Trade preferences are a central issue in ongoing efforts to negotiate further multilateral trade liberalization. "Less preferred" countries are increasingly concerned about the discrimination they confront, while "more preferred" developing countries worry that WTO-based liberalization of trade will erode the value of current preferential access regimes. This tension suggests there is a political economy case for preference-granting countries to explicitly address erosion fears. The authors argue that the appropriate instrument for this is development assistance.

The overall goal of this report is to
give strategic focus to implementation of the agricultural
water management (AWM) components of the corporate
strategies. Its specific objectives are to set out the
changing context of demand and supply for agricultural
water; to identify the policy, institutional, and incentive
reform options that will accelerate productivity
improvements and pro-poor growth; and to articulate

This study analyzes the
interrelationship between local benefits and global
environment benefits in the Global Environment Facility
(GEF) strategies and projects in order to: Enhance GEF
policies, strategies, and project design and implementation
so these can effectively promote the potential for local
gains in those global environmental programs where actors
need to be mobilized for long-term support of sound

Infrastructure development has made a
major contribution to East Asia's enviable record on
growth and poverty reduction. However, substantial new
investments in infrastructure and service delivery
improvements will be required to sustain progress in the
future, and to address new challenges posed by urbanization,
decentralization, and regional integration. At the same
time, questions have often been raised about the impact of

Agricultural water management is a vital
practice in ensuring reduction, and environmental
protection. After decades of successfully expanding
irrigation and improving productivity, farmers and managers
face an emerging crisis in the form of poorly performing
irrigation schemes, slow modernization, declining
investment, constrained water availability, and
environmental degradation. More and better investments in

The purpose of the Third Overall
Performance Study (OPS3), commissioned by the Global
Environment Facility (GEF) Council, is "to assess the
extent to which GEF has achieved, or is on its way towards
achieving its main objectives, as laid down in the GEF
Instrument and subsequent decisions by the GEF Council and
the Assembly, including key documents such as the
Operational Strategy and the Policy Recommendations agreed

This report presents an update on the
economic challenges facing Ethiopia with a focus on the
shared goal of accelerating equitable growth. The starting
point is the Government's own Plan for Accelerated and
Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP), which is in
the process of finalization, and is designed to cover the
period 2005-2010. This report proposes that the growth
strategy should more explicitly adopt a

The report documents poverty in Zamia
along a number of dimensions, including material
deprivation, human deprivation, vulnerability, destitution,
and social stigmatization. The report identified a number of
basic actions to facilitate growth in the rural sector;
these include (1) a (revived) system of regular manual
maintenance of rural roads; (2) simple systems of animal
disease control; animal movement control; health inspection

A decade and a half of relative peace and political stability, broad economic reforms, and far-reaching political decentralization have brought Ethiopia back from one of its lowest levels of income per capita to one of its highest levels over the past forty years. At the same time, Gross Domestic Product per capita today is still only slightly above the levels reached in the early 1970 underscoring the deep-rooted and complex nature of poverty in Ethiopia.

This paper concerns an NGO intervention in agricultural commodity markets known as Fairtrade. Fairtrade pays producers a minimum unit price and provides capacity building support to member cooperative organizations. Fairtrade's organizational capacity support targets those factors believed to reduce the commodity producer's share of returns. Specifically, Fairtrade justifies its intervention in markets like coffee by claiming that market power and a lack of capacity in producer organizations 'marks down' the prices producers receive.

The purpose of this study is to update
the review of World Bank experience in Irrigation (IEG 1994)
and to broaden the scope of evaluation to include all water
lending for agricultural development. Since that first
study, the proportion of World Bank lending for agricultural
water management continued to decline, a trend that started
in the late 1970s when the sub-sector received 11 percent of
the lending, is falling to less than 2 percent in 2001-03.

The 2005 Tanzania poverty and social impact analysis (PSIA) on local government tax reform was designed to examine the intended and unintended consequences on poverty reduction and growth in Tanzania of the tax reforms implemented in June 2003 and 2004. The main elements of the reform were the abolition of the flat rate development levy in 2003 along with nuisance taxes, and the abolition of business license fees for enterprises below a certain size and capping of those fees for larger enterprises in 2004.