Informal payments in the health sector in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) is emerging as a fundamental aspect of health care financing and as a major impediment to health care reform. Private payments to public doctors, nurses, and other health personnel are essentially an informal market for health care occurring within the confines of public health care service networks. These expenditures are also outside the financial controls, policy rubric, and audits of countries' health care systems. Like the informal sector, it is often illegal and unreported, and despite the terminology, is a...

While the economies of Europe and Central Asia (ECA) have spiraled downward over the past decade, they have made some progress in other spheres. Civil liberties and democracy are taking root in many of the ECA countries, and new opportunities are being created and exploited as the region opens to the global economy. For most ECA countries, however, the transition process remains fragile. The urban areas have been hit hardest. The closing of state industries and excessive urbanization have left cities impoverished in many of the former socialist countries. This phenomenon contrasts sharply...

'Rural infrastructure is critical to both economic and social development. Its absence thwarts growth and, typically, the poor are those hurt the most. The purpose of this paper is to serve as a basis for knowledge management on rural infrastructure.' In the 1970s, the primary, if not the unique, objective of rural infrastructure lending was to get rural infrastructure built. However, the institutional aspects of how this infrastructure was to be built, and later how it would be operated and maintained, did not receive much attention. Only recently has poverty alleviation through employment...

'Southeastern Nigeria has some of the highest population densities in Sub-Saharan Africa and one of the most threatened ecosystems on the continent: the rainforests of West Africa. As population pressure has mounted, fallow periods have declined... Instead of doggedly pursuing old strategies, farmers shifted their agricultural practices in the face of mounting population pressures. Farmers have intensified their traditional bush-fallow cultivation system by adopting several strategies...' What agrobiodiversity is, what it does, and its importance to the environment and agriculture form the...