Short summary of a Ph.D. thesis. The dominance of the white farm issue has delayed serious attention to more subtle land conflicts. Thesis focuses on the continued maintenance of communal land rights by urban property owners. Explores what would happen if these rights disappeared. In reality and in the absence of explicit state policy, poor families and women are already relinquishing these rights, which has very practical implications for urbanisation.

World Bank Group President, James Wolfensohn addressed the Board of Governors. In the past year the Bank launched a new initiative—the Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF). The aim was to bring the social and the structural aspects of development together with the macroeconomic and the financial so as to establish a much more balanced and effective approach. The Bank will work with the broad development community—the United Nations, the European Union, bilaterals, regional development banks, civil society, and the private sector—to build genuine partnerships.

A checklist for gender-sensitive analysis of land tenure and common property resource systems, with sections on: gender roles, needs, incentives and benefits; project planning; livelihoods context; facilitating participation; and measuring impact.

James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank Group, reassessed the global financial architecture and its impact on Latin America. Latin American countries, being small economies, are very vulnerable to world pressures. After a huge drop in private sector finance, we’re seeing the first signs of return. What we need now is greater transparency and supervision in banking and the private sector—and a better common set of principles and standards. We need decent government, trained government, with capacity at all levels. We need legal systems that work.

The note focuses on the global effects of land degradation, but emphasizes other important levels of land degradation: at the field level, it may result in reduced productivity; at the national level, it may cause flooding, and sedimentation; and, at the global level, it can contribute to climate changes, damaging bio-diversity, and international waters. The effects on climate changes are explored, and the report questions the extent to which land degradation on agricultural land, affects climate change. Does it increase emissions of greenhouse gases?

This study develops an analytical framework to account for sources of rapid economic growth in China. The traditional Solow approach includes only two sources, i.e. increased use of inputs and technical change. We expanded the approach to include a third source of economic growth-structural change. The empirical results show that structural change has contributed to growth significantly by reallocating resources from low productivity to high productivity sectors, especially by moving labor from agricultural production to rural enterprises.

This paper uses a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model to simulate the short-run effects of alternative food- subsidy scenarios. Savings from reduced subsidy spending are used to reduce direct taxes uniformly for all household types. The model uses a 1996/97 database with detailed household information. The simulated impact of targeting or eliminating oil and sugar subsidies is small: disaggregated real household consumption changes by ±0.3 percent.

Undernutrition of children 0-60 months old in Mozambique is much higher in rural than in urban areas. Food security is about the same, although substantial regional differences exist. Given these outcomes, we hypothesized that the determinants of food security and nutritional status in rural and urban areas of Mozambique would differ as well. Yet we find that the determinants of food insecurity and malnutrition, and the magnitudes of their effects, are very nearly the same.

This research report on India addresses an important policy issue faced by policy-makers in many developing countries: how to allocate public funds more efficiently in order to achieve both growth and poverty-reduction goals in rural areas. This research is particularly important at a time when many developing countries are undergoing substantial budget cuts as part of macroeconomic reforms and adjustment. The econometric model employed in this research includes a broad range of government expenditure items.

Morocco is currently about to start reducing industrial protection in the context of its association agreement with the European Union. However, agriculture, which represents the major income source for the disfavored rural population, is the sector that is most strongly protected. In this study, a general equilibrium model of Morocco is used as a laboratory for analyzing the short-run equilibrium effects of alternative scenarios for reduced protection for agriculture and industry.

In this lecture, Moïse C. Mensah traces the recent history of economic policy in Benin and examines how Benin can meet food security needs while overcoming the challenges posed by a growing population, fragile natural resource base, and constraints on productivity. Although the gap between food supply and demand is not significant in Benin, about a third of the population is food insecure because of regional differences in food production and lack of income.

In recent years, many development agencies have made intensive efforts to improve their efficiency and increase their impact on rural poverty. At the heart of this new strategic management process is the measurement of performance.