Pre-harvest lean seasons are widespread in the agrarian areas of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Every year, these seasonal famines force millions of people to succumb to poverty and hunger. An incentive of $8.50 is assigned to households in Bangladesh to out-migrate during the lean season, and...

Throughout human history, technology has proven its ability to contribute to higher material living standards, yet the work of poverty alleviation is far from complete. We believe that in the modern age, biotechnology holds remarkable potential for reducing poverty and its attendant adversities....

A key driver of foreign investment in land, food security is a challenge mankind has been confronted with in various times and places. Wherever human societies have developed, growing needs have led to increasing arable land, and when land has been limited by nature or wars, food shortages...

The experience of childhood is increasingly urban. Over half the world’s people – including more than a billion children – now live in cities and towns. This report adds to the growing body of evidence and analysis, from UNICEF and partners, that scarcity and dispossession...

Governments frequently compartmentalize issues of reform and reconstruction into separate strategies and separate ministries (the fate of poverty reduction as well). Donors do likewise, for each has its own responsibilities; the IMF focuses on reform, the UN concentrates on conflict resolution...

It is clear from the implications of growth theory that the impact of aid depends on how it affects savings, investment and government behaviour. In respect of low-income countries, which are the principal aid recipients and the economies for which the issue of the impact of aid on growth is...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have lofty expectations regarding the impact of official development aid. Are these expectations valid? This paper surveys the literature on aid and growth. It finds that practically all aid studies since the late 1990s conclude that aid increases economic...

For many low-income countries, there has been an extended period in which fiscal policy was not a choice, or was a choice made by authorities external to the country. For a number of them, this situation is now changing. Their own success in stabilising the economy, coupled with a shift in the...

This keynote address of the conference on Natural Resource Conservation Use and Sustainability in Drylands, focuses mainly on some new concepts of resource assessments in dry areas, some recent debates on organizational ideas on communities and their institutions; larger issues to place the...

Speech of Prof. K. Anbazhagan, Minister for Finance, Government of Tamil Nadu, presenting the Budget for 2008-2009 to the Legislative Assembly on 20th March, 2008.