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Projects
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The World Bank's increased focus on housing related research and projects grew out of World Bank President McNamara's 1975 address on Urban Poverty. The earliest shelter assistance were a series of sites and services projects in Africa and India. The current portfolio has broadened to a wide range of project types around the globe. For example, in Indonesia the Bank contributed to one of the most extensive slum improvement programs in the world. In Mexico, it lent more than $1 billion to help support a more market friendly system to support the poor. In India, it made significant contributions to establishing a thriving private housing finance system. It also contributed to reforming the housing systems of many former socialist economies in Eastern and Central Europe.
In support of project assistance, the Bank has undertaken several extensive research projects over the last thirty years. The first was the Cities Study in Colombia, next the Housing Demand Study in the 1980's, then the compilation of Housing Indicators, as well as Land Market and Housing Finance studies in the 1990's, and finally the development of the Land and Real Estate Assessment (LARA) diagnostic tool in the late 1990’s. This work has brought together some of the world's leading scholars, resulting in a large number of books, articles, and policy papers.
The result is that the Bank's housing portfolio was not only large at close to $5 billion dollars in last decade, but has also had a high performance level. In response to this our most recent analytical work draws on a comprehensive database of housing projects (file size 2.7MB) supported by the Bank and the IFC from 1972 to 2004. The database contains the share of costs devoted shelter each loan, the various types of housing components in each loan, and the project outcome. (For more information on World Bank projects, visit the Projects web page.)
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