Migration is transforming rural
economies, landscapes, and potentially, gender relations.
Migration is one of the drivers of the so-called
feminization of agriculture in Latin America. This
feminization has relevance for everyone given agriculture’s
role in regional food security, national shared prosperity,
and household resilience to shocks. The objective of this
study is to investigate the feminization of agriculture as

This note reviews the role legal aid can
play as a catalyst to empower and strengthen the livelihoods
of the poor in a World Bank-funded project in the Indian
state of Andhra Pradesh (AP), the AP Rural Poverty Reduction
Project. This note shows how land-related legal aid
activities can be implemented to support community-driven
development project objectives. Initial evidence on the
positive impacts of legal aid on economic and social

Economic development critically involves
diversification and structural transformation—that is, the
continued, dynamic reallocation of resources from less
productive to more productive sectors and activities. This
paper documents that, over an extended period, developing
Asia has on average been particularly successful in
diversifying its exports, particularly in comparison with
Sub-Saharan Africa. Much of the progress has occurred

Central Asia is often associated with
the silk route or road, the longest overland trade route
connecting China to Europe and one of the oldest in history.
Growth opportunities and the future prosperity of the region
are highly dependent upon the efficiency of its internal and
external supply-chain connections, which is the focus of
this report. Supply-chain connectivity depends on the
quality of the infrastructure on specific routes. This study

Drawing on international trade data,
this paper uses the product space approach to analyze
changes in Morocco’s goods exports in 1990–2010 and future
export priorities. The level of Morocco’s gross domestic
product and its moderate growth match the predictions of
product space analysis, informed by changes in the income
potential of Morocco’s export basket, reflecting relatively
strong capabilities (a high density) in products with

The contribution of women to labor in
African agriculture is regularly quoted in the range of 60
to 80 percent. Using individual-disaggregated, plot-level
labor input data from nationally representative household
surveys across six Sub-Saharan African countries, this study
estimates the average female labor share in crop production
at 40 percent. It is slightly above 50 percent in Malawi,
Tanzania, and Uganda, and substantially lower in Nigeria (37

This paper uses farm panel data from
China to examine the dynamics of land transactions, machine
investments, and the demand for machine services. Recently,
China's agriculture has experienced a large expansion
of machine rentals and machine services provided by
specialized agents, which has contributed to mechanization
of agricultural production. The empirical results show that
an increase in nonagricultural wage rates leads to expansion

Renato and Hecinta are raising six young
children in a rural area of Mozambique’s northern Nampula
Province. On just half a hectare, they grow rice, maize,
beans, cashew, peanuts, cabbage, and tomatoes, selling what
they can and eating the rest. But, like many of the 475
million smallholder household’s worldwide, agricultural
production is just one of their many income-generating
activities. They balance several sources of income, within

The report Africa Can Help Feed Africa
(World Bank 2012) showed that increasing food staples1
supply can be met by better connecting African markets to
each other. That report called for a stronger focus on
removing trade barriers and building on the forces of
regional integration. This report builds on the lessons of
Africa Can Help Feed Africa by looking into the specific
circum¬stances met in West Africa, home to one-third of the

This Fifth Edition of the Uganda
Economic Update presents evidence that if the urbanization
process is well managed, it has the potential to stimulate
economic growth and to provide productive jobs for a greater
proportion of Uganda s young and rapidly expanding
population. In many countries across the world, the growth
of cities has stimulated the establishment and expansion of
productive businesses by reducing the distance between

Climate change is a critical issue
facing the countries of the Nile basin. While individual
weather events are difficult to attribute to climate change,
their sum is already having adverse effects on socioeconomic
conditions across the region. While climate change was not
an overt focus of the Nile basin initiative’s (NBI’s)
mandate when it was launched in 1999, it has emerged as a
key challenge for countries of the Nile to take seriously.

This report is the result of a World
Bank mission that visited Paraguay in June 2013 at the
request of the Government of Paraguay. The mission’s
objective was to identify, quantify, and prioritize
agriculture risks that determine the volatility of
agriculture gross domestic product (GDP), based on a
methodology to assess sector risks developed by the World
Bank. The methodology stipulates a two-phase process. The