The story of agricultural policy in Northeast Asia over the past 50 years illustrates the dramatic changes that can occur in distortions to agricultural incentives faced by producers and consumers at different stages of economic development.

This report seizes the opportunity to learn from existing evidence by analyzing lessons derived from impact evaluations produced between 2000 and January 2009 to begin to discern what has been effective in agriculture. It is part of a broader effort being undertaken by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) of the World Bank to understand how impact evaluations can help improve performance and broadly disseminate those lessons.

A well-functioning land administration and management system is crucial for Madagascar's economic and social future. Land is implicated in Madagascar's ongoing economic development and social transformation in many important ways, as key a factor in its quest for economic growth, urbanization, transparent decision-making on land-related foreign investments, environment protection, vibrant and sustainable rural communities, political stability, and social cohesion.

The point of departure of this paper is that in the absence of effectively functioning asset markets the distribution of wealth matters for efficiency. Inefficient asset markets depress total factor productivity (TFP) in two ways: first, by not allowing efficient firms to grow to the size that they should achieve (this could include many great firms that are never started); and second, by allowing inefficient firms to survive by depressing the demand for factors (good firms are too small) and hence factor prices.

South Africa's growth experience provides an example of how contrasting growth trends long-term decline followed by improved growth pivot around political change, in this case a transition to democracy. In the decade prior to 1994, South Africa experienced the worst period of economic growth since the end of the Second World War, with growth variable and declining.

The real exchange rate was not at the center of the first generation of neoclassical growth models, nor was it prominent among the policy prescriptions that flowed from those models. Recent analyses, in contrast, have paid it more attention. This paper analyzes the role of the real exchange rate in the growth process, the channels through which the real exchange rate influences other variables, and policies useful (and not useful) for governing the real rate. An appendix provides econometric evidence supportive of the emphases in the text.

After decades of war, with a dilapidated infrastructure and millions of people dead, wounded or displaced, Vietnam could have been considered a hopeless case in economic development. Yet, it is now about to enter the ranks of middle-income countries. The obvious question is: How did this happen? This paper goes one step further, asking not which policies were adopted, but rather why they were adopted. This question is all the more intriguing because the process did not involve one group of individuals displacing another within the structure of power.

Brazil grew 2.4 percent per year on average in the last 25 years-somewhat less than Latin America, a good deal less than the world, far less than the emerging countries of Asia in the same period, and indeed far less than Brazil itself in previous decades. If anything stands out favorably in recent Brazilian experience, it is not growth but stabilization and the successful opening of the economy. The purpose of this paper is more modest.

The organization, which is now called the International Land Coalition (ILC), was established on January 1, 1996, on the recommendation of the conference on hunger and poverty convened by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in 1995. At first, the organization was called the popular coalition to eradicate hunger and poverty. The ILC itself was formally constituted and launched along with its new name in February 2003.

Uganda has started its journey into urbanization and economic development. The pace of urbanization is picking up currently at 4.5 percent per year, and likely to accelerate with rising incomes. The economic benefits from urban growth will come from exploiting economies of scale and agglomeration and by increasing fluidity in factor markets that enable substitution between land and non land inputs.

The tsunami that originated from the Indian Ocean in 2004 wreaked massive destruction, killing more than 130,000 people and displacing half a million individuals in Aceh, Indonesia. More than 800 kilometers of coastline was affected, and close to 53,795 land parcels were destroyed. The land administration system sustained significant damage because documentation of land ownership was washed away along with people's houses and other possessions in the affected communities. Physical boundary markers, including trees and fences, also disappeared.

This study of 23 leases over land on the island of Epi is the first of the Jastis Blong Evriwan (JBE) research activities to examine land and natural resource management (L&NRM) and access to justice on particular Vanuatu islands. The research will be repeated on the island of Tanna. To inform the broader context of land leasing in Vanuatu, JBE, in collaboration with the government of Vanuatu, has begun collecting and analyzing government land-leasing data.