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An innovation system can be defined as a network of organizations, enterprises, and individuals demanding and supplying knowledge and bringing it into a social and economic use. This book's primary aim is to focus on the largely unexplored operational aspects of the innvoation systems concept and to explore its potential for agriculture.

A critical analysis of World Bank's agricultural assistance in Sub-Saharan Africa.This study assesses the development effectiveness of World Bank assistance in addressing constraints to agricultural development in Africa over the period of fiscal 1991-2006.This region faces a variety of constraints that make its development a complex challenge.

In the Commonwealth,the principle of legal professional privilege has been treated as almost sacrosanct and in consequence, derogations from it have been rare. The traditional view is that, despite resulting unfairness, the rule must be absolute in order to achieve its stated goals. This view is challenged here through an examination of the structure of and exceptions to the privilege. Auburn argues that the claims made of the rule in the past have been overstated and that the privilege is more robust than widely assumed. Being dependent on patterns of client behaviour, it can accommodate change, while still fulfilling its essential function. Having examined the theory, structure and main derogations from the privilege, the author asserts that we should be more sceptical of the claims made of the privilege, and in appropriate circumstances should give more weight to the values underlying the disclosure of evidence. This thoughtful analysis presents a new approach to the issue of legal professional privilege. It offers a thorough exploration of the principles underlying the privilege and takes a Commonwealth-wide approach, covering the law in England, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, as well as drawing on relevant principles from European and United States law.

The report assesses the World Bank Group?s support for growth and productivity in the agriculture sector. Enhancing agricultural growth and productivity is essential to meeting the worldwide demand for food and to reducing poverty, particularly in the poorest developing countries. Between 1998 and 2008, the period covered by this evaluation, the World Bank Group (WBG) provided 23.7 billion in financing for agriculture and agribusiness in 108 countries (roughly 8 percent of total WBG financing), spanning areas from irrigation and marketing to research and extension. However, this was a time of declining focus on agricultural growth and productivity by both countries and donors. The cost of inadequate attention to agriculture, especially in agriculture-based economies, came into focus with the food crisis of 2007-08. The crisis added momentum to an emerging renewal of attention and stepped-up financing to agriculture and agribusiness at the World Bank and International Finance Corporation (IFC), as well as at several multilateral and bilateral agencies. World Bank financing rose two and a half times from 2008 to 2009, though that increase in lending seems to have been accompanied by a decline in analytical work, which this review finds valuable for results. This evaluation seeks to provide lessons from successes and failures to help improve the development impact of the renewed attention to the sector. Ratings against the World Bank?s stated objectives and IFC?s market-based benchmarks for agriculture and agribusiness projects have been equal to or above portfolio averages in East Asia, Latin America, and the transition economies in Europe, with notable successes over a long period in China and India. But performance of WBG interventions has been well below average in Sub-Saharan Africa, where IFC has had little engagement in agribusiness. Inconsistent client commitment and weak capacity have limited the effectiveness of WBG support in agriculture-based economies, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, and constraints on staffing and internal coordination within the WBG have also hurt outcomes. Financial sustainability has been constrained by insufficient government funding and the difficulty of maintaining agricultural services and infrastructure. The WBG has a unique opportunity to match the increases in the financing for agriculture with sharper focus on improving agricultural growth and productivity in agriculture-based economies, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa. Greater effort will be needed to connect sectoral interventions and achieve synergies from public and private sector interventions; to build capacity and knowledge exchange; to take stock of experience in rain-fed agriculture; to ensure attention to financial sustainability and to cross-cutting issues of gender, environmental and social impacts, and climate; and to better integrate WBG support at the global and regional levels with that at the country level.

This volume combines the analyses of leading experts on the various elements affecting economic growth and the policies required to spur that growth. Ascent after Decline: Regrowing Global Economies after the Great Recession identifies the main challenges to the economic recovery, such as rising debt levels, reduced trade prospects, and global imbalances, as well as the obstacles to growth posed by fiscal conundrums and lagging infrastructure. It also examines the way forward, beginning with the role of the state and then covering labor markets, information technology, and innovation. The common thread throughout the book is the view that economic re-growth will depend in large measure on smart policy choices and that the role of government has never been more crucial than at any time since the great depression. As members of the World Bank community, these issues are of particular importance to us, since without a resurrection of strong economic growth in major economies, the likelihood of rapid economic development in poorer developing countries is dampened. This is troubling because we have seen progress in many parts of the globe in the past decade, including in Africa, and these gains will be arrested as long as the global economy is in disarray. Donors will withdraw, investment will retrench, and prospects will dim. This immiserizing welfare outcome is to be avoided. The volume is intended to shed light on those areas of policy that reduce the prospects of a prolonged period of stress and decline by 'regrowing growth.'

Interest in farmland is rising. And, given commodity price volatility, growing human and environmental pressures, and worries about food security, this interest will increase, especially in the developing world. One of the highest development priorities in the world must be to improve smallholder agricultural productivity, especially in Africa. Smallholder productivity is essential for reducing poverty and hunger, and more and better investment in agricultural technology, infrastructure, and market access for poor farmers is urgently needed. When done right, larger-scale farming systems can also have a place as one of many tools to promote sustainable agricultural and rural development, and can directly support smallholder productivity, for example, throughout grower programs. However, recent press and other reports about actual or proposed large farmland acquisition by big investors have raised serious concerns about the danger of neglecting local rights and other problems. They have also raised questions about the extent to which such transactions can provide long-term benefits to local populations and contribute to poverty reduction and sustainable development. Although these reports are worrying, the lack of reliable information has made it difficult to understand what has been actually happening. Against this backdrop, the World Bank, under the leadership of Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, along with other development partners, has highlighted the need for good empirical evidence to inform decision makers, especially in developing countries.

Over the past ten years, private-sector-led growth has revolutionized access to telecommunications. Every region of the developing world benefitted in terms of investment and rollout. This revolution would have been impossible without government reform and oversight. Advanced information and communication infrastructure (ICI) are increasingly important to doing business in a globalizing world. Governments, enterprises, civil society, workers, and poor populations in the developing countries need more affordable access. This report proposes strategies that governments can carry out to attract private investment and ensure the continued evolution and spread of information and communication infrastructure. These strategies encompass more than sector policy alone, for investment decisions are based on a wide range of factors including, for example, the roles played by financial sector development and the broader investment environment. The strategies also include potential public sector investments that can catalyze ICI rollout in subsectors where the private sector is not prepared to intervene on its own.

This paper was prepared by the public sector and governance group of the World Bank poverty reduction and economic management network. Since 1984, the World Bank has financed 87 Financial Management Information System (FMIS) projects in 51 countries, totaling over US $2.2 billion, of which US $938 million was for FMIS-related Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions. This study presents the World Bank's experience with these investment operations, including substantial ICT components, in order to share the achievements and challenges observed, and provide guidance for improving the performance of future projects. This study is dived into five chapters. The introduction covers the definitions used and methodology applied in reviewing projects. Chapter 2 provides descriptive characteristics of the sample data drawn from Bank databases and describes general patterns in duration, regional distribution, costs, and ICT solutions implemented, among other aspects. Chapter 3 analyzes the performance of the projects, differentiating between ratings of the Implementation Completion Reports (ICRs) and the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) reports, as well as the factors contributing to the success and failure of projects and individual components. A detailed analysis of country case studies from Mongolia, Turkey, Albania, Guatemala, and Pakistan are presented in chapter 4. In conclusion, chapter 5 synthesizes the main lessons learned and prerequisites necessary for an effective FMIS project. The findings of this study are based on a comprehensive database of 55 closed and 32 active Treasury and FMIS projects implemented between 1984 and 2010 (pipeline projects were also analyzed in some sections). The data presented here was gathered from individual project ICRs, Project Appraisal Documents (PADs), the IEG reports, and complemented with interviews with task team leaders and relevant public sector and informatics specialists.

This report assesses the potential of electricity contract auctions as a procurement option for the World Bank's client countries. It focuses on the role of auctions of electricity contracts designed to expand and retain existing generation capacity. It is not meant to be a 'how-to' manual. Rather, it highlights some major issues and options that need to be taken into account when a country considers moving towards competitive electricity procurement through the introduction of electricity auctions. Auctions have played an important role in the effort to match supply and demand. Ever since the 1990s, the use of long-term contract auctions to procure new generation capacity, notably from private sector suppliers, has garnered increased affection from investors, governments, and multilateral agencies in general, as a means to achieve a competitive and transparent procurement process while providing certainty of supply for the medium to long term. However, the liberalization of electricity markets and the move from single-buyer procurement models increased the nature of the challenge facing system planners in their efforts to ensure an adequate and secure supply of electricity in the future at the best price. While auctions as general propositions are a means to match supply with demand in a cost-effective manner, they can also be and have been used to meet a variety of goals.

This book is a compilation of two recently completed works on the convergence of information and communication technology (ICT) (Singh and Raja 2008, 2009). Since then, convergence, the eroding of boundaries among previously separate ICT services, networks, and business practices, has accelerated and deepened. At the time these reports were written, convergence was already a reality and was picking up pace in low-income countries, as in the rest of the world. Now, as this introduction summarizes, broadband networks are reaching deeper into previously unserved areas. The growing number of people connected to broadband networks are consuming, sharing, and creating new multimedia content and applications. And they are doing this on handheld and portable devices that are less costly and do more than before. All sorts of users, governments, businesses, individuals, and ICT firms, are looking to cut costs while capturing greater value. Taken together, these trends indicate that convergence is set to accelerate even through the ongoing global economic downturn. Countries that enable convergence through appropriate policy and regulatory responses will realize significant benefits in terms of expanded access, lower prices, and greater competition. Chapter two of this book focuses on the strategic implications of convergence and possible policy responses. Chapter three focuses on emerging regulatory practices facilitating multiple plays, or the provision of multiple services, such as voice telephony, broadcasting, and Internet access, by one operator over a single communications network, typically telephone or cable television but increasingly mobile and fixed wireless networks. The book concludes by presenting several best-practice principles for regulatory responses to multiple plays and, to some extent, to convergence more generally. Indeed, the main task for regulators is to remove artificial barriers and restrictions that are remnants of legacy regulation, thus clearing the way for market forces to play out, promoting the public interest, and leading to the realization of a range of benefits for users.