Policies that enable rural communities
to participate in expanding economic opportunities can be
central to inclusive growth in Myanmar. Rural communities
are home to the majority of Myanmar’s population, the
majority of its many ethnic groups, and 70 percent of its
poor. Development in rural areas is constrained by low
returns to agriculture, and significantly lower levels of
public service delivery and human development outcomes

Even after several decades of green
revolution, malnutrition continues to be a major development
challenge in much of South Asia, and India has a major share
of the malnourished people in the region. For nutrition
goals to be integrated into extension the curricula provided
to current and future agricultural extension agents must be
revisited. As part of the South Asia Food and Nutrition
Security Initiative (SAFANSI), this paper focuses on

Rice is the world’s most heavily
consumed staple crop. Its production requires enormous
volumes of water and emits large quantities of atmospheric
methane, a greenhouse gas some many times more powerful than
carbon dioxide - particularly during a medium term period of
about seven years. In a global context of growing
population, increasingly scarce water resources, and climate
change, more productive, sustainable, and efficient rice

Once concentrated among a few large
economies, global flows of goods, services, and capital now
reach an ever-larger number of countries worldwide. Global
trade in goods and in services both increased 10 times
between 1980 and 2011, while foreign direct investment (FDI)
flows increased almost 30-fold. A value chain is global when
some of these stages are carried out in more than one
country, most notably when discrete tasks within a

In 2012, the World Bank initiated the
building urban resilience in East Asia program, aimed at
increasing the resilience of cities to disasters and the
impact of climate change by using a risk-based approach to
making public investment decisions. The objective is to
demonstrate a scalable methodology and practical tools for
risk assessment that can be used for city-level investment
decisions. This activity started with engaging selected

The city of Kampala has undergone a
period of rapid urbanization that has contributed to the
degradation of the city’s natural environment. The urban
environmental profile for Kampala has been prepared as the
first component of the assignment promoting green urban
development in Africa: enhancing the relationship between
urbanization, environmental assets, and ecosystem services,
a project being conducted under the leadership of the World

This paper develops a novel methodology
to measure the quantity of jobs and value of wages embodied
in exports for a large number of countries and sectors for
intermittent years between 1995 and 2011. The resulting
Labor Content of Exports database allows the examination of
the direct contribution of labor to exports as well as the
indirect contribution via other sectors of the economy for
skilled and unskilled labor. The analysis of the new data

This paper studies the effects of
differences in local administrative burdens in Italy in the
years 2005–2007 preceding a major reform that sped up firm
registration procedures. Combining regulatory data from a
survey on Italian provinces before the reform (costs and
time to start a business) with industry-level entry rates of
limited liability firms, it explores the effects of
regulatory barriers on the average of the annual entry rates

This study analyzes the long-term
impacts of large-scale expansion of biofuels on land-use
change, food supply and prices, and the overall economy in
various countries or regions using a global computable
general equilibrium model, augmented by a land-use module
and detailed representation of biofuel sectors. The study
finds that an expansion of global biofuel production to meet
currently articulated or even higher national targets in

The importance of land rental for
overall economic development has long been recognized in
theory, yet empirical evidence on the productivity and
equity impacts of such markets and the extent to which they
realize their potential has been scant. Representative data
from China's nine most important agricultural provinces
illustrate the impact of rental markets on households'
economic strategies and welfare, and the productivity of

This study has at its origin the land
question in Paraguay, namely that land ownership is highly
concentrated and has become a source of social conflict in
the rural areas where one-half of the population lives. A
central thesis of the study is that the existing patterns of
land use and ownership, in particular, the very large land
holdings (Zatifundio), are a reflection in part of the
almost insignificant land tax that is charged today on rural

This study has at its origin the land
question in Paraguay, namely that land ownership is highly
concentrated and has become a source of social conflict in
the rural areas where one-half of the population lives. A
central thesis of the study is that the existing patterns of
land use and ownership, in particular, the very large land
holdings (Zatifundio), are a reflection in part of the
almost insignificant land tax that is charged today on rural