The Government of Malawi has since 2005
been pursuing a growth strategy mainly based on increasing
the volume of agricultural exports. This entails that Malawi
should endeavor to improve the competitiveness of its
agricultural commodities so as to gain an increasing share
of the regional and international markets. This paper
analyzes the competitiveness of the country's key
agricultural commodities -- tobacco, maize, cotton, and rice

This report presents the impact and
lessons learned from the Andhra Pradesh Drought Adaptation
Initiative (APDAI). The APDAI was implemented as a package
of pilot activities in two dryland districts in Andhra
Pradesh (Anantapur and Mahbubnagar) with the aim of
developing and testing approaches for natural resource-based
economic activities to better respond to current climate
variability and long-term consequences of climate change.

Agriculture and agroprocessing are
important in Zambia's economy, representing more than
40 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and contributing
about 12 percent of national export earnings. Agriculture
employs some 67 percent of the labor force and supplies raw
materials to agricultural industries, which account for some
84 percent of manufacturing value-added in the country.
Smallholder agriculture dominates the rural economy. It

Using the Agricultural Census 2003 and
the Rice Household Survey 2008 for Indonesia, this paper
analyzes the distribution of benefits from fertilizer
subsidies and their impact on rice production. The findings
suggest that most farmers benefit from fertilizer subsidies;
however, the 40 percent largest farmers capture up to 60
percent of the subsidy. The regressive nature of the
fertilizer subsidies is in line with research carried out in

This overview summarizes the key
findings of the eight chapters and one policy note. It is
organized as follows. The first section provides a
background of Guangdong, while the second describes the
current situation of inequality in the province. Next is a
discussion of the potential impacts of the transfer of
industrial activities ('industrial transfer') in
mitigating regional disparity, followed by the

This is a Regional Program Review (RPR)
of the World Bank's support for the MBC. The review is
framed around an assessment of five Global Environment
Facility (GEF)-financed World Bank implemented projects in
Costa Rica, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama that had
the common objective of consolidating the Mesoamerican
Biological Corridor (MBC). It also reports on the
achievements of trust fund activities, financed by the Bank

This book provides an overview of the
World Bank's Eco2 cities : ecological cities as
economic cities initiative. The objective of the Eco2 cities
initiative is to help cities in developing countries achieve
a greater degree of ecological and economic sustainability.
The book is divided into three parts. Part one describes the
Eco2 cities initiative framework. It describes the approach,
beginning with the background and rationale. Key challenges

Poverty, environment, social
development, and gender are important cross-cutting themes
of the World Bank and government investment programs,
especially within the Sustainable Development Network (SDN).
For developing sectoral strategies and programs, economic,
environment and social assessments are undertaken, however,
these are usually done separately, and most often gender
issues are not included. This is a missed opportunity,

This paper aims to develop a vision
statement for the agricultural sector that may then guide
the future investments in Chile's agricultural
innovation system, A joint and shared perspective on how the
sector might look and what role agricultural innovation
should play in getting there is a prerequisite for any
effective strategy. But developing such a vision is not only
a function of what the country wants: it also depends on the

This paper analyzes the trends and
evolution of public spending in the agriculture sector in
Indonesia, as well as the impact of public spending on
agricultural growth. It finds that, in line with empirical
work undertaken in other countries, public spending on
agriculture and irrigation during the period 1976-2006 had a
positive impact on agricultural growth, while public
spending on fertilizer subsidies had the opposite effect.

Climate change is believed to represent
a serious challenge to poverty reduction efforts around the
globe. This paper conducts an up-to-date review of three
main strands of the literature analyzing the poverty impacts
of climate change : (i) economy-wide growth models
incorporating climate change impacts to work out consistent
scenarios for how climate change might affect the path of
poverty over the next decades; (ii) studies focusing on the

Institutional features of the African
setting -- large extended families and imperfect credit and
land markets -- matter to the equity and efficiency roles
played by intergenerational linkages. Using original survey
data on Senegal that include an individualized measure of
consumption, this paper studies the role played by land
inheritance, other bequests and parental background as
influences on an adult's economic welfare and economic