The accumulation of decent housing
matters both because of the difference it makes to living
standards and because of its centrality to economic
development. The consequences for living standards are
far-reaching. In addition to directly conferring utility,
decent housing improves health and enables children to do
homework. It frees up women's time and enables them to
participate in the labor market. More subtly, a home and its

As the 21st century unfolds, the vast
nation of India faces an array of challenges, including how
to feed its burgeoning population in a situation where rural
poverty is widespread and land resources are under mounting
pressure. In such a situation it is vital that the resources
supporting agriculture (especially rain-fed arable farming)
- soil and water, physical infrastructure, and those
employed on the land operate efficiently and in harmony. Two

This paper is part of a larger effort to
document, assess, and promote scalable models and approaches
to empower poor communities to manage a climate and disaster
risk agenda in support of their development goals and to
identify practical ways of getting climate and disaster risk
financing directly to the ground level where impacts are
felt. Social funds, social protection systems and safety
nets, community-driven development (CDD) projects,

Climate change is a huge challenge for
the agriculture and rural development (ARD) sector in
Romania. On the one hand, agriculture is a source of
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and must therefore be
expected to contribute towards the climate change mitigation
goals of the Europe 2020 strategy. European farmers,
foresters, rural businesses, and other local people
therefore need to start paying much greater attention to

Over the seven years from 2004 through
2011, Cambodian economic growth was tremendous, ranking amid
the best in the world. Moreover, household consumption
increased by nearly 40 percent. And this growth was
pro-poor, not only reducing inequality, but also
proportionally boosting poor people's consumption
further and faster than that of the non-poor. As a result,
the poverty rate dropped from 52.2 to 20.5 percent,

In many Pacific island countries,
meeting non-food basic needs is a growing challenge and
further complicated by substantial economic and
environmental risks. Hardship and vulnerability are
increasingly prominent concerns in Pacific island countries,
but the knowledge base to guide policymaking is limited.
Family and community networks are central to life in most
Pacific island countries, providing critical support to

Agricultural growth rates in the Latin
America and the Caribbean (LAC) region have been much slower
than the rest of the developing world. In the regions of
East Asia, South Asia and Middle East and North Africa, the
annual growth of agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
in 1980-2004 exceeded 3 percent, while growth in Sub-
Saharan Africa averaged almost 3 percent. This paper
attempts to present an overview of the agricultural sector

The Multi Donor Fund for Aceh and Nias
(MDF) and the Java Reconstruction Fund (JRF) have played
significant roles in the remarkable recovery of Aceh, Nias
and Java, following some of the worst disasters in Indonesia
in recent years. The MDF and the JRF, which is patterned
after it, are each considered a highly successful model for
post-disaster reconstruction. This paper presents lessons
from the MDF and JRF's efforts to facilitate

Indonesia's Program Nasional
Pemberdayaan Masyarakat (PNPM) is the largest Community
Driven Development (CDD) program in the world covering all
urban wards (PNPM-Urban) and rural villages (PNPM-Rural) in
Indonesia. This policy note summarizes a comprehensive
process evaluation of the PNPM-Urban program which has been
carried by the Research and Development (RAND) corporation
in collaboration with survey meter, as well as a rapid

Long-term economic growth is the key
driver for increasing the economic wellbeing of the
population, but the pattern and the incidence of growth also
matter. Economic growth narrowly based on certain enclave
sectors or benefitting small groups is neither socially
stable nor sustainable. Along these lines, the World Bank
recently revised its institutional strategy, establishing
two goals, namely: (i) ending extreme global poverty, the

In 2006, the government approved a
national livestock policy based on the premise that the
livestock industry has an important role to play in building
a strong national economy and in the process, reducing
inequalities among Tanzanians by increasing their incomes
and employment opportunities. This report presents an
analysis of rural livelihoods in Tanzania, with particular
emphasis on the livestock sub-sector, smallholder

This paper quantifies the contributions
to distributional changes observed in Pakistan over the last
decade. In contrast to methods that focus on aggregate
summary statistics, the method adopted in this paper
generates entire counterfactual distributions to account for
the contributions of demographics, labor and non-labor
incomes in explaining poverty reduction. The results show
that the most important contributor was the growth in