This paper investigates the impacts of cotton marketing reforms on farm productivity, a key element for poverty alleviation, in rural Zambia. The reforms comprised the elimination of the Zambian cotton marketing board that was in place since 1977. Following liberalization, the sector adopted an outgrower scheme, whereby firms provided extension services to farmers and sold inputs on loans that were repaid at the time of harvest. There are two distinctive phases of the reforms: a failure of the outgrower scheme, and a subsequent period of success of the scheme.

This is a draft edition of the Poverty Environment Nexus (PEN) report for Cambodia, Lao PDR and Vietnam. The purpose of this conference edition is to present the findings from the studies that have been undertaken in each country over the last three years as well as to obtain relevant comments and feedback from the conference participants that could be included in the final edition of the report. The material presented in this report is based upon comprehensive case studies as well as national analytical work performed in each country.

The present report was prepared upon the
request of the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic to inform
policy decisions on reforming the existing safety net. The
report aims at providing analytical underpinning of the
country's ongoing safety net reform, along with venue
for policy discussions with the Government and stakeholders
on the immediate as well as on the longer-term challenges
related to designing and implementing of a modern national

This paper concerns an NGO intervention in agricultural commodity markets known as Fairtrade. Fairtrade pays producers a minimum unit price and provides capacity building support to member cooperative organizations. Fairtrade's organizational capacity support targets those factors believed to reduce the commodity producer's share of returns. Specifically, Fairtrade justifies its intervention in markets like coffee by claiming that market power and a lack of capacity in producer organizations 'marks down' the prices producers receive.

This Public Expenditure Review (PER) builds on the commitments of the 2003 Country Economic Memorandum (CEM), and 2002 Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) Progress Report, being its primary objective to assess strengths and weaknesses in key areas of public expenditure, and identify policy options for fiscal sustainability. Jamaica's high debt aggravates debt sustainability and efforts to improve growth. Revenue performance is also a weak element in the country's overall fiscal framework, while the current level of public sector investment is too low to support strong sustained growth.

The Government of Kenya adopted in 2004
an Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth and Employment
Creation (ERSWEC), which recognizes three main pillars for
economy recovery namely: (i) strengthening economic growth;
(ii) enhancing equity and reducing poverty; and (iii)
improving governance. The ERSWEC reiterates that the
achievement of the three pillars is dependent on adequate
and reliable access to least-cost energy. Since agriculture

This paper addresses labor markets in
Haiti, including farm and nonfarm employment and income
generation. The analyses are based on the first Living
Conditions Survey of 7,186 households covering the whole
country and representative at the regional level. The
findings suggest that four key determinants of employment
and productivity in nonfarm activities are education,
gender, location, and migration status. This is emphasized

This paper analyzes the impact of trade reforms on household welfare. In particular, it studies the importance of each of the links that together constitute the impact using data from the Vietnamese experience in the 1990s. The implementation of trade reforms in the 1990s, most noteworthy of which was the liberalization of rice, resulted in substantial improvement in welfare as evidenced by the drastic decline in poverty. Using analytical and empirical methods, the author examines the role of each channel (direct versus indirect) in this improvement for different groups of households.

Recovering from three decades of conflict, over this last decade, Cambodia has undergone dramatic economic, political, and social transitions. Cambodia experienced rapid institutional changes as it restored peace, moved from a centrally planned to a market-oriented economy, and moved from isolation to regional and global integration. Cambodia has achieved political and macroeconomic stability, and has initiated key structural reforms. Nevertheless, Cambodia's economy remains vulnerable, and economic growth has not translated into widespread poverty reduction.

Spatial disparity in incomes and
productivity is apparent across and within countries. Most
studies of the determinants of such differences focus on
cross-country comparisons or location choice among firms.
Less studied are the large differences in agricultural
productivity within countries related to concentrations of
rural poverty. For policy, understanding the determinants of
this geography of agricultural productivity is important,

In this paper, the authors examine the
impact of reductions in barriers to migration on the
consumption of rural households in China. The authors find
that increased migration from rural villages leads to
significant increases in consumption per capita, and that
this effect is stronger for poorer households within
villages. Household income per capita and non-durable
consumption per capita both increase with out-migration, and

In this paper, the authors seek to answer three questions about poverty and forests in Malawi: (1) What is the extent of biomass available for meeting the energy needs of the poor in Malawi and how is this distributed? (2) To what extent does fuelwood scarcity affect the welfare of the poor? (3) How do households cope with scarcity? In particular, do households spend more time in fuelwood collection and less time in agriculture in response to scarcity? The authors attempt to answer these questions using household and remote-sensing data.