This paper examines spending plans
suggested by the recent literature regarding Dutch disease
and examines their implications to Niger relative to its
expanding mineral sector. The key to the benefits of
significant mineral revenue lies with the productivity and
supply responses of spending. If significant output gain is
ensured, then there is little difference across the spending
plans in their effects on real consumption. The overshooting

The success of reducing carbon emissions
from deforestation and forest degradation depends on the
design of an effective financial mechanism that provides
landholders sufficient incentives to participate and provide
additional and permanent carbon offsets. This paper proposes
self-enforcing contracts as a potential solution for the
constraints in formal contract enforcement derived from the
stylized facts of reducing emissions from deforestation and

This paper studies the relationship
between inequality of opportunity and development outcomes
in a cross-country setting. Scholars have long debated the
impact of inequality on growth, development, and the quality
of institutions in a society. The empirical relationships
are however confounded by the notion that
"inequality" can be seen as a composite of
inequality arising from differences in effort and ability,

The vision of Pakistan's social
protection strategy to reach the poor and vulnerable (2007)
is 'to develop an integrated and comprehensive social
protection system, covering all the population, but
especially the poorest and the most vulnerable'.
Consistent with this vision, the goals of the strategy are
identified as: 1) to support chronically poor households and
protect them against destitution, food insecurity,

This paper contributes to the
long-standing debate on the merits of decentralized
beneficiary targeting in the administration of development
programs, focusing on the large-scale Malawi Farm Input
Subsidy Program. Nationally-representative household survey
data are used to systematically analyze the decentralized
targeting performance of the program during the 2009-2010
agricultural season. The analysis begins with a standard

The Government of Indonesia (GOI) is in
the process of designing a national REDD+ mechanism to allow
it to access donor funding in the medium term, and funding
from a potential performance based mechanism in the long
term. This policy brief is focused on the broad question of
how REDD+ can address underlying community issues such as
lack of access to forest land, and does not deal with the
more specific questions of legal and institutional

In Africa, women are subjected to
discriminatory practices that keep them in a vulnerable
situation. Their limited access to land, in a continent
where the majority of the population depends on agriculture,
reduces their access to credit and their capacity to
undertake sustainable economic activities to generate
income. They hold only 18 percent of agricultural lands and
are not better off in administrations. In Cote

Agricultural and rural development
provides a critically important opportunity for reducing
malnutrition. The purpose of this paper is to provide a set
of guiding principles for incorporating nutrition goals into
the design and implementation of agricultural and rural
development projects, and to provide examples of current
best evidence options for operational investments. Several
principles are likely to be important in all or most cases

While self-assessments of welfare have
become popular for measuring poverty and estimating welfare
effects, the methods can be deceptive given systematic
heterogeneity in respondents' scales. Little is known
about this problem. This study uses specially-designed
surveys in three countries, Tajikistan, Guatemala, and
Tanzania, to study scale heterogeneity. Respondents were
asked to score stylized vignettes, as well as their own

This study, policy and investment
priorities to reduce environmental degradation of the Lake
Nicaragua watershed, has assessed the sources and the
magnitude of the pressures that threaten Lake Cocibolca. It
was accomplished by applying a hydrological and land use
model to the lake's watershed and by conducting
additional estimates of nutrients generated from wastewater
sources and tilapia farming. The study has confirmed that

This paper sheds light on how to harvest
the "youth dividend" in Sub-Saharan Africa by
creating jobs in agriculture. The agriculture that attracts
the youth will have to be profitable, competitive, and
dynamic. These are the same characteristics needed for
agriculture to deliver growth, to improve food security, and
to preserve a fragile natural environment. With higher
priority accorded to implementation of well-designed public

Since 2004, Sri Lanka has pursued inward
looking policies that have encouraged import substitution,
especially with respect to agricultural commodities. This
report provides empirical evidence to inform the policy
dialogue over the impact of current trade and price policies
on the incentive framework for agriculture in Sri Lanka.
This analysis provides a quantitative assessments of: (1)
the level of support to farmers producing import-competing