This paper assembles data at the
all-India level and for the village of Palanpur, Uttar
Pradesh, to document the growing importance, and influence,
of the non-farm sector in the rural economy between the
early 1980s and late 2000s. The suggestion from the combined
National Sample Survey and Palanpur data is of a slow
process of non-farm diversification, whose distributional
incidence, on the margin, is increasingly pro-poor. The

The agricultural and food sector is an
ideal case for investigating the political economy of public
policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector
since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational, while
others have been gradual but persistent. This paper reviews
and synthesizes the literature on trends and fluctuations in
market distortions and the political-economy explanations
that have been advanced. Based on a rich global data set

The paper provides an up-to date and
selective review of the literature on how social safety nets
contribute to growth. The evidence is carefully chosen to
show how safety nets have the potential to overcome
constraints on growth linked to market failures, and is
organized into 4 distinct pathways: i) encouraging asset
accumulation by changing incentives and by addressing
imperfections in financial markets caused by constraints in

This paper provides an overview of
research on income inequality in China over the period of
economic reform. It presents the results of two main sources
of evidence on income inequality and, assisted by various
decompositions, explains the reasons income inequality has
increased rapidly and the Gini coefficient is now almost
0.5. This paper evaluates the degree of income inequality
from the perspectives of people's subjective well-being

As countries develop, they restructure
away from agriculture and urbanize. But structural
transformation and urbanization patterns differ
substantially, with some countries fostering migration out
of agriculture into rural off farm activities and secondary
towns, and others undergoing rapid agglomeration in mega
cities. Using cross-country panel data for developing
countries spanning 1980-2004, the analysis in this paper

Mali, a landlocked West African nation
at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, has introduced a
program to produce biodiesel using jatropha curcas, a
non-edible shrub widely available throughout the country by
farmers for generations as a living fence for their gardens.
The aim of the program is to partially substitute diesel,
which is entirely supplied through imports, with domestic
biodiesel produced from a feedstock that does not have any

This paper investigates the role of
employment opportunities created by foreign-owned firms as a
determinant of internal migration and destination choice
using the Vietnam Migration Survey 2004 and the Vietnam
Household Living Standards Survey 2004. Multinomial logit
and conditional logit models are estimated to study both
origin and destination-specific characteristics of migrants.
The paper finds that the migration response to foreign job

A rather unique panel tracking more than
3,300 individuals from households in rural Kagera, Tanzania
during 1991/4-2010 shows that about one in two
individuals/households who exited poverty did so by
transitioning from agriculture into the rural nonfarm
economy or secondary towns. Only one in seven exited poverty
by migrating to a large city, although those moving to a
city experienced on average faster consumption growth.

This Policy Note discusses the status of
Forestry in the Middle East and North Africa Region (MNA) of
the Bank. The Policy Note is a product of the FAO Investment
Center in Rome, the International Food Policy Research
Institute (IFPRI) and the Bank. Experience in natural
resource management shows that to adequately address
sustainable development, solutions must go beyond any single
sector, and be cross-sectoral. They must also go beyond

The purpose of this study is to assess
agriculture's competitiveness in Colombia. During the
past 12 years, Colombia's agricultural sector has
performed poorly, resulting in the continuation of extensive
rural poverty. Improving the sector's competitiveness
is the only sure and lasting way to improve its growth
performance and reduce poverty. Thus, the main objectives of
this study are to assess: (a) the sector's current and

This report addresses key structural,
institutional, and sectoral policy impediments to achieving
a higher, and sustained economic growth in the sector, and
poverty reduction in rural areas of Iran. It focuses mainly
on an assessment of agricultural development outcomes, a
discussion of the agricultural policy agenda, and provides
recommendations for future policy dialogue between the Bank,
and the Government of Iran. On examining development

The aim for this study was to assess the
impact of irrigation activities in the Brazilian Semi-Arid
(BSA) Region, and to analyze to what extent irrigated
agriculture in this region has contributed to the reduction
of poverty levels and regional inequalities, income growth
and distribution, and the creation of quality jobs, with the
aim of contributing to the establishment of guidelines for a
regional development strategy. The study indicates that,