Three out of every four poor people in developing countries live in rural areas, and most of them depend directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihoods. In many parts of the world, women are the main farmers or producers, but their roles remain largely unrecognized. The 2008 World development report: agriculture for development highlights the vital role of agriculture in sustainable development and its importance in achieving the millennium development goal of halving by 2015 the share of people suffering from extreme poverty and hunger.

Recognition of the potentially deleterious implications of inequality in opportunity originating in a skewed asset distribution has spawned considerable interest in land reforms. However, little attention has been devoted to fact that, in the longer term, the measures used to implement land reforms could negatively affect productivity. Use of state level data on rental restrictions, together with a nationally representative survey from India, suggests that, contrary to original intentions, rental restrictions negatively affect productivity and equity.

Recognition of the importance of institutions that provide security of property rights and relatively equal access to economic resources to a broad cross-section of society has renewed interest in the potential of asset redistribution, including land reforms. Empirical analysis of the impact of such policies is, however, scant and often contradictory. This paper uses panel household data from India, together with state-level variation in the implementation of land reform, to address some of the deficiencies of earlier studies.

Although a large theoretical literature discusses the possible inefficiency of sharecropping contracts, the empirical evidence on this phenomenon has been ambiguous at best. Household-level fixed-effect estimates from about 8,500 plots operated by households that own and sharecrop land in the Ethiopian highlands provide support for the hypothesis of Marshallian inefficiency. At the same time, a factor adjustment model suggests that the extent to which rental markets allow households to attain their desired operational holding size is extremely limited.

The Cambodia environment monitor 2008 is one of a series of environmental reports prepared for East Asian countries under an initiative sponsored by the World Bank. The objective of this series is to present a snapshot of environmental trends across a range of issues. The purpose of the monitor is to engage and inform interested stakeholders about key environmental changes in an easy to understand format accessible to a wide audience. This report identifies seven strategic priorities for the Royal government of Cambodia and its conservation partners.

Climate change presents a profound challenge to food security and development. Negative impacts from climate change are likely to be greatest in regions that are currently food insecure and may even be significant in those regions that have made large gains in reducing food insecurity over the past half-century. Adaptation in the agricultural sector is being given a high priority within this effort because of the inherent sensitivity of food production to climate and the strong inter-linkages that exist between climate, agriculture, and economic growth and development.

The volume on agricultural price distortions, inequality and poverty begins with a global study that uses the World Bank's linkage model to examine the economic impacts in various countries, regions and the world as a whole of agricultural and trade policies as of 2004. It does so by shocking that model with the removal of all agricultural price-distorting domestic and border policies with, and without, the removal of trade policies affecting all other goods.

Reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions affecting agriculture in developing countries, particularly by cuts to agricultural export taxes and by some reductions in government assistance to agriculture in high-income countries, but international trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods. This paper summarizes a series of empirical studies that focus on the effects of the remaining distortions to world merchandise trade for poverty and inequality, especially in developing countries.

This social assessment (SA) was conducted under the Fergana Valley Water Resources Management Project (FVWRMP), which is providing assistance to the Government of Tajikistan to address irrigation and drainage deficiencies in Eastern Sughd. The main SA objectives were to understand how prevailing structures of water provision, land reforms, and gender relations impact rural livelihoods; to analyze experiences in establishing inclusive Water Users Associations (WUAs); and to provide recommendations to FVWRMP with the aim of enhancing its programs.

Capitalizing on the most recent estimates of agricultural price distortions in China and in other countries, this paper assesses the economic and poverty impact of global and domestic trade reform in China. It also examines the interplay between the trade reforms and factor market reforms aimed at improving the allocation of labor within the Chinese economy. The results suggest that trade reforms in the rest of the world, land reform and hukou reform all serve to reduce poverty, while unilateral trade reforms result in a small poverty increase.

This paper sketches a macroeconomic scenario for China for 2010-20. Growth accounting exercise finds that, with both the working population and total factor productivity on course to decelerate, potential gross domestic product (GDP) growth is likely to moderate in the coming 10 years, despite still sizeable capital deepening. Actual GDP should grow broadly as fast as potential GDP, continuing the track record since the late 1990s.

South Africa has rapidly reduced trade barriers since the end of Apartheid, yet agricultural production and exports have remained sluggish. Also, poverty and unemployment have risen and become increasingly concentrated in rural areas. This paper examines the extent to which remaining price distortions, both domestic and foreign, are contributing to the underperformance of the agricultural sector vis-a-vis the rest of the economy. The author draws on a computable general equilibrium (CGE) and micro-simulation model of South Africa that is linked to the results of a global trade model.