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

Mongolia’s ongoing economic transition generates levels of uncertainty that often inhibit investments in
productivity and marketing improvements on the part of producers and processors. This study was undertaken to identify gaps in policies, laws, regulations, and practices from production
to the consumer end point, and to stimulate discussions about how to leverage the agriculture sector’s
potential contributions to national development objectives.

This paper examines the determinants of
agricultural productivity and its link to poverty using
nationally representative data from the Nigeria General
Household Survey Panel, 2010/11. The findings indicate an
elasticity of poverty reduction with respect to agricultural
productivity of between 0.25 to 0.3 percent, implying that a
10 percent increase in agricultural productivity will
decrease the likelihood of being poor by between 2.5 and 3

A significant portion of the world’s
forests that are eligible for Reducing Emission from
Deforestation and Forest Degradation, known as REDD ,
payments are community managed forests. However, there is
little knowledge about preferences of households living in
community managed forests for REDD contracts, or the
opportunity costs of accepting REDD contracts for these
communities. This paper uses a choice experiment survey of

The prime objective of the project/subproject is to improve the power sector in the State of
Mizoram and capacity building to achieve sustainable development in the long term. The Project is
expected to facilitate connection to remote/virgin area, to enhance the capacity & reliability of the system,
to improve voltage profile & to reduce losses and ultimately to enhance satisfaction for all categories of
consumers which in turn will spur growth & overall development in the whole State.

The use of the phrase, ‘political
economy’ originates in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and is
also found in the writings of David Ricardo and Karl Marx.
What is presently understood as ‘economics’ was, at that
time, termed ‘political economy’. This was understood to
mean ‘conditions of production organization in
nation-states’ (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012, Beuran,
Raballand and Kapoor, 2011). Venerable scholars such as

In many developing countries,
consumption of animal source foods among the poor is still
at a level where increasing its share in total caloric
intake may have many positive nutritional benefits. This
paper explores whether ownership of various livestock
species increases consumption of animal source foods and
helps improve child nutritional status. The paper finds some
evidence that food consumption patterns and nutritional

This paper estimate the effects of
collective action in Nepal’s community forests on four
ecological measures of forest quality. Forest user group
collective action is identified through membership in the
Nepal Community Forestry Programme, pending membership in
the program, and existence of a forest user group whose
leaders can identify the year the group was formed. This
last, broad category is important, because many community

Women comprise 50 percent of the
agricultural labor force in Sub-Saharan Africa, but manage
plots that are reportedly on average 20 to 30 percent less
productive. As a source of income inequality and aggregate
productivity loss, the country-specific magnitude and
drivers of this gender gap are of great interest. Using
national data from the Uganda National Panel Survey for
2009/10 and 2010/11, the gap before controlling for