This book documents frontier knowledge on the drivers of agriculture productivity to derive pragmatic policy advice for governments and development partners on reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity. The analysis describes global trends and long-term sources of total factor productivity...

Enhancing the productivity of agriculture is vital for Sub-Saharan Africa's economic future and is one of the most important tools to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity in the region. How governments elect to spend public resources has significant development impact in this regard....

By most accounts, rural Malawi has lacked dynamism in the past decade. Growth has been mostly volatile, in large part due to unstable macroeconomic fundamentals evidenced by high inflation, fiscal deficits, and interest rates. When rapid economic growth has materialized, the gains have not...

Mobile phones and the internet have significantly affected practically all sectors of the economy, and agriculture is no exception. Building on a recent World Bank flagship report, this paper introduces a concise framework for describing the main benefits from new information and communications...

This study is part of the African Regional Studies Program, an initiative of the Africa Region Vice-Presidency at the World Bank. These studies aim to combine high levels of analytical rigor and policy relevance, and to apply them to various topics important for the social and economic...

Agricultural growth rates in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region have been much slower than the rest of the developing world. In the regions of East Asia, South Asia and Middle East and North Africa, the annual growth of agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1980-2004...

Mobile phones and the internet have significantly affected practically all sectors of the economy, and agriculture is no exception. Building on a recent World Bank flagship report, this paper introduces a concise framework for describing the main benefits from new information and communications...

This paper sheds light on how to harvest the "youth dividend" in Sub-Saharan Africa by creating jobs in agriculture. The agriculture that attracts the youth will have to be profitable, competitive, and dynamic. These are the same characteristics needed for agriculture to deliver growth, to...

The enforcement of stringent intellectual property rights in the pharmaceutical sector of developing countries generates considerable controversy, due to both the extensive research investment and the public policy importance of this sector. This paper explores the likely effects of enforcing...

This paper examines whether and to what extent amendments in inheritance legislation impact women's physical and human capital investments, using disaggregated household level data from India. The authors use inheritance patterns over three generations of individuals to assess the impact of...