Poverty in Turkey has declined significantly between 2003 and 2006, as a result of rapid poverty reduction in urban areas. In the same time period, the reduction in poverty in rural areas has been slow or non-existent. As a result, the relative risk of poverty has increased in this time period for those employed in agricultural sector, living in rural areas and in large households.

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.

The Country Environmental Analysis (CEA) for Timor-Leste identifies environmental priorities through a systematic review of environmental issues in natural resources management and environmental health in the context of the country's economic development and environmental institutions. Lack of data has been the main limitation in presenting a more rigorous analysis. Nevertheless, the report builds on the best available secondary data, presents new data on the country's wealth composition, and derives new results on the costs of water and air pollution.

This chapter begins with a brief summary of economic growth and structural changes in the region since the 1950s and of agricultural and other economic policy developments as they affected the farm sector at the time of and in various stages after independence from colonial powers.

This chapter begins with a brief summary of the long history of national distortions to agricultural markets. It then outlines the methodology used to generate annual indicators of the extent of government interventions in markets, details of which are provided in Anderson and appendix A.

Reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions affecting agriculture in developing countries, particularly by cuts to agricultural export taxes and by some reductions in government assistance to agriculture in high-income countries, but international trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods. This paper summarizes a series of empirical studies that focus on the effects of the remaining distortions to world merchandise trade for poverty and inequality, especially in developing countries.