The population of Sub-Saharan Africa
stood at 854 million in 2010. Annual population growth
averaged 2.5 percent, with a relatively high sustained
fertility rate, fostered by the fact that two-thirds of the
population is under 25. The region has the highest
proportion of poor people in the world, with 47.5 percent of
its population living on less than $1.25 a day, as measured
in terms of purchasing power parity in 2008. It is also the

Public knowledge about India's
ambitious Employment Guarantee Scheme is low in one of
India's poorest states, Bihar, where participation is
also unusually low. Is the solution simply to tell people
their rights? Or does their lack of knowledge reflect deeper
problems of poor people's agency and an unresponsive
supply side? This paper reports on an information campaign
that was designed and implemented in the form of an

Broad-based economic growth is essential to sustainable, long-term development. It creates opportunities for raising living standards, provides countries with the resources to expand access to basic services and enable citizens to chart their own prosperous futures. Despite incredible progress that has reduced poverty and improved livelihoods around the world, global economic growth since 2008 has slowed and in some cases regressed. Today, three quarters of the world’s poor don’t have a bank account and access to capital remains a significant barrier throughout the developing world.

Based on a large survey to compare the
effectiveness of land markets and land reform in Colombia,
the authors find that rental and sales markets were more
effective in transferring land to poor but productive
producers than was administrative land reform. The fact that
land transactions were all of a short-term nature and that
little land was transferred from very large to small land
owners or the landless suggests that there may be scope for

Empirical evidence indicates that in
many developing regions, the extreme poor in more marginal
land areas form a "residual" pool of rural labor.
Structural transformation in such developing economies
depends crucially on labor and land use decisions of these
most-vulnerable populations located on abundant but marginal
agricultural land. Although the modern sector may be the
source of dynamic growth through learning-by-doing and

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

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

This paper uses a three-round
4,000-household panel from Andhra Pradesh together with
administrative data to explore short and medium-term poverty
and welfare effects of the National Rural Employment
Guarantee Scheme. Triple difference estimates suggest that
participants significantly increase consumption (protein and
energy intake) in the short run and accumulate more
nonfinancial assets in the medium term. Direct benefits

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