In this paper the authors compare indicators of development, infrastructure, and living conditions in the slums of Dakar, Nairobi, and Johannesburg using data from 2004 World Bank surveys. Contrary to the notion that most African cities face similar slum problems, find that slums in the three...

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,...

This study looks at the experience of integrated urban upgrading in a low-income neighborhood of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Infrastructure and social investments have been made in the community through a government program, with community participation playing a major role in the design and...

In the event of large swings in world food prices, countries often intervene to dampen the impact of international food price spikes on domestic prices and to lessen the burden of adjustment on vulnerable population groups. While individual countries can succeed at insulating their domestic...

Like many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Senegal has struggled to develop its industrial sector in the face of import competition. For basic food products, there is an implicit trade-off between the objectives of maintaining employment and lowering the cost of living, both of which figure...

This study uses household models based on detailed expenditure and agricultural production data from 31 developing countries to assess the impacts of changes in global food prices on poverty in individual countries and for the world as a whole. The analysis finds that food price increases...

This paper has two purposes. It first considers the impact on world food prices of the changes in restrictions on trade in staple foods during the 2008 world food price crisis. Those changes -- reductions in import protection or increases in export restraints -- were meant to partially insulate...

World prices for staple foods increased between 2006 and 2008, and accelerated sharply in 2008. Initial analysis indicated that the adverse effects of higher food prices in Uganda were likely to be small because of the diversity of its staple foods, high level of food self-sufficiency, and weak...

Although the measurement and determinants of poverty have been widely studied, vulnerability, or the threat of future poverty, has been more difficult to investigate due to data paucity. This paper combines nationally representative household data with objective drought and price information to...

Do higher food prices help or hinder poverty reduction? Despite much debate, existing research has almost solely relied on simulation models to address this question. In this paper World Bank poverty estimates are used to systematically test the relationship between changes in poverty and...