This study examines agricultural and
rural development (ARD) public expenditures in Mexico. The
study is based on federal public expenditures. The study is
structured in six parts as follows: the first part presents
the Mexican ARD context in terms of policy and performance.
The second part dissects the ARD public budget, classifying
expenditure programs in various ways so as to provide an
overview of the scope and composition of ARD spending. The

Employing a view of culture as a
communicative phenomenon involving discursive engagement,
which is deeply influenced by social and economic
inequalities, the authors argue that the struggle to break
free of poverty is as much a cultural process as it is
political and economic. In this paper, they analyze
important examples of discursive spaces - public meetings in
Indian village democracies (gram sabhas), where villagers

This book, Financing cities, emphasized
case studies on different topics to look at the interactions
of a range of variables and factors and to see how they fit
together. Rather than require each case to follow the same
format, the authors have structured their papers around the
issues that matter most from their perspective in addressing
the topic in hand. The first part of this book presents case
studies describing the framework established at the national

The decentralization game in Bolivia has
been altered quite significantly with the presence of new
bargainers at the departmental level. Two, opposing groups
have emerged and which follow intricate strategies to
enforce their claims. The highland departments are strongly
aligned to the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party and the
charismatic leadership of the country's first
indigenous leader Evo Morales. The Media Luna departments in

The financial sector, dominated by the
banks, is vulnerable to external shocks. The country is
exposed to terms of trade shocks mainly from coffee and oil
prices, which could impact banks through real sector
effects. The banking system is also vulnerable to a decline
in external assistance which funds nearly half of the
government on which a large share of the economy depends.
Burundi has not been directly affected by the international

This report summarizes the findings of
the study on Competitive Commercial Agriculture for Africa
(CCAA). The objective of the CCAA study was to explore the
feasibility of restoring international competitiveness and
growth in African agriculture through the identification of
products and production systems that can underpin rapid
development of a competitive commercial agriculture. The
CCAA study focused on the agricultural potential of

The issue of regional differences in
development has moved to the center of the development
debate in Sri Lanka, partly after the release of regional
poverty data. For the past many years, there have been
significant and increasing differences between the Western
province and the rest of the country in terms of per capita
income levels, growth rates of per capita income, poverty
rates, and the structure of provincial economies. The

Standard approaches to decomposing how
much group differences contribute to inequality rarely show
significant between-group inequality, and are of limited use
in comparing populations with different numbers of groups.
This study applies an adaptation to the standard approach
that remedies these problems to longitudinal household data
from two Indian villages -- Palanpur in the north, and Sugao
in the west. The authors find that in Palanpur the largest

This approach resulted in the
fragmentation of agricultural holdings, with families owning
noncontiguous plots. Land use was inefficient, owing in part
to the low rate of use of agricultural machinery. Making
land use and farming more efficient will require the
establishment of a functioning land market. Granting farmers
the right to sell, exchange, and lease their land will
enable them to use it as collateral and to consolidate

Reducing poverty continues to be one of
the main priorities of the Government of Albania. Currently,
Albania has an ample platform to provide social protection
to its citizens through social insurance, social assistance
and employment programs. However, these programs are not
efficiently linked to each other, which can lead to unclear
and occasionally overlapping roles among the programs. Among
these social protection programs, Ndihma Ekonomike (NE) is

The report is structured as follows.
Section one examines the contribution of the rural economy
to the national economy, the structure of the farm and
non-farm sectors and their relative importance. Section two
describes policies and constraints affecting the wider rural
economy including, reforms in macro-economic management,
recent external influences and financial services before
discussing those which relate specifically to agriculture

This policy note reviewed the status of
farm machinery in the Kyrgyz Republic. Agricultural
productivity, particularly in terms of grain yields, is low
because of underinvestment. This note finds that a
significant deficit in agricultural machinery is hindering
sector productivity. The Kyrgyz Republic has fewer tractors
per hectare than any comparable country, with a deficit
estimated at 40 percent. The deficit of combine harvesters,