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

Trade policies can promote aggregate
efficiency, but the ensuing structural adjustments generally
create both winners and losers. From an incomes perspective,
trade liberalization can raise gross domestic product per
capita, but rates of emergence from poverty depend on
individual household characteristics of economic
participation and asset holding. To fully realize the growth
potential of trade, while limiting the risk of rising

This study was conducted with the main objective of determining the linkages between poverty and land management in Uganda. The study used the 2002/03 Uganda National Household Survey in eight districts representing six major agro-ecological zones and farming systems. Farmers in these districts deplete an average of 179 kg/ha of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, which is about 1.2 percent of the nutrient stock stored in the topsoil.

The adoption of new agricultural
technologies may be discouraged because of their inherent
riskiness. This study implemented a randomized field
experiment to ask whether the provision of insurance against
a major source of production risk induces farmers to take
out loans to invest in a new crop variety. The study sample
was composed of roughly 800 maize and groundnut farmers in
Malawi, where by far the dominant source of production risk

The paper revisits the site of a large,
World Bank-financed, rural development program in China 10
years after it began and four years after disbursements
ended. The program emphasized community participation in
multi-sectoral interventions (including farming, animal
husbandry, infrastructure and social services). Data were
collected on 2,000 households in project and nonproject
areas, spanning 10 years. A double-difference estimator of

This report is about balanced economic development in the Northeast of Thailand. It is about growth and poverty reduction, cities and villages, enterprises and workers, skills and education, infrastructure and trade, and rice and silk. Northeast economic development is only part of Thailand's development challenge, but it is among the most important. We look back at how the Northeast has fared in terms of growth, poverty reduction and social capital over the last decades relative to other regions in Thailand.

The report analyses the contribution to
date of agricultural water management to poverty reduction
and growth in the in sub-Saharan Africa region, the reasons
for its slow expansion and apparently poor track record, as
well as the ways in which increased investment in
agricultural water management could make a sustainable
contribution to further poverty reduction and growth. The
first chapter places agricultural water management in the