This paper assesses the current rural development practice against the main trends in recent rural development thinking, based on evidence from four country case studies. While much progress has been made in understanding the need to look beyond only agriculture for the promotion of productive...

Summary This paper examines the links between the assets and the economic activities of rural households in developing countries to provide insight into how the promotion of certain key assets--particularly education, land, and infrastructure--influences the economic choices of these households....

Agricultural development is an essential engine of growth and poverty reduction, yet agricultural data suffer from poor quality and narrow sectoral focus. There are several reasons for this: (i) difficult-to-measure smallholder agriculture is prevalent in poor countries, (ii) agricultural data...

In developing countries, poverty is generally measured with expenditure data, which are normally available only every three to five years. In between surveys, there is a clear need to provide policy makers with information for the monitoring of poverty trends. This paper reviews several methods...

In this paper we investigate how combining objective and subjective measures of welfare can enrich traditional poverty profiles by exploring the relationship between these welfare measures, and examining what explains the differences between the two. One important finding of our analysis (using...

The increasing volume of remittances and public transfers in rural areas of the developing world has raised hopes that these inflows may serve as an effective mechanism for reducing poverty in the long term by facilitating investments and raising productivity, particularly in agriculture where...

This paper investigates the impact of international migration on technical efficiency, resource allocation and income from agricultural production of family farming in Albania. The results suggest that migration is used by rural households as a pathway out of agriculture: migration is negatively...