About a third of development projects fail to achieve satisfactory outcomes, according to agencies' independent evaluation units. To a large extent, these outcomes appear to be baked into projects at their inception due to inadequate project design or relevance. This prompts questions about the...

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...

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...

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

This paper addresses the deceptively simple question: what is the rural population of Latin America and the Caribbean? 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 uses...

Temporary crediting of carbon storage is a proposed instrument that allows entities with emissions reductions obligations to defer some obligations for a fixed period of time. This instrument provides a means of guaranteeing the environmental integrity of a carbon sequestration project. But...

The authors critically review the literature on the net domestic (within-country) economic benefits of protecting tropical forests, focusing on hydrological benefits and the production of nontimber forest products. (The review does not consider other important classes of benefits, including...