One area of weakness in current
agricultural policy work in Vietnam is the lack of a clear
understanding of both the private profitability of farmers
for different crop activities and the social profitability
of such activities. Agricultural performance is thus gauged
in physical terms (i.e. yields and the volume of aggregate
output) rather than in financial or economic terms. This has
hampered efforts to compare and contrast the impacts and

As a low-middle-income country with a
gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of US$1,715 and a
population of 30 million (nearly half of all of the Central
Asian population), Uzbekistan has seen stable economic
progress since the mid-2000s, both in terms of growth and
poverty reduction. Growth has averaged 8 percent per year
since 2004 and extreme poverty has declined from 27 percent
in 2000 to 15 percent in 2012. Encouraged by this

This report provides tentative leads
toward such policy prescriptions, based on an overview of
the empirical evidence. Chapter one sets the stage by
putting Africa's export-survival performance into
perspective and proposing a framework that will guide the
interpretation of empirical evidence throughout the report.
Chapter two covers country-level determinants of export
sustainability at origin and destination, including the

In the standard model of corruption, the
rich are more likely to pay bribes for their children's
education, reflecting higher ability to pay. This prediction
is, however, driven by the assumption that the probability
of punishment for bribe-taking is invariant across
households. In many developing countries lacking in rule of
law, this assumption is untenable, because the enforcement
of law is not impersonal or unbiased and the poor have

Burkina Faso's Poverty Reduction
Strategies (PRS) of the 2000s, which were implemented as
annually rolled-over Priority Action Programs, focused on
four pillars: a) accelerating broad based growth; b)
expanding access to social services for the poor; c)
increasing employment and income-generating activities for
the poor; and d) promoting good governance. Increased public
expenditure and targeted social service provision also led

Agriculture plays an important role in
the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil. Most of its production
depends on small family-owned farms, which are greatly
exposed to climatic and price shocks. In order to help small
farmers to manage risks, the federal and state governments
have been carrying out several programs and measures to
reduce and transfer agricultural risks. Santa Catarina ranks
seventh out of 26 Brazilian states in terms of agricultural

This book is organized as follows: this
first chapter examines the pattern of structural
transformation in Middle East and North Africa, or MENA and
summarizes the role of various factors examined thoroughly
in the rest of the volume. This second chapter examines the
correlates of this overall disappointing performance. At the
macro level, MENA countries have been unable to maintain
depreciated (undervalued) real exchange rates for long

This overview of climate change
activities in Tajikistan is part of a series of country
notes for five Central Asian countries that summarize
climate portfolio of the major development partners in a
number of climate-sensitive sectors, namely energy,
agriculture, forestry and natural resources, water, health,
and transport. Recognizing the nature and significance of
climate change contribution to an increase in disaster risk,

Inappropriate regulation can influence
productivity performance by affecting incentives to invest
and adopt new technologies, as well as by directly curbing
competitive pressures. Results of a labor productivity
growth model for European countries suggest that improving
the regulatory environment -- proxied by the Worldwide
Governance Indicators regulatory quality indicator -- and
boosting effective exposure to competition through

The impacts of climate change on
agriculture are projected to be significant in coming
decades, so response strategies, and their likely costs,
should be evaluated now. That is why this study produced an
open-access, crop-climate-economic impact modeling platform
for Latin America and the Caribbean, that can be extended to
other regions, then modified and improved by users as new
crop, climate, and economic datasets become available. The

This paper reviews Pakistan's
agriculture performance and analyzes its agriculture and
water policies. It discusses the nature of rural poverty and
emphasizes the reasons why agricultural growth is a critical
component to any pro-poor growth strategy for Pakistan. It
supports these arguments by summarizing key results from
recent empirical analysis where the relative benefits of
agricultural versus non-agricultural led growth are

Reduction of carbon emissions from
deforestation and forest degradation has been identified as
a cost effective element of the post-Kyoto strategy to
achieve long-term climate objectives. Its success depends
primarily on the design and implementation of a financial
mechanism that provides land-holders sufficient incentives
to participate in such scheme. This paper proposes
self-enforcing contracts (relational contracts) as a