphasizes cross-country comparisons
and benchmarks the investment climate across various firm