Interest in farmland is rising. And,
given commodity price volatility, growing human and
environmental pressures, and worries about food security,
this interest will increase, especially in the developing
world. One of the highest development priorities in the
world must be to improve smallholder agricultural
productivity, especially in Africa. Smallholder productivity
is essential for reducing poverty and hunger, and more and

Poor rural women in the developing world
spend considerable time collecting water. How then do they
respond to improved access to water infrastructure? Does it
increase their participation in income earning market-based
activities? Does it improve the health and education
outcomes of their children? To help address these questions,
a new approach for dealing with the endogeneity of
infrastructure placement in cross-sectional surveys is

Today, 370 million people live in cities
in earthquake prone areas and 310 million in cities with
high probability of tropical cyclones. By 2050, these
numbers are likely to more than double. Mortality risk
therefore is highly concentrated in many of the world s
cities and economic risk even more so. This paper discusses
what sets hazard risk in urban areas apart, provides
estimates of valuation of hazard risk, and discusses

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.

This paper examines the dynamics of
poverty and vulnerability in Haiti using various data sets.
As living conditions survey data are not comparable in this
country, we first propose to use the three rounds of the
Demographic Health Survey (DHS) available before the
earthquake. Decomposing household assets changes into age
and cohort effects, we use repeated cross-section data to
identify and estimate the variance of shocks on assets and

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 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 summary report is the culmination
of a comprehensive, more than a year-long, collaboration
between the World Bank, Fiji Department of Social Welfare
(DSW), Fiji Islands Bureau of Statistics (FIBOS) and AusAID.
It reflects various activities undertaken under the work
program that was agreed upon with the Government of Fiji
(GOF), with financial support provided by AusAID under the
Externally Funded Output (EFO) agreement with the World

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

Global warming is expected to heavily
impact agriculture, the dominant source of livelihood for
the world's poor. Yet, little is known about the
distributional implications of climate change at the
sub-national level. Using a simple comparative statics
framework, this paper analyzes how changes in the prices of
land, labor, and food induced by modest temperature
increases over the next three decades will affect

International migration has increased
rapidly in recent decades and this has been accompanied by a
remarkable increase in transfers made by migrants to their
home countries. This paper investigates the effect of the
rural economic growth brought about by migration and
remittances on Nepal's Himalayan forests. The authors
assemble a unique village-panel dataset combining remote
sensing data on land use and forest cover change with data