In 2000, the Government of India
launched the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (hereinafter
PMGSY) with the primary objective of providing all-weather
road connectivity (with necessary culverts and
cross-drainage structures operable throughout the year), to
eligible unconnected habitations in rural areas. Currently,
about 60 percent of the 170,000 eligible habitations have a
road. By the end of 2010, expenditures for the program had

The authors develop a model of land
leasing with agents characterized by unobserved
heterogeneity in ability and presence of an off-farm labor
market. In this case, decentralized land rental may
contribute to equity and efficiency goals and may have
several advantages over administrative reallocation. The
extent to which this is true empirically is explored using
data from three of China's poorest provinces. The

After 15 years of political stagnation
due to political troubles from 1990 to 2005, Togo is now
enjoying political stability and economical revival.
Agricultural sector is doing especially well and the
government is reviewing the public expenditures in this
domain. The goal is to learn lessons from the past in terms
of budget and to increase the performances of the programs
to come. The objectives of this document are: a) better

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