In 2000, the Government of India
launched the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (hereinafter
PMGSY) with the primary objective of providing all-weather
road connectivity (with necessary culverts and
cross-drainage structures operable throughout the year), to
eligible unconnected habitations in rural areas. Currently,
about 60 percent of the 170,000 eligible habitations have a
road. By the end of 2010, expenditures for the program had

Countries everywhere are divided into
two distinct spatial realms: one urban, one rural. Classic
models of development predict faster growth in the urban
sector, causing rapid migration from rural areas to cities,
lifting average incomes in both places. The process
continues until the marginal productivity of labor is
equalized across the two realms. The pattern of rising
urbanization accompanying economic growth has become one of

The women Land Rights Project is a project of Kenya Land Alliance that aims at actualisation Women land and property rights, as provided in the Constitution of Kenya, 2013 and as a means towards poverty alleviation. This considering the fact that, in Kenya where the foundation of most communities is Agriculture and livestock production, women contribute up to 80% of workforce yet they only hold 1% of registered land in their names and around 5-6% of registered titles are held in joint names (Kenya Land Alliance, 2013).

The authors develop a model of land
leasing with agents characterized by unobserved
heterogeneity in ability and presence of an off-farm labor
market. In this case, decentralized land rental may
contribute to equity and efficiency goals and may have
several advantages over administrative reallocation. The
extent to which this is true empirically is explored using
data from three of China's poorest provinces. The

The newly elected government takes
office at a time of stark economic challenges. The outfall
of the global economic crisis threatens to undo many of the
achievements of the recent past, derail convergence with the
European Union (EU), and heighten social vulnerability. The
election of a strong government offers a timely opportunity
to restore and broaden the economic reform agenda which had
been initiated before EU accession and but lost some

The present study examines the
challenges facing municipal governments in FYR Macedonia.
The introductory chapter provides some further context for
these developments, in terms of the challenges they pose
for urban areas and their governments. Chapter Two examines
issues for financial management of municipalities under the
decentralized regime, and the attendant need for improving
local government capacity. The third chapter highlights

This note reviews the performance of key
sectors of the Kenyan economy after the power-sharing
arrangement of 2008. Declines in the agricultural,
manufacturing, and services sectors considered in this note
are estimates. Data collected and information interpreted
provides picture of the broad orders of magnitude
anticipated of the economic decline. Assuming that the
power-sharing arrangement holds and the country returns to

This paper examines the effects of
men's and women's participation in group-based
micro-credit programs on a large set of qualitative
responses to questions that characterize women's
autonomy and gender relations within the household. The data
come from a special survey carried out in rural Bangladesh
in 1998-99. The results are consistent with the view that
women's participation in micro-credit programs helps to

The authors analyze how property rights
affect the allocation of firms' available resources
among different types of assets. In particular, they
investigate empirically for a large number of countries
whether firms in environments with more secure property
rights allocate available resources more toward intangible
assets and consequentially grow faster. The authors find
that improved asset allocation due to better property rights

With the recent resurgence of interest
in equity, inequality, and growth, the possibility of a
negative relationship between inequality and economic
growth, has received renewed interest in the literature.
Faced with the prospect that high levels of inequality may
persist, and give rise to poverty traps, policymakers are
paying more attention to the distributional implications of
macroeconomic policies. Because high levels of inequality

The rural economy of developing
countries has long been regarded as synonymous with
agriculture but in recent years this view has begun to
change. Such diverse activities as government, commerce, and
services are now seen as providing most income in rural
households. Applying decomposition analysis to two new
nationally representative sets of household data from Egypt
and Jordan, the author examines how different sources of

Geographic targeting is perhaps the most
popular mechanism used to direct social programs to the poor
in Latin America. The author empirically compares geographic
targeting indicators available in Peru. He combines
household-level information from the 1994 and 1997 Peru
Living Standards Measurement Surveys and district-level
information from the 1993 Peru Population and Housing
Census. He then conducts a series of simulations that