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Cameroon is a lower-middle income country with social indicators and levels of poverty which are below those for comparator countries. Large and rising inequalities between north and south, inefficiencies in public resource allocation and an adverse business environment explain this. While insecurity due to Boko Haram activities and rapidly rising public debt constrain efforts at poverty reduction, there exists a huge potential for economic growth and poverty reduction. This potential remains mostly untapped. Realizing it will require far reaching reforms, particularly with respect to the business environment and public financial management, and require politically courage to accomplish. The remainder of this document explores how to achieve the twin goals of ending poverty and improving shared prosperity by 2030 in a sustainable manner. The document identifies a limited number of binding constraints which would need to be lifted to achieve the poverty objective. The next four chapters present background material to chapter six, which presents binding constraints to poverty reduction. The micro-foundations to poverty reduction are discussed in chapters two and three. Chapter two discusses poverty, equity and vulnerability. Chapter three discusses human capital and its role in poverty reduction. Chapter four considers poverty reduction from a macro-economic perspective. It discusses opportunities for growth and economic transformation as well as the status of various cross-cutting economic services. Chapter five, considers governance, fragility and the institutional environment. Binding constraints to sustainable poverty reduction are identified in chapter six.

Bleak short-term economic outlook raises the risk that social and environmental achievements may not be sustained. The changed economic circumstances have exposed shortcomings in Brazil’s development model, epitomized by the struggle to achieve a sustainable fiscal policy. Against this background, some Brazilians are now asking whether the gains of the past decade might have been an illusion, created by the commodity boom, but unsustainable in today’s less forgiving international environment. Brazil thus finds itself at an important juncture and, to a certain extent, the policy course set today will determine whether the country can sustain the gains of the past and return to a path of solid, inclusive and environmentally sustainable growth. This Systematic Country Diagnostic offers a contribution to the debate about Brazil’s future development.

A synchronous growth slowdown has been underway in emerging markets (EM) since 2010. Growth in these countries is now markedly slower than, not just the pre‐crisis average, but also the long‐term average. As a group, EM growth eased from 7.6 percent in 2010 to 4.5 percent in 2014, and is projected to slow further to below 4 percent in 2015. This moderation has affected all regions (except South Asia) and is the most severe in Latin America and the Caribbean. The deceleration is highly synchronous across countries, especially among large EM. By 2015, China, Russia, and South Africa had all experienced three consecutive years of slower growth. The EM‐AE growth differential has narrowed to two percentage points in 2015, well below the 2003‐08 average of 4.8 percentage points and near the long‐term average differential of 1990‐2008. The recent slowdown in EM has been a source of a lively debate, as evident from the quotations at the beginning of this note. Some economists paint a bleak picture for the future of EM and argue that the impressive growth performance of EM prior to the crisis was driven by temporary commodity booms and rapid debt accumulation, and will not be sustained. Others emphasize that a wide range of cyclical and structural factors are driving the slowdown: weakening macroeconomic fundamentals after the crisis; prospective tightening in financial conditions; resurfacing of deep‐rooted governance problems in EM; and difficulty adjusting to disruptive technological changes. Still others highlight differences across EM and claim that some of them are in a better position to weather the slowdown and will likely register strong growth in the future. This policy research note seeks to help move the debate forward by examining the main features, drivers, and implications of the recent EM slowdown and provides a comprehensive analysis of available policy options to counteract it.

The extractive industries (EI) sector occupies an outsize space in the economies of many developing countries. Economists, public finance professionals, and policy makers working in such countries are frequently confronted with issues that require an in-depth understanding of the sector. The objective of this volume is to provide a concise overview of EI-related topics these professionals are likely to encounter. The volume provides an overview of issues central to EI economics; discusses key components of the sector’s governance, policy, and institutional frameworks; and identifies the public sector’s EI-related financing obligations. Its discussion of EI economics covers the valuation of subsoil assets, the economic interpretation of ore, and the structure of energy and mineral markets. The volume maps the responsibilities of relevant government entities and outlines the characteristics of the EI sector’s legal and regulatory frameworks. Specific key functions of the sector are briefly discussed, as are the financial structures that underpin environmental and social safeguards; investment of public revenues generated from oil, gas, or minerals; as well as extractive-based economic diversification. The authors hope that decision makers in ministries of finance, international organizations, and other relevant entities will find the study useful to their understanding and analysis of the EI sector.

The process by which different ecological conditions and historical trajectories interacted to create different social and cultural systems resulted in major differences in economic development performance within Southeast Asia. In the late 19th century, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand commonly experienced vent-for-surplus development through exploitation of unused lands. Nevertheless, different agrarian structures were created. Indonesia s development was mainly based on the exploitation of tropical rain forest under Dutch colonialism. It resulted in the bifurcation of the rural sector between rice-farming peasant proprietors and large plantations for tropical export crops based on hired labor. In the Philippines, exploitation of the same resource base under Spanish rule resulted in pervasive landlessness among the rural population. Relatively homogeneous landowning peasants continued to dominate in Thailand, where delta plains that were suitable only for rice production formed the resource base for development. These different agrarian structures associated with different social value systems have accounted for differential development performance across the three economies in the recent three decades.

Spatial disparity in incomes and productivity is apparent across and within countries. Most studies of the determinants of such differences focus on cross-country comparisons or location choice among firms. Less studied are the large differences in agricultural productivity within countries related to concentrations of rural poverty. For policy, understanding the determinants of this geography of agricultural productivity is important, because strategies to reduce poverty often feature components designed to boost regional agricultural incomes. Census and endowment data for Ecuador are used to estimate a model of endogenous technology choice to explain large regional differences in agricultural output and factor productivity. A composite-error estimation technique is used to separate systemic determinants from idiosyncratic differences. Simulations are employed to explore policy avenues. The findings suggest a differentiation between the types of policies that promote growth in agriculture generally and those that are more likely to assist the rural poor.