About two-thirds of the developing world’s 3 billion rural people live in about 475 million small farm households, working on land plots smaller than 2 hectares. 1 Many are poor and food insecure and have limited access to markets and services. Their choices are constrained, but they farm their land and produce food for a substantial proportion of the world’s population. Besides farming they have multiple economic activities, often in the informal economy, to contribute towards their small incomes.

Despite a decline in both monetary and
multidimensional poverty rates since 2000, Haiti remains
among the poorest and most unequal countries in Latin
America. Two years after the 2010 earthquake, poverty was
still high, particularly in rural areas. This report
establishes that in 2012 more than one in two Haitians was
poor, living on less than $ 2.41 a day, and one person in
four was living below the national extreme poverty line of

Agriculture remains fundamental for
Nicaragua from both a macroeconomic and social view. It is
the largest sector of the Nicaraguan economy, and it remains
the single biggest employer with around 30 percent of the
labor force and including processed foods, like meat and
sugar, agriculture accounts for around 40 percent of total
exports value. Nicaragua appears to be gradually losing
competitive edge of some of its key agricultural exports

In this issue: Facilitating labor
migration from the Philippines; Incentives and teacher
effort; Electoral accountability and local public spending
in Indonesia; Why don't poor countries do R&D?; How
effective are efforts to raise voluntary enrollment in
health insurance?; How insecure property rights affect
migration in China; the challenges of public service
delivery in the Pacific Islands.

Previous research on sex-selective
abortions has ignored the interactions between fertility,
birth spacing, and sex selection, despite both fertility and
birth spacing being important considerations for parents
when deciding on the use of sex selection. This paper
presents a novel approach that jointly estimates the
determinants of sex-selective abortions, fertility, and
birth spacing, using data on Hindu women from India's

This study estimates marginal increase
in malnutrition for children ages 1-3 years from exposure to
an extreme shock in the West African Sahel. The study uses
knowledge of a child's birth and high resolution
spatial and temporal distribution of shocks, calculated from
the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and
satellite-based measures of rainfall and temperature to link
a child to the shock experienced in-utero. The study finds

This paper investigates the causal
consequences of Tropical Storm Agatha (2010) -- the
strongest tropical storm ever to strike Guatemala since
rainfall records have been kept -- on household welfare. The
analysis reveals substantial negative effects, particularly
among urban households. Per capita consumption fell by 12.6
percent, raising poverty by 5.5 percentage points (an
increase of 18 percent). The negative effects of the shock

Economic progress is accompanied by a
fundamental spatial transformation where the economic
landscapes of countries become increasingly uneven. The
journey from low incomes to high incomes involves rising
concentration of prosperity in a few places. Connecting
people to prosperity - is the principle behind economic
integration policies that can help countries reap the
benefits of both uneven growth and inclusive development.

Iraq appears to have firmly entered the
ranks of upper middle-income countries in 2012, having
experienced strong economic growth following the
establishment of a civilian elected government in 2005-06.
In 2012 the years of growth culminated in a per capita GDP
of 2472 constant 2005 US$. This three-volume poverty and
inclusion assessment provides the first in-depth analysis of
Iraq's economic and social development during the

Himachal Pradesh has the reputation of
being stable, inclusive, cohesive and well-governed and it
stands apart in many respects from its neighbors in northern
India. It has additionally, achieved remarkable growth,
especially in the last two decades, which has been
accompanied by very good human development outcomes. Despite
being a predominantly rural society, educational attainment
in Himachal Pradesh for instance, is among the best in the

This paper uses farm panel data from
China to examine the dynamics of land transactions, machine
investments, and the demand for machine services. Recently,
China's agriculture has experienced a large expansion
of machine rentals and machine services provided by
specialized agents, which has contributed to mechanization
of agricultural production. The empirical results show that
an increase in nonagricultural wage rates leads to expansion

The paper investigates determinants of
civic participation in local budget processes in rural areas
in the Kyrgyz Republic by using data from the Life in
Kyrgyzstan survey, conducted in 2012. The analysis of the
data suggests that although civic awareness and interest in
local budget processes is relatively high, the participation
rate in local budgeting processes is low. The paper also
shows that interest, awareness, and participation are