Obsolete pesticides have accumulated in almost every developing country or economy in transition over the past several decades. Public health and environmental authorities are eager to reduce health threats by removing and decontaminating stockpile sites, but there are many sites, cleanup can be...

An increase in sea surface temperature is evident at all latitudes and in all oceans. The current understanding is that ocean warming plays a major role in intensified cyclone activity and heightened storm surges. The vulnerability of coastlines to intensified storm surges can be ascertained by...

Global climate models predict a rise in extreme weather in the next century. To better understand future interactions among adaptation costs, socioeconomic development, and climate change in developing countries, observed losses of life from floods and droughts during 1960-2003 are modeled using...

Most discussions of the digital divide treat it as a"North-South"issue, but the conventional dichotomy doesn't applyto cell phones in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although almost all Sub-Saharan countries are poor by international standards, they exhibit great disparities in coverage by cell telephone...

Sea level rise (SLR) due to climate change is a serious global threat. The scientific evidence is now overwhelming. Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions and associated global warming could well promote SLR of 1m-3m in this century, and unexpectedly rapid breakup of the Greenland and West...

The Millennium Development Goal of achieving near-zero malaria deaths by 2015 has led to a re-examination of wider use of DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane) in indoor residual spraying as a prevention tool in many countries. However, the use of DDT raises concerns of potential harm to the...

Extension services are a keystone of information diffusion in agriculture. This paper exploits a large randomized controlled trial to track diffusion of a new technique in the classic Training and Visit (T&V) extension model, relative to a more direct training model. In both control and...

This paper analyzes the level and trends in inequality of opportunity among Egyptian children during the 2000s. The analysis uses severall tools, including comparison of the distributions of early risks and outcomes across circumstance groups; estimation of the human opportunity index;...

Although child mortality rates have declined all across the developing world over the past 40 years, they have declined the most in the Middle East and North Africa region. This paper documents this remarkable experience and shows that it is broad based in the sense that all countries in the...

Female labor participation in the Arab world is low compared with the level of economic development of Arab countries. Beyond anecdotal evidence and cross-country studies, there is little evidence on what could explain this phenomenon. This paper uses the richest set of panel data available for...