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

The spike in food prices between 2005
and the first half of 2008 has highlighted the
vulnerabilities of poor consumers to higher prices of
agricultural goods and generated calls for massive policy
action. This paper provides a formal assessment of the
direct and indirect impacts of higher prices on global
poverty using a representative sample of 63 to 93 percent of
the population of the developing world. To assess the direct

The demand for verifiable evidence of
results and impacts of development agricultural programs and
projects is growing. However, most of the indicators that
development practitioners have traditionally used in
tracking progress toward achieving projects' objectives
focus on the workings of the development operation itself.
These performance indicators relate mainly to lower-level
inputs and outputs and are used to populate management

This study employed the Ricardian
approach to measure the economic impacts of climate change
on farm net revenue in Egypt. Farm net revenue were
regressed against climate, soil, socioeconomic and
hydrological variables to determine which factors influence
the variability of farm net revenues. 900 households from 20
governorates were interviewed. The standard Ricardian model
was applied, in addition to three other models, each

The goal of the Investment Climate
Assessment (ICA) of Uganda is to evaluate the investment
climate in Uganda in all its operational dimensions and to
promote policies to strengthen the private sector and
encourage broad-based economic growth. Sustained
improvements in living standards depend on broad-based
growth. Growth will only occur, however, if firms improve
their productivity by investing in human and physical

Seasonal poverty in Bangladesh, locally
known as monga, refers to seasonal deprivation of food
during the pre-harvest season of Aman rice. An analysis of
household income and expenditure survey data shows that
average household income and consumption are much lower
during monga season than in other seasons, and that seasonal
income greatly influences seasonal consumption. However,
lack of income and consumption smoothing is more acute in

Despite the large potential of the
agricultural sector in Eastern Europe and Central Asia,
production is still limited by a lack of technical knowledge
and, in many cases, an unwillingness to change agricultural
practices inherited from Soviet times. The problem has more
than one cause: poor technology, management skills, and
quality of produce prevent farms from joining agribusiness
supply chains. Limited access to financing further prevents

Well-functioning groups enforce social
norms that restrain opportunism, but the social structure of
a society may encourage or inhibit norm enforcement. This
paper studies how the exogenous assignment to different
positions in an extreme social hierarchy - the caste system
- affects individuals' willingness to punish violations
of a cooperation norm. Although the analysis controls for
individual wealth, education, and political participation,

This policy note, Environmental
Management for a Sustainable Economic Development Strategy
for Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam, investigates six environmental
management topics which will affect the capacity of the
province to develop the economy and need to be underpinned
by strong environmental and natural resource management. The
six topics cover: agriculture, forestry, fisheries, land and
water, environmental law and regulations, and spatial

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

India faces a turbulent water future and
the current water development and management system is not
sustainable.Unless dramatic changes are made and made soon
in the way in which government manages water, India will
have neither the cash to maintain and build new
infrastructure, nor the water required for the economy and
for people. This Report examines the evolution of the
management of India's waters, describes the