Using data obtained from Living Standards Measurement Surveys of rural households, the socioeconomic trends in rural households is defined for a limited set of countries in the 90's and 2000's. These trends are studied in light of seven categories of rural economies: self-employed agriculture, employer agriculture (land owners), employee agriculture, self-employed not agriculture; employer not agriculture, employee not agriculture, not in the labor force. Relative differences in income, consumption and poverty are documented.

This paper quantifies how African
farmers have adapted their crop and irrigation decisions to
their farm's current agro-ecological zone. The results
indicate that farmers carefully consider the climate and
other conditions of their farm when making these choices.
These results are then used to forecast how farmers might
change their irrigation and crop choice decisions if climate
changes. The model predicts African farmers would adopt

This report, which has been prepared by
the World Bank in cooperation with the National Statistical
Committee, provides an assessment of poverty in the Kyrgyz
Republic using the most recent data available. The objective
of this report is to understand to what extent economic
growth has reduced poverty and led to improved living
conditions for the population during 2000-2005. The report
also attempts to answer three questions about the Kyrgyz

This report seeks to present micro
evidence on how environmental changes affect poor
households. It focuses primarily on environmental resources
that are outside the private sphere, particularly commonly
held and managed resources such as forests, fisheries, and
wildlife. The objectives for this volume are three-fold. It
is first interested in using an empirical data-driven
approach to examine the dependence of the poor on natural

This report presents policy, market, and
agriculture transition in the Northern Uplands of Lao
People's Democratic Republic aims to contribute to such
a dialogue by providing: (a) a policy-relevant typology of
the structural characteristics and transition patterns of
the principal small-holder agriculture systems in the
Northern Uplands; and (b) recommendations to strengthen
Government's facilitation of a more sustainable and

Reversing Africa's decades-long
decline in soil productivity levels poses a major challenge,
and one that cannot be addressed without increased use of
appropriate fertilizer nutrients. The 2006 World Bank Africa
Fertilizer Strategy Assessment was undertaken to inform
policy makers, providing them with guidelines on measures to
effectively raise fertilizer use. This Note draws upon the
material prepared for the above fertilizer strategy

Real GDP per capita and capital stock in
Cote d'Ivoire grew strongly from 1960 to 1979, but have
declined ever since, for twenty-five years. As a result, the
country has traveled a full circle from economic success to
failure in little more than a generation. What are the
long-term factors behind this dismal growth story? Are the
Ivorian development problems mostly of recent origin? Or
there are more fundamental, economic factors that explain

There are many reasons to believe that
Syrian agriculture has great potential for the future. The
liberalisation of agriculture in Eastern Europe delivered
rapid growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Countries
such as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Hungary,
Kazachstan, Romania and Russia achieved labour productivity
growth in constant US$ terms of over 7 percent between 1998
and 2004. Syria has a global comparative advantage in fruit

The success of development programs,
including water resource projects, depends on two key
factors: the role of underlying institutions and the impact
synergies from other closely related programs. Existing
methodologies have limitations in accounting for these
critical factors. This paper fills this gap by developing a
methodology, which quantifies both the roles that
institutions play in impact generation and the extent of

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,

Policies to promote adaptation climate
risks often rely on the willing cooperation of the intended
beneficiaries. If these beneficiaries disagree with policy
makers and programme managers about the need for adaptation,
or the effectiveness of the measures they are being asked to
undertake, then implementation of the policies will fail. A
case study of a resettlement programme in Mozambique shows
this to be the case. Farmers and policy-maker disagreed

Measurement of the likely magnitude of
the economic impact of climate change on African agriculture
has been a challenge. Using data from a survey of more than
9,000 farmers across 11 African countries, a cross-sectional
approach estimates how farm net revenues are affected by
climate change compared with current mean temperature.
Revenues fall with warming for dryland crops (temperature
elasticity of -1.9) and livestock (-5.4), whereas revenues