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

Ethiopia's rural non-farm sector is
significant and participation is increasing. The sector is
particularly important for women and poorer households.
Non-farm enterprises provide income-earning opportunities to
those lacking alternative options and supplementary income
for farming households. This report is organized into seven
chapters. The first chapter lays the analytical groundwork
for assessing the rural investment climate in Ethiopia and

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

Measuring the poverty and distributional
impact of the global crisis for developing countries is not
easy, given the multiple channels of impact and the limited
availability of real-time data. Commonly-used approaches are
of limited use in addressing questions like who are being
affected by the crisis and by how much, and who are
vulnerable to falling into poverty if the crisis deepens?
This paper develops a simple micro-simulation method,

This report aims to update knowledge of
gender disparities in Ethiopia using the latest household
survey data. The aim of this analysis is to support ongoing
efforts to implement Plan for Accelerated and Sustained
Development to End Poverty (PASDEP) vision. The significant
progress in addressing key dimensions of gender disparities
such as education shown in this report as well as in the
recent annual progress report on the implementation of

The authors use recent data from the
2006 National Family Health Survey of India to explore the
relationship between religion and demographic behavior. They
find that fertility and mortality vary not only between
religious groups, but also across caste groups. These groups
also differ with respect to socio-economic status. The
central finding of this paper is that despite their
socio-economic disadvantages, Muslims have higher fertility

Paying for performance (P4P) provides
financial incentives for providers to increase the use and
quality of care. P4P can affect health care by providing
incentives for providers to put more effort into specific
activities, and by increasing the amount of resources
available to finance the delivery of services. This paper
evaluates the impact of P4P on the use and quality of
prenatal, institutional delivery, and child preventive care

This study documents the long-term
welfare effects of household non-traditional agricultural
export (NTX) adoption. The analysis uses a unique panel
dataset, which spans the period 1985-2005, and employs
difference-in-differences estimation to investigate the
long-term impact of non-traditional agricultural export
adoption on changes in household consumption status and
asset position in the Central Highlands of Guatemala. Given

Poverty reduction strategies (PRSs)
provide a central framework for macroeconomic, structural,
and social policies in developing countries. Because of the
numerous and complex links between environment and poverty,
it is important that environmental issues are taken into
account in the PRS process. This paper follows six previous
assessments of the degree of mainstreaming environment in
the PRS process using a similar methodology to present

This paper examines three systems of
courts of justice, each in a different country in the region
of South Pacific islands known as Melanesia, where state
legal systems have been adopted from former European
colonial governments. The systems discussed are, by
comparison, 'hybrid', each of them having been
established with the intention of addressing disputes among
small-scale social groups by less formal means or by taking

This paper assesses the role of ideas in
economic change, combining economic and historical analysis
with insights from psychology, sociology and anthropology.
Belief systems shape the system of categories
("pre-confirmatory bias") and perceptions
(confirmatory bias), and are themselves constrained by
fundamental values. The authors illustrate the model using
the historical construction of racial categories. Given the

This Policy Memorandum provides policy
advice to the government of Liberia (GOL) in an effort to
mainstream gender issues in policies, programs, and projects
supporting agricultural production and value-chain
development. It is organized as follows. Section I reviews
women's roles in Liberian agriculture and agricultural
value chains, drawing on a variety of data sources,
including the 2007 Core Welfare Indicator Questionnaire