The authors test whether poor households use cash transfers to invest in income generating activities that they otherwise would not have been able to do. Using data from a controlled randomized experiment, they find that transfers from the Oportunidades program to households in rural Mexico resulted in increased investment in micro-enterprise and agricultural activities. For each peso transferred, beneficiary households used 88 cents to purchase consumption goods and services, and invested the rest.

The analysis of the distributional
impact of policy reforms on the well-being or welfare of
different stakeholder groups, particularly on the poor and
vulnerable, has an important role in the elaboration and
implementation of poverty reduction strategies in developing
countries. In recent years this type of work has been
labeled as Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) and is
increasingly implemented to promote evidence-based policy

Using recent advances in modeling
climate-related risks and adjusting state of the art
catastrophic risk modeling techniques to drought, the study
conducts an innovative long-term assessment of drought risks
in Andhra Pradesh, India, and suggests strategies to reduce
their impact, under several economic, drought management and
climate change scenarios. The analysis deepens an
understanding of climate risk adaptation strategies,

This Sourcebook has been prepared to
help in implementing the World Bank's current rural
strategy, by sharing information on investment options and
innovative approaches that will aid the design of future
lending programs for agriculture. The Sourcebook provides
generic good practices and many examples that demonstrate
that investment in agriculture can provide rewarding and
sustainable returns to development efforts. The contents

Although sharecropping has long
fascinated economists, the determinants of this contractual
form are still poorly understood and the debate over the
extent of moral hazard is far from settled. The authors
address both issues by emphasizing the role of landlord
supervision. When tenant effort is observable, but at a cost
to the landlord, otherwise identical share-tenants can
receive different levels of supervision and have different

The authors use a Ricardian model to
test the relationship between annual net revenues and
climate across Israeli farms. They find that it is important
to include the amount of irrigation water available to each
farm in order to measure the response of farms to climate.
With irrigation water omitted, the model predicts that
climate change is strictly beneficial. But with water
included, the model predicts that only modest climate

Trade preferences are expected to
facilitate global market integration and offer the potential
for rapid economic growth and poverty reduction for
developing countries. But those preferences do not always
guarantee sustainable external competitiveness to
beneficiary countries and may risk discouraging their
efforts to improve underlying productivity. This paper
examines the EU beef import market where several African

The rapid pace of economic growth in
China has been unprecedented since the start of economic
reforms in late 1970s. It has delivered higher incomes and
made the largest single contribution to global poverty
reduction. Measured by international poverty lines, from
1978-2004, the absolute poor population in rural areas has
dropped from 250 million to 26.1 million. Such gains are
impressive and have been driven largely by a set of

This year the preliminary results of the
international comparison program are being released,
providing new comparisons of price levels for more than 140
countries. The program, the largest single data collection
effort ever undertaken, is a salutary example of what can be
accomplished through global partnership, technical
innovation, and systematic attention to building local
statistical capacity. Along with censuses, surveys are a

This report shows that after a decade of
moderate growth but little or no long term change in rural
poverty in Pakistan, agricultural output, rural incomes,
rural poverty and social welfare indicators all showed
marked improvements between 2001-02 and 2004-05. However,
longer term trends suggest there is little reason for
complacency. The agricultural GDP per capita growth rate
(1999- 2000 to 2004-05) was only 0.3 percent per year; rural

It is the purpose of this Investment
Climate Assessment (ICA) to look at what hinders the move of
the Palestinians to new markets and what can be done to
encourage it. The ICA reveals that shrinking market access
and the lack of free movement are the main constraints to
growth for Palestinian enterprises. Relative to other
countries in the region, the Palestinian investment climate
is good: petty corruption is low, the bureaucracy is

The objective of this assignment was to develop a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) system for watershed management in the Loess Plateau area. The M&E system for the China Watershed Management Project (CWMP) has been developed on the base of the M&E system that has been implemented during the previous two phases of the World Bank Loess Plateau Project. The final report presents the main outcomes of this process. The major findings of the M&E systems review are summarized in the following chapter two.