The spike in food prices between 2005
and the first half of 2008 has highlighted the
vulnerabilities of poor consumers to higher prices of
agricultural goods and generated calls for massive policy
action. This paper provides a formal assessment of the
direct and indirect impacts of higher prices on global
poverty using a representative sample of 63 to 93 percent of
the population of the developing world. To assess the direct

The Ghana Country Environment Analysis
(CEA) has thus been formulated to assist the Government of
Ghana and its development partners to: (a) assess the
country's environmental priorities in key sectors, the
environmental implications of key economic and sector
policies, and the country's institutional capacity to
address them; and (b) find practical management,
institutional, and policy solutions to handle issues of

This assessment of poverty and
inequality comes at an important juncture for Kenya. The
December 2007 elections and subsequent pronouncements of the
newly formed Grand Coalition have underlined the salience of
these issues to ordinary Kenyans, and for policy makers. The
violence in early 2008 highlighted the importance of
addressing poverty and inequality as major goals in their
own right, but also for instrumental reasons, as major goals

Morocco is a middle-income country with
good water infrastructure that provides access to safe
drinking water and sanitation to the majority of the urban
population. In 2005, Morocco made it a priority to extend
service to poor peri-urban settlements, and encouraged
operators and local governments to reduce connection fees
for their inhabitants. These connection fees had been priced
at marginal cost, which represented a major obstacle for

Nicaragua is a small, open economy that
is vulnerable to external and natural shocks. With an
estimated Gross National Income (GNI) per capita of US$1000
in 2006, and a total population of 5.2 million, it is one of
the poorest countries in Latin America. Forty six percent of
the population lived below the poverty line in 2005 (while
15 percent lived in extreme poverty), and the incidence of
poverty is more than twice as high in rural areas (68

This paper studies nonmarket
institutions that facilitate exports. In Malawi, as in many
other developing countries, farmers face numerous
constraints that disconnect them from export markets. The
paper explores the role of a local institution, the burley
tobacco clubs, in bridging smallholders to exports. Burley
clubs potentially enable farmers to increase their tobacco
farming productivity by providing services related to

The situation in The Gambia is a good
example of the many challenges small states have to deal
with. The country is faced with institutional capacity
constraints and due to a narrow resource base and a small
domestic market, its production base and exports show little
diversification. Like other small states, the country tends
to rely heavily on external trade and foreign investment to
overcome its scale and resource limitation, increasing its

Trade policy reforms in recent decades
have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming
agriculture in developing countries, yet global trade in
farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade
in nonfarm goods. Those distortions reduce some forms of
poverty and inequality but worsen others, so the net effects
are unclear without empirical modeling. This paper
summarizes a series of new economy-wide global and national

Cambodia's changing distribution of
income-related outcomes is consistent with the process of
transition from a planned to an open market economy, and the
accompanying growth of incomes. This transformation has
promoted better resource reallocation, expanded the spectrum
of gainful activities, and widened the distribution of
earnings. Aided by robust economic growth and improved
capacity for implementing public policies, Cambodia has seen

How cash transfers made to women are
used has important implications for models of household
behavior and for the design of social programs. In this
paper, the authors use the randomized introduction of an
unconditional cash transfer to poor women in rural Ecuador
to analyze the effect of transfers on the food Engel curve.
There are two main findings. First, the authors show that
households randomly assigned to receive Bono de Desarrollo

This Investment Climate Policy Note
(ICPN) identifies the main constraints to the development of
the private sector in the Republic of Congo, based on a
survey of enterprises operating in the manufacturing and
services sectors, in Pointe Noire and Brazzaville, and to
propose specific short term recommendations to address these
constraints. The ICPN emphasizes cross-country comparisons
and benchmarks the investment climate across various firm

Using a nested multinomial logit model
of car ownership and personal travel in Beijing circa 2005,
this paper compares the effectiveness of different policy
instruments to reduce traffic congestion and CO2 emissions.
The study shows that a congestion toll is more efficient
than a fuel tax in reducing traffic congestion, whereas a
fuel tax is more effective as a policy instrument for
reducing gasoline consumption and emissions. An improvement