Local and Community Driven Development (LCDD) is an approach that gives control of development decisions and resources to community groups and representative local governments. Poor communities receive funds, decide on their use, plan and execute the chosen local projects, and monitor the provision of services that result from it. It improves not just incomes but people's empowerment and governance capacity, the lack of which is a form of poverty as well. LCDD operations have demonstrated effectiveness at delivering results and have received substantial support from the World Bank.

Although Mozambique has considerable agricultural potential, rural poverty remains extremely high. This paper examines the extent to which global and domestic price distortions affect agricultural production and national poverty. The author develops a computable general equilibrium (CGE) and micro-simulation model of Mozambique that is linked to the results of a global model. This framework is used to examine the effects of eliminating global and national price distortions.

South Africa has rapidly reduced trade barriers since the end of Apartheid, yet agricultural production and exports have remained sluggish. Also, poverty and unemployment have risen and become increasingly concentrated in rural areas. This paper examines the extent to which remaining price distortions, both domestic and foreign, are contributing to the underperformance of the agricultural sector vis-a-vis the rest of the economy. The author draws on a computable general equilibrium (CGE) and micro-simulation model of South Africa that is linked to the results of a global trade model.

Although economic reform has brought remarkable progress in poverty reduction in Vietnam, the scale and depth of ethnic minority poverty in Vietnam presents one of the major challenges to achieving the targets for poverty reduction set out in the Socio-Economic Development Plan, as well as the millennium development goals. The authors first review a series of monetary and non-monetary indicators which show the living standards of the ethnic minorities are improving but still lag seriously behind those of the majority Kinh-Hoa.

Using recent estimates of industry assistance rates, the effects of trade liberalization in the rest of the world and in Pakistan alone are analyzed using a global and a Pakistan computable general equilibrium (CGE) model under two tax replacement schemes: a direct income tax and an indirect tax replacement. The results indicate that the distributional and poverty effects in Pakistan of a unilateral liberalization of all traded goods are significantly greater than the effects of trade liberalization in the rest of the world.

A general equilibrium modeling approach is used to estimate the effects within Indonesia of unilateral and global trade liberalization, including effects on poverty incidence. It is concluded that global reform of trade policy in all commodities is a significant potential source of poverty reduction for Indonesia. The poor rural and urban have a strong interest in global trade policy reform. If Indonesia were to liberalize unilaterally, poverty incidence also will decline but the effect is small.

This review of public expenditures on Social Protection (SP) in Nicaragua is based on the analytical framework of Social Risk Management (SRM) developed by the World Bank. The concept of managing social risk comes from the notion that certain groups in society are vulnerable to unexpected shocks which threaten their livelihood and/or survival. Social protection focuses on the poor since they are more vulnerable to the risks and normally do not have the instruments to handle these risks.

The report seeks to analyze what has been learned about how agricultural interventions influence nutrition outcomes in low-and middle-income countries, focusing on the target populations of the millennium development goals-people living on less than a dollar a day. It also sets out to synthesize lessons from past efforts to improve the synergies between agriculture and nutrition outcomes. The report identifies a number of developments in agriculture and nutrition that have transformed the context in which nutrition is affected by agriculture.

Capitalizing on the most recent estimates of agricultural price distortions in China and in other countries, this paper assesses the economic and poverty impact of global and domestic trade reform in China. It also examines the interplay between the trade reforms and factor market reforms aimed at improving the allocation of labor within the Chinese economy. The results suggest that trade reforms in the rest of the world, land reform and hukou reform all serve to reduce poverty, while unilateral trade reforms result in a small poverty increase.

Main pharmaceutical policy goals in Ghana are access to essential medicines for everybody, quality assurance for all drugs on the market, a functioning and efficient supply chain as well as rational use of medicines by professionals and patients. There is also a commitment to strengthen the domestic pharmaceutical industry, outlined under health industry in the national health policy.

Agriculture in Western Europe enjoys a degree of diversity that reflects a wide variety of soils and climatic conditions ranging from the arid Mediterranean regions to the Arctic Circle. Superimposed on this natural diversity is the complexity of different social, economic and political conditions in the eighteen countries that are the subject of this chapter.

This paper uses new data on agricultural policy interventions to examine the political economy of agricultural trade policies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Historically, African governments have discriminated against agricultural producers in general (relative to producers in non-agricultural sectors), and against producers of export agriculture in particular. While more moderate in recent years, these patterns of discrimination persist. They do so even though farmers comprise a political majority.