...Workfare programmes have been used across Asia, Africa, and Latin America to provide the poor with income transfers, help them cope with income shocks, and create assets by constructing much-needed infrastructure—which, once built, can continue to generate employment. Recently, policymakers have begun paying attention to gender issues in workfare programmes... The authors of this brief used the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey (ERHS) to explore gender dimensions of public works programmes...

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.

Disputes over land, water, forests, rangelands, and other resources, both privately and commonly-held, are omnipresent across Africa and increasing in number due to the socioeconomic and environmental changes happening on micro- and macro-levels. Communities in Africa have a variety of mechanisms rooted in customary and statutory institutions to deal with disputes. This paper uses community-level survey data from Uganda to investigate the determinants of natural resource conflicts and the type of institutions people turn to for conflict resolution.

Since registering a disappointing growth of 1.2 percent in 2002, Nigeria's economic performance has rebounded, averaging growth at 7.3 percent between then and 2007. However, the pressing challenge for the nation lies in maintaining and improving current economic growth indicators and translating these recent gains into an improved standard of living for the majority of its citizens. Poverty within Nigeria remains staggeringly high with over 50 percent and 70 percent of its general and rural population respectively, living on less than US1$ a day.

Agriculture is the backbone of the Ghanaian economy. It plays an important role in the socioeconomic development of Ghana as it contributes to ensuring food security, provides raw materials for local industries, generates foreign exchange, and provides employment and incomes for most of the population (especially those living in the rural areas), thereby contributing to economic development and poverty reduction.

This study constructs a regional CGE model of China to analyze the differential regional impacts of China’s WTO accession on agricultural production, trade, and farmers’ income. The results show that China’s WTO accession will generally improve the total welfare but will widen existing gaps among regions and sectors. It is expected that the agricultural sector will suffer if only agricultural trade is liberalized, as cheap imports of agricultural products, particularly grains, will increase and domestic agricultural production and farmers’ agricultural income will decline.

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.

For the past 20 years, AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa has been considered a disease of high mobility largely associated with political strife1 or urbanization.2 With its largely peaceful recent history and heavily rural population, however, Malawi poses several challenges to existing assumptions about this demographic and social profile of the disease. Adult HIV prevalence in the country was estimated at 14.1 per cent in 2005, among the highest in the world. More than half a million Malawians have died of AIDS to date in a country of approximately 11 million people.

In the past decade, it has become increasingly common to use simple laboratory games and decision tasks as a device for measuring both the preferences and understanding of rural populations in the developing world. This is vitally important for policy implementation in a variety of areas. In this paper, we report the results observed using three distinct risk elicitation mechanisms, using samples drawn from the rural population in Senegal, West Africa.

This paper documents a Tanzania Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for the year 2009. The national SAM is based on newly estimated supply-use tables, national accounts, state budgets, and balance of payments. The SAM reconciles these data using cross-entropy estimation techniques. The final SAM is a detailed representation of Tanzania's economy. It separates 58 activities and commodities; labor by different education levels; and households by rural/urban areas as well expenditure quintiles. Labor and household information is drawn from the most recent Tanzania Household Budget Survey.

This study, based on the data of China’s agricultural census of 1997, focuses on the land distribution among rural households and its effects on crop production structure and employment of labor and capital. The Census data show that the size of holdings surprisingly differs among households, and land rental activities has started to play an important role in land allocation. Grain production accounts for 80% of total sown area for each household group, indicating that self-sufficiency in grains production is still an important factor to farmers.

CARE began PROSPECT (Program of Support for Poverty Elimination and Community Transformation) in 1998. PROSPECT aims to reduce poverty in peri-urban areas of Lusaka. It employs a community-based approach to carry out three types of activities: social empowerment (institution building at the local level), personal empowerment (microfinance), and infrastructure improvement (mostly water supply schemes). PROSPECT has attempted to carry out these activities largely through its support of area-based organizations (ABOs) that now form part of city government.