Environmental degradation can inflict
serious damage on poor people because their livelihoods
often depend on natural resource use and their living
conditions may offer little protection from air, water, and
soil pollution. At the same time, poverty-constrained
options may induce the poor to deplete resources and degrade
the environment at rates that are incompatible with
long-term sustainability. In such cases, degraded resources

Reviewing cross-country experience with
sugar policies, and policy reform, the authors conclude that
long-standing government interventions - rooted in
historical trade arrangements, fear of shortages, and
conflicting interests between growers, and sugar mills -
often displace both the markets, and the institutions
required to produce efficient outcomes. Arrangements rooted
in colonial eras, still shape policies, and trade in the

Using plot-level data, the authors
estimate a bi-variate probit model to explain land clearing,
and the siting of protected areas in North Thailand in 1986.
Their model suggests that protected areas (national parks,
together with wildlife sanctuaries) did not reduce the
likelihood of forest clearing, but wildlife sanctuaries may
have reduced the probability of deforestation. Road
building, by reducing the impedance-weighted distance to

The standard approach for fitting a
Cobb-Douglas production function to micro data with zero
values is to replace those values with "sufficiently
small" numbers to facilitate the logarithmic
transformation. In general, the estimates obtained are
extremely sensitive to the transformation chosen, generating
doubts about the use of a specification that assumes that
all inputs are essential (as the Cobb-Douglas does) when

The main objective of the study is to
provide the Government of Senegal the analyses and
information to implement policies towards reducing the rural
poor's vulnerability. While during the latest years,
economic growth reduced poverty in the country, this has
been less noticeable among the rural population, who
actually account for 6 million people over a total
population of 10 million. The rural economy remains

This sector report on Challenges and
Priorities for Rural Development analyzes why Upper Egypt
has lagged behind the rest of the country and to help the
Government of Egypt and stakeholders to define a framework
for interventions to promote broad-based economic growth and
human development that will reach the poor and improve
welfare in rural Upper Egypt. To achieve this objective, the
strategic framework for intervention proposed here has two

Theoretical work has shown that
nonlinear dynamics in household incomes can yield poverty
traps and distribution-dependent growth. If this is true,
the potential implications for policy are dramatic:
effective social protection from transient poverty would be
an investment with lasting benefits, and pro-poor
redistribution would promote aggregate economic growth. The
authors test for nonlinearity in the dynamics of household

Cereal production accounts for about
seventy percent of all agricultural land in Morocco. Cereal
producer prices, influenced by the government, are higher
than world prices. Production is divided into six broad
agro-climatic zones. About half of cereal production is
concentrated in the favorable, and intermediate zones; the
rest occurs mostly in less favorable (arid and semi-arid)
zones, with average annual rainfall below 450 millimeters.

With the recent resurgence of interest
in equity, inequality, and growth, the possibility of a
negative relationship between inequality and economic
growth, has received renewed interest in the literature.
Faced with the prospect that high levels of inequality may
persist, and give rise to poverty traps, policymakers are
paying more attention to the distributional implications of
macroeconomic policies. Because high levels of inequality

Many developing country governments
discriminate against sectors that export primary
commodities. India, for example, discriminates against
cotton production. Exports of cotton have been restricted by
quotas, and the mill industry has been subject to such
regulations as the obligation to supply hank yarn for Indian
handlooms. These interventions have led to stagnating cotton
yields, rent-seeking activities, manipulation of cotton

The authors present evidence that in
Burkina Faso, certain high-performing local institutions
contribute to equitable economic development. They link
reduced levels of poverty, and inequality to a high degree
of internal village organization. The structure of these
high-performing local organizations means they can exist in
a number of African countries, because they depend more on
internal participation, rather than on nay one

Central control of forests takes
management responsibility away from the communities most
dependent on them, inevitably resulting in tensions. Like
many African countries, Tanzania--which has forest or
woodland cover over 30-40 percent of its land--established
central forestry institutions at a time when there was
little need for active management and protection because
population pressures were low. But in the face of scarce