Celebrated in its heyday as the world’s fourth-largest lake, the Aral Sea shrunk dramatically after the two major rivers that fed its waters were diverted in the 1960s to irrigate cotton and rice…

Two recently released World Bank reports — one on commodities and the other on remittances — lend insight into an unfolding dynamic in the world today. As oil prices dropped from more than $100…

My father is a long-distance trucker based in Belarus. As a young girl, I spent long hours on the road with him. I loved traveling to neighboring and faraway cities and—even though I could barely…

If you think about it, snow is a pretty amazing thing. It is nature’s way of storing water in the winter, and then using it in the summer when it is needed, namely during the growing season. If it…

It’s hard to get a break in the Europe and Central Asia region, it seems – even a short one. Hit hard by the troubles in the Eurozone at the beginning of the decade, emerging and developing…

We talk so frequently about how we shape our work and yet rarely about how our work shapes us. Let me explain. I recently moved 4 degrees in latitude – from Chisinau, Moldova to Almaty, Kazakhstan…

Citizen participation in any issue is most often thought of in the context of formal procedures. Sometimes, civil society representatives, like me, are invited to events, commissions or programs…

Laura Tuck, Vice President for the World Bank's Europe and Central Asia region, shares her impression on her trip to Kazakhstan, its economy growth, progress in development, and the World…

Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic – Laura Tuck, the vice president for the World Bank’s Europe and Central Asia unit, talks about her trip to Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and…

If you love books as much as I do, perhaps you too cherish the sensation of holding a new book in your hands for the first time. Or the way your nose twitches when dust lifts off the pages of an…