Under price ceilings and quality floors for agricultural inputs in cash crop sectors in developing countries where credit markets are weak, imperfect information on the ability of farmers to pay for their inputs at the end of the cropping season may lead the decentralized production of those...

The case studies in this book provide useful information on the characteristics of students and the performance of various types of schools that benefit from public-private partnerships. While these case studies are empirically grounded, their results are not necessarily of universal...

Conflict and political instability have weakened Guinea-Bissau's productive infrastructure considerably during the past three decades. This situation contributes to an increase in the degree of vulnerability of the population, especially in rural areas where most economic activities continue to...

The papers in this volume examine the links between gender, time use, and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. They contribute to a broader definition of poverty to include time poverty, and to a broader definition of work to include household work. The papers present a conceptual framework linking...

This paper presents a framework for analyzing the community response to HIV and AIDS. On the basis of a review of the literature, six criteria are proposed for characterizing such community responses: (1) the types of organizations and structures implementing the response, (2) the types of...

In order to inform discussions on the extent of poverty in a country, it is often useful to compare the country's poverty measures to estimates obtained in other countries with similar levels of development within the same region of the world. Beyond gains from the point of view of cross-country...

There are often large regional differences in poverty and other social indicators within a country. But geographic poverty profiles based on household surveys tend to be limited to broad areas because survey sample sizes are too small to permit analysts to construct valid estimates of poverty at...

A recent study for sub-Saharan Africa by Banerjee et al. (2007) uses Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 22 countries that have conducted at least two such surveys between 1990 and 2005 in order to collect comparable information across countries on access to modern and alternative...

Several sub-Saharan African countries have succeeded at increasing their economic growth rate in recent years, and this has translated into substantial poverty reduction according to objective measures based on household survey data. At the same time, many people do not feel that the poverty...

In many sub-Saharan African countries household surveys are well designed to measure consumption and poverty as well as human development outcomes (especially in education and health) and access to basic infrastructure. But detailed information on the sources of income and the livelihoods of...