This chapter addresses the unrelenting pessimism in Asian Drama about Indonesia's development prospects. This pessimism was based on two key realities: the poor level of governance demonstrated by the Sukarno regime (partly a heritage of Dutch colonial policies) and the extreme poverty witnessed...

In the long run-- over the past four decades--improvements in food security in Indonesia have generally been driven by pro-poor economic growth and a successful Green Revolution, led by high-yielding rice varieties, massive investments in rural infrastructure, including irrigation, and ready...

No country has been able to sustain a rapid transition out of poverty without raising productivity in its agricultural sector. Despite this historical role of agriculture in economic development, both the academic and donor communities lost interest in the sector, starting in the mid-1980s. This...

There is great interest among policy makers in how to influence the behavior of supermarkets in ways that serve the interests of important groups in society, especially small farmers and the owners of traditional, small-scale food wholesale and retail facilities. Two broader issues are also...

This paper re-examines the sources of inequality in Vietnam, a transitional economy with large reductions in poverty from recent and dramatic economic growth, but vastly unequal gains across ethnic groups. Using an instrumental variable approach to provide consistent estimators of explanatory...

In order to fight back poverty, the Central as well as States Governments in India have attempted a number of programs leading to income generation. Like in any developing country, poor governance with lack of proper focus in implementing the programs are the main sources contributing to low...

We have constructed a composite indicator of anthropometric failure (CIAF) that refines the Waterlow-3 tier classification, using a recent nation-wide household survey. The CIAF and its disaggregation into subcategories of undernourished 5 years old children reveal a grimmer story of child...

This paper discusses the conceptual and operational problems associated with the social audit of a government scheme. It argues that social audits have not performed well in the National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREG) scheme because of three problems. First, conceptually, it has been unable...

This paper aims to contribute to the contemporary policy debate on the role of trade policy reforms in economic development and poverty reduction in developing countries through a review of Trade Liberalisation and The Poverty of Nations by A.P. Thirlwall and Penelope Pacheco-Lopez (Cheltenham,...

This paper uses a simple empirical approach to estimate vulnerability to food inadequacy using a cross-section data from the 2001 Timor-Leste Living Standard Measurement Survey. This measurement is based on the assumption that households are exposed to the same kind of shock. We find that the...