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Pakistan - Balochistan Economic Report : From Periphery to Core, Volume 2. Full ReportBalochistan offers some of the best assets for development. Balochistan is generously bestowed with natural and locational resources. It possesses the largest land area of any province of Pakistan, proving vast rangeland for goats, sheep, buffaloes, cattle, camels and other livestock. Its southern border makes up about two thirds of the national coastline, giving access to a large pool of fishery resources. As a frontier province, it is ideally situated for trade with Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf countries. Over the last four decades, it supplied cheap natural gas to Pakistan's economic centers, supporting the country's industrialization. This report offers an empirical analysis of provincial economic development and the ways in which the provincial and federal governments, supported by donors, can help to foster it. It is organized around three topics: the stock taking of economic outcomes over the last decades; the Strategies for inclusive economic development of generating growth, delivering services, and financing development in the future; and the instruments for today's economic policies to bring about the required changes. The five main findings of the report are as follows. First, there are good reasons to be optimistic about Balochistan's development. Provincial and federal reforms, the synergies between Balochistan's and Pakistan's development agenda in the areas of energy and trade, and the strong performance of the national economy present a unique opportunity to move Balochistan from the periphery to the core of economic development to the benefit of its people. Second, in order to overcome the challenges that held back provincial development for many decades, Balochistan should pursue a development agenda around generating growth, delivering services, and financing development. This approach can make sure that Balochistan's development path is inclusive, where the gains are shared across regions and population groups. Third, generating growth requires leveraging Balochistan's resource and locational advantages, deepening its capacity for value-addition, and strengthening the foundations for business activity. Fourth, delivering services depends on improving the public administration, making devolution more effective and scaling-up of basic services with innovative approaches involving the private sector and communities. Finally, financing development relies on a prudent management of provincial expenditures, strengthening the capacity for revenue collection, and advancing fiscal devolution.
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The Fruit of Her LaborThe overall goal of this report is to assist the World Bank Group (WBG) to achieve greater impact for women from its current activities in agribusiness in Papua New Guinea (PNG), and to provide clear recommendations on additional interventions aimed at improving outcomes for women. The report focuses on the supply chains for coffee, cocoa, and horticultural products (fresh produce), as there is a wealth of knowledge on these supply chains and on gender issues, and these provide the best opportunity to identify entry points for follow-up activities. Given the importance of smallholders in PNG, and the need to understand gender dynamics in farming, this report pays particular attention to the roles and constraints faced by smallholders, without in so doing wishing to diminish the importance of the roles played by other actors in these supply chains.
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Rural Transport : Improving its Contribution to Growth and Poverty Reduction in Sub-Saharan AfricaPoverty reduction is a long-standing development objective of many developing countries and their aid donors, including the World Bank. To achieve this goal, these countries and organizations have sought to improve smallholder agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as part of a broader rural development agenda aimed at providing a minimal basket of goods and services in rural areas to satisfy basic human needs. These goods and services include not only food, health care, and education, but also infrastructure. As a result, rural transport remains a constraint to increasing agricultural productivity, achieving rural growth, and thus alleviating rural poverty. The first major finding of the review of rural transport theory and practice is that many of the approaches needed to improve the impact of rural transport interventions on poverty reduction are known, particularly from the work of the Rural Travel and Transport Program (RTTP) of Sub-Saharan Africa Transport Policy Program (SSATP). Unfortunately, many of the recommended approaches remain untested within Sub-Saharan Africa beyond the pilot scale, notwithstanding their influence on rural transport policy and project design in other operational regions of the Bank. For SSA, these are missed opportunities. Even where SSA countries have applied these approaches, institutional and financial sustainability and scaling up local successes remain significant challenges for both their agriculture and transport sectors. The second key finding is that rural households are rarely the point of focus in the design of rural transport interventions in SSA, even though a methodology to allow this focus has been developed and successfully tested in several pilot projects since the 1980s, the result is that the transport needs of rural households continue to be analyzed and understood by means of an indirect assessment of those needs, which means that most projects have a less than desirable impact on improving the rural access and mobility situation of such households.