Healthy land ecosystems are essential to sustainable development, including food security and improved livelihoods. Yet, their key services have usually been taken for granted and their true value underrated, leading to land degradation becoming a critical global problem. This pattern of...

Healthy soils are essential for sustaining economies and human livelihoods. In spite of this, the key ecosystem services provided by soils have usually been taken for granted and their true value – beyond market value – is being underrated. This pattern of undervaluation of soils is about to...

Higher weather volatility may be reflected in higher incidences of weather shocks. Weather shocks could potentially affect the supply of agricultural commodities and their prices. In this study, the effects of weather shocks on agricultural commodity prices in Central Asia are investigated at...

Assets are an important means of coping with adverse events in developing countries but the role of gendered ownership is not yet fully understood. This paper investigates changes in assets owned by the household head,his spouse,or jointly by both of them in response to shocks in rural...

The need to address extreme poverty from the perspective of marginality arises from the frustration that the number of the poorest and hungry remains unacceptably high. This triggered the call for an innovative approach from the side of science and action. The conceptual and analytical framework...

We draw a distinction between the social integration and economic assimilation of migrants, and study an interaction between the two. We define social integration as blending into the host country’s society, and economic assimilation as acquisition of human capital that is specific to the host...

Drawing on the literature of occupational status and social distance, a theory is developed of labor migration that is prompted by a desire to avoid “social humiliation.” A closed-economy general equilibrium model that incorporates occupational status and examines the interaction between the...

To achieve a better understanding of the diverse vulnerabilities of different social groups affected by the tsunami in December 2004 in Sri Lanka, a survey of 500 households in the Sri Lankan urban area of Galle has been conducted in cooperation with several institutes under the direction of the...

In the model of Stark et al. (1997, 1998), the possibility of employment in a developed country raises the level of human capital acquired by workers in the developing country. We show that this result holds even when workers have the option to save.

We demonstrate that a rank-preserving transfer from a richer individual to a poorer individual can exacerbate income inequality (when inequality is measured by the Gini coefficient). This happens when individuals’ preferences depend negatively not only on work time (effort) but also on low...