This paper studies the use of labor
markets to mitigate the impact of violent shocks on
households in rural areas in Colombia. It examines changes
in the labor supply from on-farm to off-farm labor as a
means of coping with the violent shock and the ensuing
redistribution of time within households. It identifies the
heterogeneous response by gender. Because the incidence of
violent shocks is not exogenous, the analysis uses

Around the world, countries are becoming
urbanized at an astonishing pace. As countries develop
economically, their economies shift from mainly rural and
agrarian to increasingly urban and nonagricultural. This
rural-urban transformation presents both opportunities and
challenges for development. When managed effectively, the
transformation spurs growth and reduces poverty. When
managed poorly, however, the process can result in stark

This book provides an overview of the
World Bank's Eco2 cities : ecological cities as
economic cities initiative. The objective of the Eco2 cities
initiative is to help cities in developing countries achieve
a greater degree of ecological and economic sustainability.
The book is divided into three parts. Part one describes the
Eco2 cities initiative framework. It describes the approach,
beginning with the background and rationale. Key challenges

Climate change is believed to represent
a serious challenge to poverty reduction efforts around the
globe. This paper conducts an up-to-date review of three
main strands of the literature analyzing the poverty impacts
of climate change : (i) economy-wide growth models
incorporating climate change impacts to work out consistent
scenarios for how climate change might affect the path of
poverty over the next decades; (ii) studies focusing on the

Global warming is expected to heavily
impact agriculture, the dominant source of livelihood for
the world's poor. Yet, little is known about the
distributional implications of climate change at the
sub-national level. Using a simple comparative statics
framework, this paper analyzes how changes in the prices of
land, labor, and food induced by modest temperature
increases over the next three decades will affect

After 20 years of neglect by
international donors, agriculture is now again in the
headlines because higher food prices are increasing food
insecurity and poverty. In the coming years it will be
essential to increase food productivity and production in
developing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and
with smallholders. This however requires finding viable
solutions to a number of complex technical, institutional

This paper explores the reduction of
food insecurity in Bolivia, adopting a supply side approach
that analyzes the role of agricultural spending on
vulnerability. Vulnerability to food insecurity is captured
by a municipal level composite -- developed locally within
the framework of World Food Program food security analysis
-- that combines welfare outcomes, weather conditions and
agricultural potential for all 327 municipalities in 2003,

This paper estimates the relationship
between initial village inequality and subsequent household
income growth for a large sample of households in rural
China. Using a rich longitudinal survey spanning the years
1987-2002, and controlling for an array of household and
village characteristics, the paper finds that households
located in higher inequality villages experienced
significantly lower income growth through the 1990s.

Although Bulgaria now implements the
European Union's (EU's) "common"
agricultural policy (CAP), national policymakers still
maintain responsibility to tailor CAP implementation to meet
the specific development needs of the country. The National
Rural Development Program (NRDP) very appropriately lays out
the challenges that Bulgarian agriculture and rural
development face, but the early implementation of a

Lesotho began a structural economic
transformation in the early 1990s. The transformation has
brought higher, more secure incomes to households while the
government succeeded in dramatically improving access to
services such as education, health, water, and
transportation. Yet today, Lesotho faces a number of serious
development challenges, including a high rate of chronic
poverty, entrenched income inequality, and most troubling

This study documents the long-term
welfare effects of household non-traditional agricultural
export (NTX) adoption. The analysis uses a unique panel
dataset, which spans the period 1985-2005, and employs
difference-in-differences estimation to investigate the
long-term impact of non-traditional agricultural export
adoption on changes in household consumption status and
asset position in the Central Highlands of Guatemala. Given

This paper argues that inclusive growth
analytics has a distinct character focusing on both the pace
and pattern of growth. Traditionally, applied
country-specific poverty and growth analyses have been done
separately. This paper describes the conceptual elements for
an analytical strategy aimed to integrate these two strands
of analyses, and to identify and prioritize country-specific
constraints to sustained and inclusive growth. The authors