Policymakers and land managers around the world are struggling to use our finite land and resource base to increase agricultural production, ensure resilient ecosystems and improve livelihoods. Many are turning to integrated landscape management (ILM) as a framework for inter-sectoral planning and investments to reduce potential trade-offs and realize inherent synergies.

The contemporary concern about anthropogenic release of greenhouse gas (GHG) into the

environment and the contribution of livestock to this phenomenon have sparked animal

scientists’ interest in predicting methane (CH4) emissions by ruminants. Focusing on milk

production, we address six basic nutrition models or feeding standards (mostly empirical

systems) and five complex nutrition models (mostly mechanistic systems), describe their key

characteristics, and highlight their similarities and differences. Four models were selected to

In this issue: have capital markets
aided growth in China and India? Land and poverty: the
importance of transparency; coping with $100 oil; how fit
are feed-in tariff policies? Political incentives to
underinvest in pro-poor policies; mass media and public
policy for agriculture; and managing public debt in small states.

This report is the most recent in a
series aimed at monitoring economic developments in Ghana
and has two sections. The first section summarizes the
recent macroeconomic developments in the country while the
second section presents the main findings on poverty and
employment published recently by the Ghana statistical
service. Ghana s overall macroeconomic conditions have
deteriorated further in 2014 with large twin-deficits

The Indonesia Economic Quarterly (IEQ)
has two main objectives. First, it reports on the key
developments over the past three months in Indonesia's
economy, and places these in a longer term and global
context. Based on these developments, and on policy changes
over the period, the IEQ regularly updates the outlook for
Indonesia's economy and social welfare. Second, the
IEQ provides a more in-depth examination of selected

South Sudan is a new country of 10.5
million people that has just emerged from conflict and still
facing challenges with recovery and development. Although
economic disparities, political exclusion and deprivation in
the distribution of political and economic power between the
northern and southern parts of then united Sudan were often
tendered as the proximal causes of the conflict, at the
center of the prolonged civil war was the struggle for

Serbia's economy is out of balance
and performing below its potential. Since the post,
Yugoslavian transition, Serbia's economy has been
running on one engine, the non-tradable sector and expansion
of domestic demand. This was financed with ample capital
inflows, which were sharply reduced since 2008 as the global
economic crisis escalated. While this consumption-led growth
produced some improvements in living standards, it was not

This report presents the results of a
novel study on land transparency in Vietnam; a study that
focuses on the actual provision of information related to
land. This study was produced as part of the Vietnam
Transparency Project, an effort to systematically measure
transparency, provide actionable advice on how to improve
transparency, and analyze the causes and effects of
transparency in Vietnam. If a country's political,

The various ways in which livestock production systems can be incorporated into economic, partial-equilibrium, multi-market models are presented, and the challenges outlined. A particular focus and illustrative case is livestock feed. Foremost among the challenges is the reconciliation of scientific understanding of livestock feed requirements and production characteristics with the available national data. Another challenge is in estimating herd structures.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
(MEA), The Economics of Ecosystems & Biodiversity study
(TEEB) and the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity
and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) provide a comprehensive and
useful framework to understand human dependence on ecosystem
services and how best to protect these services in
perpetuity. In these three authoritative studies, payment
for ecosystem services (PES) is listed as one of the