Paper uses a new pre-1940 Third World data base documenting real wages and relative factor prices to explore their determinants. There are three possibilities: external price shocks, factor endowment changes, and technological change. As the paper's title suggests, technological change is an unlikely explanation. The paper lays out an explicit econometric agenda for the future, although more casual empiricism suggests that external price shocks were doing most of the work, and declining-transport-cost-induced commodity price convergence in particular.

Localization—the growing economic and political power of cities, provinces, and other sub-national entities—will be one of the most important new trends in the 21st century. Together with accelerating globalization of the world economy, localization could revolutionize prospects for human development or it could lead to chaos and increased human suffering.Improved communications, transportation and falling trade barriers are not only making the world smaller they are also fueling the desire and providing the means for local communities to shape their own future.

Continued agricultural growth and diversification into nonagricultural activities are essential if India is to continue reducing rural poverty. But policymakers hoping to alleviate rural poverty must also be aware of the causes and implications of persisting, if not increasing, inequality within villages. Jayaraman and Lanjouw review longitudinal village studies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives to identify changes in living standards in rural India in recent decades.

Wildlife consumption is an integral part of the livelihood and trade patterns of many peoples in the developing world, and highly valued by them. Yet to date the dominant models of wildlife management in areas of high – and allegedly unsustainable – consumptive use have favoured the exclusion of the users from the resource and the denial of its local values. This gives little incentive to rural dwellers to manage wildlife sustainably.

Communities of present-day or former hunter-gatherers live in scattered communities across the world, although their precise numbers and status are very uncertain. Their often marginalised status and ethnolinguistic diversity has made it hard to articulate their case for land rights outside Australia and North America. Their preferred subsistence strategy, hunting, is often in direct conflict with conservation philosophies and protected areas often fall within their traditional hunting areas.

Can land reform have a lasting impact on poverty reduction?

Examines—from the perspective of transaction costs—factors that constrain access to land for the rural poor and other socially excluded groups in India. They find that: Land reform has reduced large landholdings since the 1950s. Medium-size farms have gained most. Formidable obstacles still prevent the poor from gaining access to land. The complexity of land revenue administration in Orissa is partly the legacy of distinctly different systems, which produced more or less complete and accurate land records.

Access to land is deeply important in rural India, where the incidence of poverty is highly correlated with lack of access to land. Mearns provides a framework for assessing alternative approaches to improving access to land by India's rural poor.

Examines livelihood diversification as a survival strategy of rural households in developing countries. Although still of central importance, farming on its own is increasingly unable to provide a sufficient means of survival in rural areas.

Synthesizes the results of more than 140 economic models analyzing the causes of tropical deforestation. Raises significant doubts about many conventional hypotheses in the debate about deforestation. More roads, higher agricultural prices, lower wages, and a shortage of off-farm employment generally lead to more deforestation. How technical change, agricultural input prices, household income levels, and tenure security affect deforestation—if at all—is unknown.