The main objective of this technical assistance paper is to provide
recommendations to the Royal Government of Bhutan for
modernizing its hydrometeorological services,
including capacity strengthening for disasterrelated
early warning systems (EWSs). The
DHMS does not have a national hydromet
services policy but is in the process of preparing
a strategic document to guide its modernization
and institutional reform process. This technical assistance paper contributes to this process and proposes a road

This paper reviews the empirical
evidence on the existence of poverty traps, understood as
self-reinforcing mechanisms through which poor individuals
or countries remain poor. Poverty traps have captured the
interest of many development policy makers, because poverty
traps provide a theoretically coherent explanation for
persistent poverty. They also suggest that temporary policy
interventions may have long-term effects on poverty.

Africa is estimated to have great
potential for agricultural production, but there are a
number of constraints inhibiting the development of that
potential. Spatial data are increasingly important in the
realization of potential as well as the associated
constraints. With crop production data generated at 5-minute
spatial resolution, the paper applies the spatial tobit
regression model to estimate the possible impacts of

Drawing on a new set of nationally
representative, internationally comparable household
surveys, this paper provides an overview of key features of
structural transformation—labor allocation and labor
productivity—in four African economies. New, micro-based
measures of sector labor allocation and cross-sector
productivity differentials describe the incentives
households face when allocating their labor. These measures

Cambodia’s rice harvests have been
rising significantly since 2005, powered by improved and
expanded irrigation and attractive farm gate prices. In
2010, the Cambodian government announced an export target of
1.0 million tons of milled rice by 2015. This analysis,
which updates reports prepared in 2009 and 2011, seeks to
identify short-term policy measures that can assist
Cambodian exporters in boosting exports in the near term.

Recognizing the importance and
uniqueness of the Sundarbans, the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
declared the Indian portion of the forest a World Heritage
Site in 1987, and the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Program
has included the Sundarbans Biosphere Reserve in the Global
Network of Island and Coastal Biosphere Reserves
Contributing to Action on Climate Change and Sustainable

Nepal depends entirely on imports for
meeting its demand for petroleum products, which account for
the largest share in total import volume. Diesel is the main
petroleum product consumed in the country and accounts for
38 percent of the total national CO2 emissions from fuel
consumption. There is a general perception that the country
would economically benefit if part of imported diesel is
substituted with domestically produced jatropha-based

African governments and international
development groups see boosting productivity on smallholder
farms as key to reducing rural poverty and safeguarding the
food security of farming and non-farming households.
Prompting smallholder farmers to use more fertilizer has
been a key tactic. Closing the productivity gap between male
and female farmers has been another avenue toward achieving
the same goal. The results in this paper suggest the two are

Between 2008 and 2012 the urban/rural poverty divide substantially narrowed
down, which was the result of relatively stable rural and rising urban poverty rates. Over the same period, food inflation spiked, whereby strong links between domestic and global price movements were observed owed to major import dependence on food. The high shares of consumption that households dedicate to food, especially among the poor, leave limited scope to deal with food price surges by economizing on non-food

This paper investigates the
effectiveness of protected areas in slowing tropical forest
clearing in 64 countries in Asia/Pacific, Africa, and Latin
America for the period 2001-2012. The investigation compares
deforestation rates inside and within 10 kilometers outside
the boundary of protected areas. Annual time series of these
deforestation rates were constructed from recently published
high-resolution data on forest clearing. For 4,028 parks,

This paper examines whether cooperative
behavior by respondents measured as contributions in a
one-shot public goods game correlates with reported
pro-forest collective action behaviors. All the outcomes
analyzed are costly in terms of time, land, or money. The
study finds significant evidence that more cooperative
individuals (or those who believe their group members will
cooperate) engage in collective action behaviors that

The devastating civil war in Syria is
arguably one of the major civil conflicts in recent times.
The conflict started with protests in March 2011 and soon
after escalated to a violent internal war with no end in
sight to this date. The conflict has by the end of 2014
caused well in excess of 150,000 fatalities, and 6 million
internally displaced people (UN), and led 3 million refugees
to move out of the country (UNHCR). Beyond the human