Transforming agriculture in Africa is
not simply about helping Africa; it is essential for
ensuring global food security. But Africa s agriculture is
also of critical importance when it comes to meeting the
world s future needs for food and fiber. With the global
population expected to exceed 9 billion by 2050, food
security producing enough food of sufficient quality and
making it accessible and affordable for consumers around the

Industrial parks are as popular as they
are controversial, in India and globally. At their best they
align infrastructure provision and agglomeration economies
to jolt industrial growth. More often, they generate
negative spill-overs, provide handouts, sit empty, or simply
do not get built. This paper disaggregates how parks are
built and how they fail. It contextualizes parks in India,
followed by a thick case study of an innovative scheme that

Argentina has expanded the use of its
portion of the Parana-Paraguay waterways system for the
transportation of soy and other bulk commodities through an
innovative tolling system that self-finances the dredging
and maintenance of the rivers. Brazil, in turn, is pursuing
a 'green trucking' strategy to improve efficiency
of its cargo haulage industry, reduce petroleum usage, and
curb pollution from trucking. For the entire hemisphere, the
expansion of the Panama Canal will bring post-Panama vessels

Microfinance supports mainly informal
activities that often have a low return and low market
demand. It may therefore be hypothesized that the aggregate
poverty impact of microfinance is modest or even
nonexistent. If true, the poverty impact of microfinance
observed at the participant level represents either income
redistribution or short run income generation from the
microfinance intervention. This article examines the effects

The estimated coefficient of distance on
the volume of trade is generally found to increase rather
than decrease through time using the traditional gravity
model of trade. This distance puzzle proved robust to
several ad hoc versions of the model using data for 1962-96
for a large sample of 130 countries. The introduction of an
augmented barrier to trade function removes the paradox,
yielding a decline in the estimate of the elasticity of

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,

Over the past dozen years, policymakers
have largely abandoned long-standing popular approaches for
addressing risk in agriculture without fully resolving the
question of how best to manage the negative consequences of
volatile agricultural markets. The article reviews the
transition from past policies and describes current
approaches that distinguish between the trade-related fiscal
consequences of commodity market volatility and the

Cities emerge from the spatial concentration of people and economic activities. But spatial concentration is not enough; the economic viability of cities depends on people, ideas, and goods to move rapidly across the urban area. This constant movement within dense cities creates wealth but also various degrees of unpleasantness and misery that economists call negative externalities, such as congestion, pollution, and environmental degradation.

Mexico needs to broaden and deepen its
financial system without compromising the financial
stability gains of the last decade. Much more private
investment is needed to transform the economy to boost
productivity, and despite improvements in recent years, many
households and firms still lack adequate access to financial
services. Strengthening competition and streamlining key
regulations for firms are key to increasing Mexico's

The Government of Indonesia (GOI) is in
the process of designing a national REDD+ mechanism to allow
it to access donor funding in the medium term, and funding
from a potential performance based mechanism in the long
term. This policy brief is focused on the broad question of
how REDD+ can address underlying community issues such as
lack of access to forest land, and does not deal with the
more specific questions of legal and institutional

This paper examines some of the concepts
surrounding the idea that forests and trees can contribute
to making households more resilient to food insecurity. The
paper begins with a discussion of the widely accepted
definitions of food security, and the implications for our
understanding of the role of forests and trees in
contributing to food security. Authors discuss the origins
of the idea of resilience, adaptability, and transformation

With a fast growing population requiring an ever growing supply of food, a national poverty rate of 63 percent, and a labor force that is dominated by agricultural work, Nigeria's efforts to boost agricultural productivity could not be better timed. Though women constitute a large share of the agricultural labor force in Nigeria, little is known about their activities, roles, and constraints in the sector.