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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This paper explores how a 'conflict and violence sensitive' framework in project assessment, design and implementation facilitates early identification and mitigation of negative consequences of competition and dispute, and promotes sustainable development over the longer term. It discusses the role of renewable resources in perpetuating conflict and violence, and distills lessons from selected development programming experiences in managing conflict risks associated with these dynamics.

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.

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 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.

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.

This paper addresses the potential effects of world agricultural trade liberalization on poverty and regional income distribution in Brazil, using an inter-regional applied general equilibrium (AGE) and a micro-simulation model of Brazil tailored for income distribution and poverty analysis by using a detailed representation of households. The model distinguishes 10 different labor types and has 270 different household expenditure patterns. Income can originate from 41 different production activities located in 27 different regions in the country.