For a long time, the urbanization and development discourse has coincided with a focus on economic growth and big cities. Yet, much of the world's new urbanization is taking place in smaller urban entities (towns), and the composition of urbanization may well bear on the speed of poverty...

With an estimated 724 million extreme poor people living in developing countries, and the world's demographics bifurcating into an older north and a younger south, there are substantial economic incentives and benefits for people to migrate. There are also important market and regulatory...

A thriving region until the early 1990s, Slavonia, the eastern region of Croatia, has been confronted with stagnation and decline, ageing and outmigration as well as impoverishment ever since. This followed Croatia's homeland war of 1991-1995, with Slavonia one of the frontlines, economic...

As countries develop (and food saturation takes hold), agriculture's role as domestic employer declines. But the broader agri-food system (AFS) also expands, and the scope for agriculture-related job creation shifts beyond the farm. Historically, technological revolutions both have shaped and...

Should public investment be targeted to big cities or to small towns, if the objective is to minimize national poverty? To answer this policy question, this paper extends the basic Todaro-type model of rural-urban migration to the case of migration from rural areas to two potential destinations,...

Stylized facts drive research agendas and policy debates. Yet robust stylized facts are hard to come by, and when available, often outdated. In a special issue of Food Policy, 12 papers revisit conventional wisdom on African agriculture and its farmers' livelihoods using nationally...

This review is framed around the exploration of a central hypothesis: A shift in public investment toward secondary towns from big cities will improve poverty reduction performance. Of course the hypothesis raises many questions. What exactly is the dichotomy of secondary towns versus big...

Should public investment be targeted to big cities or to small towns, if the objective is to minimize national poverty? To answer this policy question the authors extend the basic Todaro-type model of rural-urban migration to the case of migration from rural areas to two potential destinations,...

China's success in addressing food problems after adopting the reforms in 1978 has been nothing less than remarkable. Grain output (rice, wheat and maize) has almost doubled and most hunger has been eliminated. Ever since China embarked on its reform agenda more than 30 years ago, its economic...

After a decade of crisis and stellar economic growth over the past five years, Cote d'Ivoire has now set its sight on becoming an emerging economy. Improving prospects for productive employment will be essential for socially sustainable growth and poverty reduction. The "Cote d'Ivoire Jobs...