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,

The agri-food sector is an important
part of the Ukrainian economy. Agriculture could make an
even larger contribution to economic growth and the vitality
of rural areas in Ukraine than is currently the case.
Ukraine has the agro-climatic potential to be a major player
on world agricultural markets. Agricultural competitiveness
in Ukraine also suffers from inadequate systems to test and
document food product quality and food safety.

Miombo woodlands stretch across Southern
Africa in a belt from Angola and the Democratic Republic of
Congo (DRC) in the west to Mozambique in the east. The
miombo region covers an area of around 2.4 million km. In
some areas, miombo has been highly degraded as a result of
human use (southern Malawi and parts of Zimbabwe), while in
others, it remains relatively intact (such as in parts of
northern Mozambique, and in isolated areas of Angola and the

This report summarizes the findings of a
study undertaken by the World Bank at the request of the
Government of Rwanda. The study had three main objectives:
(i) Validate the argument that agriculture has potential to
become a leading engine of pro-poor growth in Rwanda and
identify potential sources of rapid and sustainable growth
within the agricultural sector; (ii) identify key actions
that will be needed to unlock these sources of agricultural

This report for Iraq - country water
resources assistance strategy (CWRAS) addresses these
objectives in two parts. The first part, which is largely
descriptive, reviews existing conditions and summarizes
Iraq's considerable accomplishments over the past
decades in developing and managing water resources. The
second part investigates challenges and priorities-how to
balance the needs of short-term reconstruction and the

States can do much to tap
community-level energies, and resources for development, if
they seek to interact more synergistically with local
communities. The broader spin-off is creating a
developmental society, and polity. Using case studies from
Asia and Latin America, the authors show how: 1) State
efforts to bring about land reform, tenancy reform, and
expanding non-crop sources of income, can broaden the

Environmental degradation can inflict
serious damage on poor people because their livelihoods
often depend on natural resource use and their living
conditions may offer little protection from air, water, and
soil pollution. At the same time, poverty-constrained
options may induce the poor to deplete resources and degrade
the environment at rates that are incompatible with
long-term sustainability. In such cases, degraded resources

Reviewing cross-country experience with
sugar policies, and policy reform, the authors conclude that
long-standing government interventions - rooted in
historical trade arrangements, fear of shortages, and
conflicting interests between growers, and sugar mills -
often displace both the markets, and the institutions
required to produce efficient outcomes. Arrangements rooted
in colonial eras, still shape policies, and trade in the

The standard approach for fitting a
Cobb-Douglas production function to micro data with zero
values is to replace those values with "sufficiently
small" numbers to facilitate the logarithmic
transformation. In general, the estimates obtained are
extremely sensitive to the transformation chosen, generating
doubts about the use of a specification that assumes that
all inputs are essential (as the Cobb-Douglas does) when

The main objective of the study is to
provide the Government of Senegal the analyses and
information to implement policies towards reducing the rural
poor's vulnerability. While during the latest years,
economic growth reduced poverty in the country, this has
been less noticeable among the rural population, who
actually account for 6 million people over a total
population of 10 million. The rural economy remains

Moldovan GDP growth rose and the poverty
rate fell steeply following the end of the Russian financial
crisis in 1999. Since late 2002, GDP has continued to grow
vigorously, however there has been little progress in
reducing poverty. In short, GDP growth is no longer reducing
poverty. The national poverty rate is broadly stable while
the rural poverty rate is on a modest upward trend. Analysis
of data from the household budget surveys shows that the

This sector report on Challenges and
Priorities for Rural Development analyzes why Upper Egypt
has lagged behind the rest of the country and to help the
Government of Egypt and stakeholders to define a framework
for interventions to promote broad-based economic growth and
human development that will reach the poor and improve
welfare in rural Upper Egypt. To achieve this objective, the
strategic framework for intervention proposed here has two