The adoption of new agricultural
technologies may be discouraged because of their inherent
riskiness. This study implemented a randomized field
experiment to ask whether the provision of insurance against
a major source of production risk induces farmers to take
out loans to invest in a new crop variety. The study sample
was composed of roughly 800 maize and groundnut farmers in
Malawi, where by far the dominant source of production risk

This paper analyzes the effect of
facilities and infrastructure available at the market place
on a farmer's decision to sell at the market using a
comprehensive survey of farmers, markets and villages
conducted in Tamil Nadu, India in 2005. The econometric
estimation shows that the likelihood of sales at the market
increases significantly with an improvement in market
facilities and a decrease in travel time from the village to

As Kosovo moves towards resolution of
its political status, the attention of the authorities and
of the international donor community is increasingly turning
towards the need for modernization of Kosovo's economic
and social infrastructure in order to facilitate sustained
economic growth and development. This note looks further
into the underlying causes and the actions that will be
required to address them. The main conclusions of the note

This sector report claims that in the
three years between 2002 and 2005 alone, almost 235,000
people have moved out of poverty in Albania. Strong economic
growth and large inflow of remittances are at the center of
this impressive achievement. However, low productivity of
predominantly small family farms has put a drag on rural
growth prospects. Moreover, Ndihma Ekonomike (NE) program,
the means-tested income support program is small in scale,

This study on Jharkhand in India
addresses the challenges faced by that new state of India
(founded in November 2000) to surmount adverse initial
conditions of low average income, very high incidence of
poverty, and little social development. In addition, initial
health and education indicators in Jharkhand were also
markedly unfavorable in comparison to both the all-India
average and the major Indian states. The paper points out

This report is about balanced economic development in the Northeast of Thailand. It is about growth and poverty reduction, cities and villages, enterprises and workers, skills and education, infrastructure and trade, and rice and silk. Northeast economic development is only part of Thailand's development challenge, but it is among the most important. We look back at how the Northeast has fared in terms of growth, poverty reduction and social capital over the last decades relative to other regions in Thailand.

Although sharecropping has long
fascinated economists, the determinants of this contractual
form are still poorly understood and the debate over the
extent of moral hazard is far from settled. The authors
address both issues by emphasizing the role of landlord
supervision. When tenant effort is observable, but at a cost
to the landlord, otherwise identical share-tenants can
receive different levels of supervision and have different

Drawing on an integrated mixed methods
research design, the authors explore the dynamics of the
development-conflict nexus in rural Indonesia, and the
specific role of development projects in shaping the nature,
extent, and trajectories of "everyday" conflicts.
They find that projects that give inadequate attention to
dispute resolution mechanisms in many cases stimulate local
conflict, either through the injection of development

Using two rounds of nationally
representative household survey data in this study, the
authors measure the impact on poverty in Nepal of local and
international migration for work. They apply an instrumental
variable approach to deal with nonrandom selection of
migrants and simulate various scenarios for the different
levels of work-related migration, comparing observed and
counterfactual household expenditure distribution. The

In view of its increasing importance,
and the dearth of information on return migration and its
impacts on source households, this study uses data from the
2005 Albania Living Standards Measurement Study survey and
assesses the impact of past migration experience of Albanian
households on non-farm business ownership through
instrumental variables regression techniques. Moreover,
considering the differences in earning potentials and

This report shows that after a decade of
moderate growth but little or no long term change in rural
poverty in Pakistan, agricultural output, rural incomes,
rural poverty and social welfare indicators all showed
marked improvements between 2001-02 and 2004-05. However,
longer term trends suggest there is little reason for
complacency. The agricultural GDP per capita growth rate
(1999- 2000 to 2004-05) was only 0.3 percent per year; rural

The overall objective of the
Comprehensive Assessment of the Agricultural Sector (CAAS)
is to provide an evidence base to enable appropriate
strategic policy responses by the Government of Liberia
(GoL) and its development partners in order to maximize the
contribution of the agriculture sector to the
Government's overarching policy objectives. Given the
strong relationship between growth in agricultural