This note reviews the role legal aid can
play as a catalyst to empower and strengthen the livelihoods
of the poor in a World Bank-funded project in the Indian
state of Andhra Pradesh (AP), the AP Rural Poverty Reduction
Project. This note shows how land-related legal aid
activities can be implemented to support community-driven
development project objectives. Initial evidence on the
positive impacts of legal aid on economic and social

Himachal Pradesh has the reputation of
being stable, inclusive, cohesive and well-governed and it
stands apart in many respects from its neighbors in northern
India. It has additionally, achieved remarkable growth,
especially in the last two decades, which has been
accompanied by very good human development outcomes. Despite
being a predominantly rural society, educational attainment
in Himachal Pradesh for instance, is among the best in the

This paper uses farm panel data from
China to examine the dynamics of land transactions, machine
investments, and the demand for machine services. Recently,
China's agriculture has experienced a large expansion
of machine rentals and machine services provided by
specialized agents, which has contributed to mechanization
of agricultural production. The empirical results show that
an increase in nonagricultural wage rates leads to expansion

This paper provides new empirical
insights on the joint distribution of consumption, income,
and wealth in three of the poorest countries in the world —
Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda — all located in Sub-Saharan
Africa (SSA). The first finding is that while income
inequality is similar to that of the United States (US),
wealth inequality is barely one-third that of the US.
Similarly, while the top of the income distribution (1 and

Why produce a policy note on
horticulture in Uzbekistan? There are several answers to
this existential question, although they are not necessarily
obvious ones. Agriculture, taken as a whole, constitutes a
small and declining share of Uzbekistan s national income,
and horticulture is a small share of agricultural income.
Even so, it is an important source of income for the 4.7
million households that operate dehkan farms in rural and

This paper uses farm panel data from
Indonesia to examine dynamic patterns of land use, capital
investments, and wages in agriculture. The empirical
analysis shows that an increase in real wages has induced
the substitution of labor by machines among relatively large
farmers. Large farmers tend to increase the scale of
operation by renting in more land when real wages increase.
Machines and land are complementary if the scale of

The continued decline in global poverty
over the past 100 years particularly in the past three
decades is a remarkable achievement. In 1981, 52 percent of
the world population lived on less than $1.25 a day. By
2005, that rate had been cut in half, to 25.0 percent, and
by 2008 to 22.2 percent (World Bank 2012). Preliminary
estimates for 2010 indicate that the extreme poverty rate
has fallen further still; if follow-up studies confirm this,

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

With farms cultivating tens or hundreds
of thousands of hectares, Ukraine is often used to
demonstrate the existence of economies of scale in modern
grain production. Panel data analysis for all the
country's farms with more than 200 hectares in
2001-2011 suggests that higher yields and profits are due to
unobserved factors at rayon (district) and farm level rather
than economies of scale. Productivity growth was driven not

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

Agricultural growth rates in the Latin
America and the Caribbean (LAC) region have been much slower
than the rest of the developing world. In the regions of
East Asia, South Asia and Middle East and North Africa, the
annual growth of agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
in 1980-2004 exceeded 3 percent, while growth in Sub-
Saharan Africa averaged almost 3 percent. This paper
attempts to present an overview of the agricultural sector

This paper studies the use of labor
markets to mitigate the impact of violent shocks on
households in rural areas in Colombia. It examines changes
in the labor supply from on-farm to off-farm labor as a
means of coping with the violent shock and the ensuing
redistribution of time within households. It identifies the
heterogeneous response by gender. Because the incidence of
violent shocks is not exogenous, the analysis uses