China should complete its transition to a market economy--through enterprise, land, labor, and financial sector reforms--strengthen its private sector, open its markets to greater competition and innovation, and ensure equality of opportunity to help achieve its goal of a new structure for economic growth.

China has made some remarkable achievements in sustainable development, but the constant deterioration of the overall trend of the environment has not yet been effectively curbed. To achieve the goal of sustainable development, we must first ensure coordination and coherence of national development goals in different areas and adhere to green development road. To achieve the objectives related to green development, and to clarify the direction of green development in the next 20 years, a road map is needed to guide and coordinate the process.

Worldwide urbanization has become a crucial issue in recent years. Bangladesh, one of the poorest and most densely-populated countries in the world, has been facing rapid urbanization. In urban areas, maternal indicators are generally worse in the slums than in the urban non-slum areas. The Manoshi program at BRAC, a non governmental organization, works to improve maternal, newborn, and child health in the urban slums of Bangladesh. This paper describes maternal related beliefs and practices in the urban slums of Dhaka and provides baseline information for the Manoshi program.

African countries confront vast economic, social, and environmental challenges. Although urban issues bear upon many of these challenges, they have remained a secondary priority for governments and the international community. The growing gap between infrastructure and services already built and those needed demands a drastic change in the scale of urban financing. This book aims to begin that reexamination. It offers a broad methodological perspective and several operational avenues to bolster and modernize the financing that cities urgently require.

This paper analyzes the rationale and limits of using labor contracts as a risk-sharing mechanism by (1) discussing types of contracts and their characteristics; (2) deriving the optimal labor contract for risk-neutral firms and risk-averse workers; (3) contrasting the predictions of contract labor and spot labor markets; (4) discussing the limits of labor contracts as a mechanisms to allocate risks; (5) focusing on rural labor markets, where labor and land contracts provide substitutes and have implication in relation to risk allocation; (6) discussing government interventions; and (7) rev

The water resources of the atolls of the Republic of the Maldives are under continual threat from climatic and anthropogenic stresses, such as changing rainfall patterns, sea-level rise, and contamination from human activities and climatic events. Groundwater, a historically important resource of the island communities of the Maldives, is particularly affected due to the fragile nature of the freshwater lens on small atoll islands.

Most studies that incorporate spatial effects use a very limited number of spatial variables in the growth model, e.g. growth spillovers or infrastructure impacts of neighbouring regions. This article innovates on previous work in spatial econometrics by differentiating among spatial contributions to economic development; e.g. infrastructure, capital, human capital, land and labour.

The author provides a briefing on cost-benefit analyses (CBA) for disaster risk reduction (DRR), stating that the most cost-effective forms of DRR investment tend to be non-structural approaches, such as land use planning, warning systems, and household-level changes. These are often backed by structural measures, making full separation difficult. Barriers to enacting DRR savings occur because political capital is rarely gained from implementing DRR, except in cases where it is visible and tangible and might not even be the most effective DRR approach.

This research explores the activities of community institutions in achieving sustainable forest management (SFM) and sustained forest cover. Three institutions representing the administrative, economic, and social/traditional institutions were identified. The institutions had 30 forest management activities and satisfied about 66% of SFM Criteria and Indicators. A loss of 122 ha of forest cover was estimated over the last 30 yr, attributed to conversion of forests to built-up areas.

The new scenario framework facilitates the coupling of multiple socioeconomic reference pathways with climate model products using the representative concentration pathways. This will allow for improved assessment of climate impacts, adaptation and mitigation. Assumptions about climate policy play a major role in linking socioeconomic futures with forcing and climate outcomes. The paper presents the concept of shared climate policy assumptions as an important element of the new scenario framework.

As Indonesia heads to the polls in 2014, its economy is slowing. The end of the commodities boom and the global return to more normal monetary policy has exposed some weaknesses. Exchange-rate depreciation has absorbed some of the adjustment; but structural rigidities are still likely to limit the expansion of non-commodity sectors, and the increased fuel-subsidy bill for imported oil is putting pressure on the current account and the budget. The immediate focus is on demand-side consolidation to manage inflation and the current account deficit.

Despite widespread agreement among economists that labor-intensive manufacturing has contributed mightily to rapid development in China and other fast-growing economies, most developing countries have had little success in raising the share of manufacturing in production, employment, or exports. Tales from the Development Frontier recounts efforts to establish light manufacturing clusters in several Asian and African countries, looking in particular at China.