This paper addresses the deceptively simple question: What is the rural population of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)? It argues that rurality is a gradient, not a dichotomy, and nominates two dimensions to that gradient: population density and remoteness from large metropolitan areas. It...

There are many causes, consequences, and connections of deforestation and forest poverty in the tropical world. This report specifically addresses the potential dilemma of trade-offs between poverty reduction and environmental protection. It seeks to improve the diagnosis of forest problems and...

Conservation of high-biodiversity tropical forests is sometimes justified on the basis of assumed hydrological benefits - in particular, the reduction of flooding hazards for downstream floodplain populations. However, the "far-field" link between deforestation and distant flooding has been...

There was substantial spatial variation in labor market outcomes in Brazil over the 1990s. In 2000, about one-fifth of workers lived in apparently economically stagnant municipios where real wages declined but employment increased faster than the national population growth rate. More than...

Environmental concern in developing countries has risen rapidly over the past decade. At the same time, decentralization and civic participation in environmental policy-making have also burgeoned. This paper uses data from the Brazilian Municipal Environmental Survey 2001 to examine the causal...

Program administrators are often faced with the difficult problem of allocating scarce resources among regions in a country when interventions are aimed at addressing multiple objectives. One main concern is the tradeoff between poverty reduction and improvement of environmental quality. To...

A "forest-hydrology-poverty nexus" hypothesis asserts that deforestation in poor upland areas simultaneously threatens biodiversity and increases the incidence of flooding, sedimentation, and other damaging hydrological processes. The authors use rough heuristics to assess the applicability of...

This paper examines two new methods to generate gridded agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and compares the results with a traditional method. In the case of Brazil, these two new methods of spatial disaggregation and cross-entropy outperform the prediction of agricultural GDP from the...

Most discussions of the digital divide treat it as a "North-South" issue, but the conventional dichotomy doesn't apply to 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...