Rising food prices played an important role in the acceleration of inflation across Asia and the Pacific region during 2007 and the early months of 2008. Not only is food price inflation the most regressive of all taxes, it also leads to lower growth and accentuation of income inequality....

Abstract With Lao PDR’s macroeconomic performance currently booming, we investigate the country’s poverty situation by examining the drivers of household poverty. This paper tests four major hypotheses: (1) Whether higher returns on all crops harvested per capita reduce consumption...

Abstract The present study seeks to build on earlier work by identifying the factors associated with the frequency of natural disasters and the resulting mortality. Drawing together the main findings, some observations are made from a policy perspective to focus on key elements of a disaster...

Much of recent work has raised the issue that the surge in prices of foodgrains in the last two years cannot be explained satisfactorily in terms of the fundamentals of supply and demand. It has also been suggested that the part that cannot be explained in this way is due largely to speculation....

This paper examines the extent to which changes in global agricultural commodity price are transmitted to domestic prices in India and China. The focus is on short and medium-run adjustment processes using an error correction specification. In particular, we show that the extent of adjustment in...

Abstract Drawing upon panel data estimations, we have analysed the relationships among agricultural productivity, employment, technology, openness of the economy, inequality in land distribution and poverty. First, we have identified a number of important factors affecting agricultural...

Abstract Based on cross-country datasets, we find that (i) development of the rural agricultural sector is the most poverty reducing; (ii) rural non-agricultural sector also is poverty reducing in some cases, but its magnitude is much smaller than that associated with the rural agricultural...

Abstract Drawing upon a cross-country panel data for developing countries, the present study sheds new empirical light on dynamic and long-term linkages among growth, inequality and poverty. First, agricultural sector growth is found to be consistently the most important factor in reducing...

This paper investigates a relationship between economic governance and the dual objectives of microfinance institutions (MFIs): poverty reduction and financial viability. Using an unbalanced panel of 531 MFIs, the important role of other institutions, such as country-level business registry...

This paper is motivated by the observation that type and combination of assets play a significant role in reducing incidences of shocks by asset-poor households. Asset-based strategies treat assets not just as resources, but also as an agency to transform such resources to improve livelihood...