This book provides an overview of the
World Bank's Eco2 cities : ecological cities as
economic cities initiative. The objective of the Eco2 cities
initiative is to help cities in developing countries achieve
a greater degree of ecological and economic sustainability.
The book is divided into three parts. Part one describes the
Eco2 cities initiative framework. It describes the approach,
beginning with the background and rationale. Key challenges

Using subnational historical data, this
paper establishes the within country persistence of economic
activity in the New World over the last half millennium. The
paper constructs a data set incorporating measures of
pre-colonial population density, new measures of present
regional per capita income and population, and a
comprehensive set of locational fundamentals. These
fundamentals are shown to have explanatory power: native

This issue includes the following
headings: seeds and soil: smallholder agriculture;
innovation: pairing commercial buyers with rural producers;
grain storage: a ready role for public-private partnerships
(PPPs); agricultural clusters: powering Africas agricultural
potential; and interviews: AgDevCo, bill and Melinda gates
foundation, earth policy institute.

International migration has increased
rapidly in recent decades and this has been accompanied by a
remarkable increase in transfers made by migrants to their
home countries. This paper investigates the effect of the
rural economic growth brought about by migration and
remittances on Nepal's Himalayan forests. The authors
assemble a unique village-panel dataset combining remote
sensing data on land use and forest cover change with data

The purpose of this report on enhancing
the role of women in water user associations in Azerbaijan
is to provide guidance for mainstreaming gender in
irrigation management projects in Azerbaijan and in the
wider Caucasus and Central Asian regions in order to foster
efficient and equitable development in irrigation
management. The paper is divided in three chapters. Chapter
one sets the background relating the themes of gender to

This paper aims to develop a vision
statement for the agricultural sector that may then guide
the future investments in Chile's agricultural
innovation system, A joint and shared perspective on how the
sector might look and what role agricultural innovation
should play in getting there is a prerequisite for any
effective strategy. But developing such a vision is not only
a function of what the country wants: it also depends on the

Following the cessation of hostilities
in May 2009, the Government of Sri Lanka has announced a
suitably ambitious macroeconomic vision to capitalize on the
peace dividend. Its goals include growing at 8 percent or
more per year and lowering government indebtedness from
around 80 to 60 percent of GDP by 2015. This paper's
main finding is that while some post-conflict bounce is only
to be expected, sustaining high growth presents significant

This paper investigates the impact of
increases in wheat flour prices on household food security
using unique nationally-representative data collected in
Afghanistan from 2007 to 2008. It uses a new estimator, the
Unconditional Quantile Regression estimator, based on
influence functions, to examine the marginal effects of
price increases at different locations on the distributions
of several food security measures. The estimates reveal that

Welfare losses from the 2008 food price
crisis in Pakistan are deepening the gap between poor and
non poor populations and further increasing inequality
between the provinces. To estimate welfare losses, the
reduction in caloric availability at household level is
measured. The analysis of calorie intake by source supports
the notion that rural households were shielded from the
worst effects of the crisis by their capacity to grow their

This paper analyzes the trends and
evolution of public spending in the agriculture sector in
Indonesia, as well as the impact of public spending on
agricultural growth. It finds that, in line with empirical
work undertaken in other countries, public spending on
agriculture and irrigation during the period 1976-2006 had a
positive impact on agricultural growth, while public
spending on fertilizer subsidies had the opposite effect.

This book provides a synthesis of key
themes and current knowledge about the links among forests,
armed conflict, poverty, and various aspects of state
fragility. The main themes addressed are: how predatory,
incapable, or absent states are fragile in different ways,
and their diverse relationships to forests and conflict; the
mechanisms by which forests facilitate or prolong conflict,
including financial flows from logging to state and

Did the rise in food prices have a long-term impact on agricultural production? Using household-level panel data from seven provinces of Indonesia, this paper finds that the price shock created a forward-looking incentive to invest, which can dynamically enhance productivity in agriculture. It also finds that the impact of the price shock on investment behavior differs by initial wealth. In response to price increases, wealthy farmers invested more in productive assets, while poor farmers increased their financial savings as well as consumption.