The authorities' determined implementation of stabilization measures over the past year has helped to avert a macroeconomic crisis. If the deterioration of the macroeconomic environment in 2010-11 was rapid, the improvement in the situation in the past twelve months has been equally swift. Regaining macroeconomic stability has been costly, but not stabilizing the economy would have led to even bigger losses.

This country note for Armenia is part of a series of country briefs that summarize information relevant to climate change and agriculture for three pilot countries in the Southern Caucasus Region, with a particular focus on climate and crop projections, adaptation options, policy development and institutional involvement. The note series has been developed to provide a baseline of knowledge on climate change and agriculture for the countries participating in the regional program on reducing vulnerability to climate change in Southern Caucasus Agricultural systems.

This report is a synthesis of information gleaned from four case studies of World Bank-financed land programs in Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Ghana, and the Lao People's Democratic Republic. The case studies were designed to both broaden and deepen our understanding of how land policies affect women and men, with an aim to applying this knowledge in very practical ways to World Ban-supported land projects.

To implement the vision of fostering
economic development, social equity, and a transparent and
effective government, the Government of Liberia has outlined
key transitions that need to be accomplished. These include
the development of infrastructure (roads, electricity),
schools, job creation and transition from war, civil
conflict and social polarization to a well functioning
society in which economic opportunities are fostered and

The 2003 land law defines that the Land
Tenure Certificate (LTCs) carries both the wife's and
husband's names. Theoretically, the requirement of both
the wife's and husband's names on the LTCs aims at
enabling the wife to participate more actively in household
economic production for poverty reduction, and to protect
the rights of the woman in the event of civil disputes over
the land that has been provided with a LTCs. A field-based

Land reform can broadly be divided into
land tenure reform-the establishment of secure and
formalized property rights in land-and land
redistribution-the transfer of land from large to small
farmers. The paper is therefore divided into two chapters.
The first chapter gives a short narrative of some of the key
land tenure and land policy issues. While these issues
remain politically sensitive, there is a solid consensus

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

The overarching theme of the book is
development in a land of contrasts. There have been large
economic, social, and political changes. The mass of society
is far more expressive and politically involved today. In
1945, the country had 7.4 million voters, about 11 percent
of the population. Today it has 120 million voters, or 67
percent of the population. The economy has been modernized,
the capitalist ethos spread across regions, mass

This study examines the effect of
performance incentives for health care providers to provide
more and higher quality care in Rwanda on child health
outcomes. The authors find that the incentives had a large
and significant effect on the weight-for-age of children
0-11 months and on the height-for-age of children 24-49
months. They attribute this improvement to increases in the
use and quality of prenatal and postnatal care. Consistent

This paper describes the key challenges
to job creation in conflict-affected environments in South
Asia. It uses household survey data since the early 2000s
for Afghanistan, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka to document the
characteristics of labor markets in conflict-affected areas,
exploiting the spatial and time variation in armed conflict
within countries. The analysis finds that, across countries,
labor markets look very different in conflict-affected areas

Did the rise in food prices have a long-term impact on agricultural production? Using household-level panel data from seven provinces of Indonesia, this paper finds that the price shock created a forward-looking incentive to invest, which can dynamically enhance productivity in agriculture. It also finds that the impact of the price shock on investment behavior differs by initial wealth. In response to price increases, wealthy farmers invested more in productive assets, while poor farmers increased their financial savings as well as consumption.

Recruiting and retaining leaders and public servants at the grass-roots level in developing countries creates a potential tension between providing sufficient returns to attract talent and limiting the scope for excessive rent-seeking behavior. In China, researchers have frequently argued that village cadres, who are the lowest level of administrators in rural areas, exploit personal political status for economic gain.