Urbanization in Bangladesh had been increasing at a rate of 6% per year since 1971. As of 2005, an estimated 38 million people or 27% of the total population lived in urban areas. Despite significant progress in poverty reduction, 37% of the urban population were below the poverty line in the 1990s.
Rapid economic development, increasing industrialization, and greater access to electricity in Viet Nam had led to an average 13.5% annual growth in electricity demand from 2002 to 2007. To meet this rising demand, the government had taken major steps to develop the energy sector and, since 2000, had embarked on harnessing more environmentally sustainable energy sources.
Located in the Yangtze River hinterlands, landlocked Anhui in central People’s Republic of China (PRC) is one of the country’s least developed provinces.
Rising from the tremendous physical damage and human losses wrought by a prolonged civil war that followed the disintegration of the former Soviet Union, Tajikistan more than halved the poverty incidence from 83% in 1999 to 41% in 2007. Its economy had grown substantially, with real gross domestic product expanding at an annual average of 7.5% in 2006−2008.
Shanxi province is situated in the middle reaches of the Yellow River and the eastern part of the Loess Plateau in northern People’s Republic of China (PRC). At project appraisal, it had only about 3.8 million hectares of dependable arable land, of modest quality and productivity, for its 23 million rural population.
