The Living Standards Measurement Study
(LSMS) surveys which have collected information on many
dimensions of household well-being for over 36 countries
since 1980 are one of the most important data sources for
informing policy making on development. The LSMS surveys
have been used to assess household welfare, to understand
household behavior, and to evaluate the welfare impact of
various government policies. These surveys, however, lack

Tajikistan is highly vulnerable to the
adverse impacts of global climate change, as it already
suffers from low agricultural productivity, water stress,
and high losses from disasters. Public awareness of the
multiple consequences of climate change is high, with
possible impacts on health, natural disasters, and
agriculture of greatest public concern. Climate change can
potentially deepen poverty by lowering agricultural yields,

Linking farmers to markets is widely
viewed as a milestone towards promoting economic growth and
poverty reduction. However, market and institutional
imperfections along the supply chain thwart perfect vertical
and spatial price transmission and prevent farmers and
market actors from getting access to information,
identifying business opportunities and allocating their
resources efficiently. This acts as a barrier to market-led

Recruiting and retaining leaders and public servants at the grass-roots level in developing countries creates a potential tension between providing sufficient returns to attract talent and limiting the scope for excessive rent-seeking behavior. In China, researchers have frequently argued that village cadres, who are the lowest level of administrators in rural areas, exploit personal political status for economic gain.

This paper aims to develop a vision
statement for the agricultural sector that may then guide
the future investments in Chile's agricultural
innovation system, A joint and shared perspective on how the
sector might look and what role agricultural innovation
should play in getting there is a prerequisite for any
effective strategy. But developing such a vision is not only
a function of what the country wants: it also depends on the

Welfare losses from the 2008 food price
crisis in Pakistan are deepening the gap between poor and
non poor populations and further increasing inequality
between the provinces. To estimate welfare losses, the
reduction in caloric availability at household level is
measured. The analysis of calorie intake by source supports
the notion that rural households were shielded from the
worst effects of the crisis by their capacity to grow their

This paper describes stylized facts
about internal migration and the labor force in Egypt, and
shows how internal migration in the country is low compared
with international standards. Using aggregate labor force
survey data, the paper shows how individuals migrate to
governorates with higher wages. With a Mincerian equation,
the analysis finds that migrants earn premiums with respect
to non-migrants, except for those migrants with low

This paper analyzes the trends and
evolution of public spending in the agriculture sector in
Indonesia, as well as the impact of public spending on
agricultural growth. It finds that, in line with empirical
work undertaken in other countries, public spending on
agriculture and irrigation during the period 1976-2006 had a
positive impact on agricultural growth, while public
spending on fertilizer subsidies had the opposite effect.

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

The report is divided into two volumes.
The first volume includes the fundamental content of the
report. It is organized as follows. Chapter one provides a
conceptual framework to analyze risk and vulnerability and
provides a definition of social protection. Chapter two
assesses the main risks faced by the Malagasy population as
well as its vulnerability profile. Chapter three reviews
Madagascar's social protection policies, the

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

Household enterprises -- usually
one-person-operated tiny informal enterprises -- are a
rapidly growing source of employment in Sub-Saharan Africa,
especially in lower-income countries. Household enterprises
tend to operate with limited interest or support from
governments. This is the case in Mozambique, where neither
the poverty reduction strategy nor small and medium
enterprise development policies include household