Developing countries have to allocate limited government resources for rural areas among different investment activities and regions to achieve the twin goals of productivity growth and poverty alleviation. This is particularly important at a time when many countries are facing severe financial constraints. This paper develops a framework and provides empirical evidence on the impact of government investments in technology, irrigation, education and infrastructure on agricultural productivity growth and rural poverty reduction in rural India.

The organization of maize marketing in Zambia reflects the main objective of the system—supplying urban areas with cheap food. Maize purchased from farmers is sold only to the major milling companies, all of which are located in urban centers. The marketing subsidy, reflected in the low sale price to these millers, is in effect a subsidy to mainly urban consumers. Rural retailers are allowed an explicit markup to cover transport costs back to rural areas.

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.
 

Community-based forestry (CBF) includes “initiatives, sciences, policies, institutions and processes that are intended to increase the role of local people in governing and managing forest resources” (RECOFTC, 2013). It includes formalized customary and indigenous processes as well as government-led initiatives.

This note lays out the rationale for
including land administration quality index in the standard
‘registering property’ indicator by doing business and
discusses initial evidence from the global sample, showing
that many countries, including some that have performed well
on Doing Business’s traditional ranking, have a long way to
go to establish a system of land administration that is
reliable and transparent, achieves sufficient coverage, and

The number of people in South Asia's cities rose by 130 million between 2000 and 2011--more than the entire population of Japan. This was linked to an improvement in productivity and a reduction in the incidence of extreme poverty. But the region's cities have struggled to cope with the pressure of population growth on land, housing, infrastructure, basic services, and the environment. As a result, urbanization in South Asia remains underleveraged in its ability to deliver widespread improvements in both prosperity and livability.

The eight Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs) form a blueprint that is agreed to by all the
world's countries and its leading development
institutions. The first seven goals are mutually reinforcing
and are directed at reducing poverty in all its forms. The
last goal, global partnership for development, is about the
means to achieve the first seven. To track the progress in
achieving the MDGs a framework of targets and indicators has

This paper analyzes the effects of land
market restrictions on structural change from agriculture to
non-farm in a rural economy. This paper develops a
theoretical model that focuses on higher migration costs due
to restrictions on alienability, and identifies the
possibility of a reverse structural change where the share
of nonagricultural employment declines. The reverse
structural change can occur under plausible conditions: if

This report on the assessment of land
governance in Brazil summarizes and discusses the results of
a series of standardized self-assessments of the land
governance situation in Brazil, conducted entirely by
Brazilian speakers. Therefore, these findings represent the
perception of local experts based on their experience of
news and data available. The main aim of this report are
federal and state authorities directly involved in land

In countries where a large proportion of
the total land area is held customarily, reform questions
around land and development often tend to focus on the
customary estate. Evidence from Solomon Islands suggests
that a focus on public land holdings, even when they are
relatively small in land area, can yield outsized benefits.
Publicly owned land regularly includes economically valuable
land and urban land on which development pressure is high.

Land rights and the systems that
administer them can vary significantly across the world and
within countries (World Bank 2003). For a number of reasons,
land rights may be unclear or insecure. Securing land rights
plays an important role in driving economic growth and
poverty reduction. In recent years there has been increasing
awareness of the relevance of land tenure issues to food
security, climate change, rapid urbanization, informality,

This study exploits a natural experiment
to investigate the impact of land reform on the fertility
outcomes of households in rural Ethiopia. Public policies
and customs created a situation where Ethiopian households
could influence their usufruct rights to land via a
demographic expansion of the family. The study evaluates the
impact of the abolishment of these pronatal property rights
on fertility outcomes. By matching aggregated census data