Increased levels and volatility of food
prices has led to a surge of interest in large-scale
agriculture and land acquisition. This creates challenges
for policy makers aiming to establish a policy environment
conducive to an agrarian structure to contribute to
broad-based development in the long term. Based on a
historical review of episodes of growth of large farms and
their impact, this paper identifies factors underlying the

Secure property rights are considered a
key determinant of economic development. However, evaluation
of the causal effects of land titling is a difficult task.
Since 2004, the Brazilian government, through a program
called "Papel Passado," has issued titles to more
than 85,000 families and has the goal to reach 750,000.
Another topic in public policy that is crucial for
developing economies is child labor force participation. In

This paper uses a rural household survey
dataset collected in 2006 and 2008 to investigate the impact
of a market-based land resettlement project in southern
Malawi. The program provided a conditional cash and land
transfer to poor families to relocate to larger plots of
farm land. The average treatment effect of the program is
estimated using a difference-in-difference matching
technique based on propensity score matching; qualitative

This paper studies the use of labor
markets to mitigate the impact of violent shocks on
households in rural areas in Colombia. It examines changes
in the labor supply from on-farm to off-farm labor as a
means of coping with the violent shock and the ensuing
redistribution of time within households. It identifies the
heterogeneous response by gender. Because the incidence of
violent shocks is not exogenous, the analysis uses

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

The World Development Report (WDR) has
become such a fixture that it is easy to forget the
circumstances under which it was born and the Bank's
motivation for producing such a report at that time. In the
first chapter of this essay, the authors provide a brief
background on the circumstances of newly independent
developing countries and summarize some of the main strands
of the emerging field of development economics. This

This book provides an overview of the
World Bank's Eco2 cities : ecological cities as
economic cities initiative. The objective of the Eco2 cities
initiative is to help cities in developing countries achieve
a greater degree of ecological and economic sustainability.
The book is divided into three parts. Part one describes the
Eco2 cities initiative framework. It describes the approach,
beginning with the background and rationale. Key challenges

This paper provides an overview of the
literature on tax morale and tax compliance. Most of the
material here is based on research that I have conducted
together with my co-authors over the last 10 years. Europe
has a dominant place in this paper. Sometimes results
derived from other countries are discussed that could be
relevant for Europe. The overall findings show the
importance of accountability, democratic governance,

Services are failing poor urban and
rural people in the developing world, and poverty remains
concentrated in rural areas and urban slums. This state of
affairs prevails despite prolonged efforts by many
governments to improve rural and urban services and
development programs. This book focuses on how communities
and local governments can be empowered to contribute to
their own development and, in the process, improve

This essay first sets out the
"business model" problems entailed by corruption
and their effects as well as implications for economic
growth. Key issues are the need for secrecy and co-operation
with partners in crime. Dealing with these leads to behavior
which is ostensibly bizarre and undermines economic
efficiency, but is in fact a rational way of managing
corrupt practices. However, different economic policies can

This paper estimates the relationship
between initial village inequality and subsequent household
income growth for a large sample of households in rural
China. Using a rich longitudinal survey spanning the years
1987-2002, and controlling for an array of household and
village characteristics, the paper finds that households
located in higher inequality villages experienced
significantly lower income growth through the 1990s.

In May 2008, the commission on growth
and development (the growth commission) issued its report
entitled 'the growth report'. In it the commission
attempted to distill what had been learned in the past two
decades, from experience and academic and policy research,
about strategies and policies that produced sustained high
growth in developing countries. It became clear in the
course of the work that politics, leadership, and political