All countries fund safety net programs
for the protection of their people. Though an increasing
number of safety net programs are extremely well thought
out, adroitly implemented, and demonstrably effective, many
others are not. This book aims to assist those concerned
with social policy to understand why countries need social
assistance, what kind of safety programs will serve those
best and how to develop such programs for maximum

This report explains why agricultural
insurance is expensive to deliver to small farm households,
details risk assessment in four provinces, and recommends
China put more resources in developing products that are
more suited to an agricultural economy that is dominated by
small farm households. The report discusses the important
role of government in supporting the legal and regulatory
environment, access to data for new product development,

This report " Country Social
Analysis (CSA) " focused on ethnicity and development
in Vietnam is a provocative analysis of marginality in
contemporary Southeast Asia. It seeks to understand the
macro social and political processes, and provides an
analysis of how social, political, and cultural factors
influence the opportunities and constraints to more
equitable, inclusive development. This study provides

This study builds a profile of the
status of poverty and vulnerability in Malawi. Malawi is a
small land-locked country, with one of the highest
population densities in Sub-Saharan Africa, and one of the
lowest per capita income levels in the world. Almost 90
percent of the population lives in rural areas, and is
mostly engaged in smallholder, rain-fed agriculture. Most
people are therefore highly vulnerable to annual rainfall

This paper investigates the reasons for
the low application of external fertilizers on farms in
Kenya and Uganda. The analysis uses a large panel of
household data with rich soil fertility data at the plot
level. The authors control for maize seed selection and
household effects by using a fixed-effects semi-parametric
endogenous switching model. The results suggest that Kenyan
maize farmers have applied inorganic fertilizer at the

Doing Business 2007: How to reform is
the fourth in a series of annual reports investigating the
regulations that enhance business activity and those that
constrain it. Doing Business presents quantitative
indicators on business regulations and the protection of
property rights that can be compared across 175
economies-from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe-and over time. This
publication points out how regulations affecting 10 areas of

The agriculture sector has been and will
continue to be important for poverty alleviation efforts in
Indonesia. Indonesia was very successful in increasing
agriculture productivity during the 1970s and up to the
early 1990s, but productivity stagnated during most of the
1990s, partly as a result of declining public investments.
Public spending on agriculture has increased significantly
in the last decade, but a large share of that spending has

Lack of access to electricity is one of
the major impediments to growth and development of the rural
economies in developing countries. That is why access to
modern energy, in particular to electricity, has been one of
the priority themes of the World Bank and other development
organizations. Using a cross-sectional survey conducted in
2005 of some 20,000 households in rural Bangladesh, this
paper studies the welfare impacts of households' grid

Stimulating agricultural growth is
critical to reducing poverty in Africa. Commercial
agriculture, potentially a powerful driver of agricultural
growth, can develop along a number of pathways. Yet many
developing regions have failed to progress very far along
any of these pathways. Particularly in Africa, agriculture
continues to lag. During the past 30 years the
competitiveness of many African export crops has declined,

This joint working paper lays out a
rationale and strategic framework for improving food
security and managing food-price shocks in the Arab
countries. The paper does not provide country specific
policy and project recommendations. Such recommendations
will follow from the country by country application of the
framework, taking into account each country's political
and cultural preferences, resource endowments, and risk

At the outset of China's reform
period, the country had a far higher poverty rate than for
Africa as a whole. Within five years that was no longer
true. This paper tries to explain how China escaped from a
situation in which extreme poverty persisted due to failed
and unpopular policies. While acknowledging that Africa
faces constraints that China did not, and that context
matters, two lessons stand out. The first is the importance

This report attempts to diagnose
existing constraints and prospects for growth in
people's incomes in South Kordofan. Given the breadth
and depth of difficulties facing the state, the focus is on
identifying the key areas of reform, or binding constraints,
to growth. There is a combination of extremely low social
returns, the prevalence of government and market failures,
the weak investment climate and the limited access to