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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.
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The Rural Investment Climate : Analysis and FindingsInterest in investment climates has emerged relatively recently. In the 1960s and 1970s, governments in many countries believed they should play a direct role in rural credit, input supply, production, trade, transport, distribution, and even marketing. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, government-dominated systems fell into disgrace because of poor performance. For the rural sector, the primary focus had traditionally been on agriculture, particularly commercial agriculture and agribusiness, which were perceived to be the main drivers of rural growth. This study's essential findings and policy implications are organized into the following six chapters. Annexes provide supporting material. Chapter two presents an overview of related work and of the literature; it also describes the subsequent chapters' methodological framework, including new ways of addressing questions of endogeneity in these kinds of surveys while seeking to isolate cause and effect. Chapter three, by applying econometric analysis, measurably extends the examination of enterprise performance and investment climate constraints initiated in RIC1 (first rural investment climate). A rigorous examination of enterprise dynamics and entrepreneurial choice is developed in chapter four. Aiming to highlight the differing effects on Rural Nonfarm Enterprises (RNFEs), chapter five draws together the main implications RIC2 findings on the rural investment climate in the three country pilots. Community-level influences also matter, and chapter six examines how the local IC and other community characteristics shape the environment for economic activity. Conclusions and recommendations appear in chapter seven, including suggestions for using RIC results for policy reform and for targeting the rural public expenditures needed to foster improvements in the rural investment climate. The annexes describe the databases employed and the methodologies used in the study, as well providing detailed regression results.
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Reducing Inequality for Shared
 Growth in China : Strategy and Policy Options for Guangdong ProvinceThis overview summarizes the key
 findings of the eight chapters and one policy note. It is
 organized as follows. The first section provides a
 background of Guangdong, while the second describes the
 current situation of inequality in the province. Next is a
 discussion of the potential impacts of the transfer of
 industrial activities ('industrial transfer') in
 mitigating regional disparity, followed by the
 recommendation of a three pillar strategy for Guangdong. The
 fifth section focuses on the elimination of absolute poverty
 through the minimum living allowance (Dibao) system, and the
 sixth turns to policy actions needed to increase
 opportunities for the rural population by moving them to
 jobs, increasing their access to finance, and ensuring that
 their land rights are better protected. The seventh section
 further assesses Guangdong's options for investing in
 people through more equitable service delivery in compulsory
 education, skill development, and health care, with the aim
 of enhancing the capacity of the poor to seize and utilize
 opportunities. The last section concludes this overview.