"Progress in combating hunger and undernutrition has been lagging for decades. Best practices to fight hunger and undernutrition have been available for a long while, but lack of political will among leaders and a lack of political power among the poor have hampered their implementation. Since...

How rapidly will child undernutrition respond to income growth? This study explores that question using household survey data from 12 countries. In addition, data on the undernutrition rates since the 1970s available from a cross-section of countries are employed in this investigation. Both...

Household food security is an important measure of well-being. Although it may not encapsulate all dimensions of poverty, the inability of households to obtain access to enough food for an active, healthy life is surely an important component of their poverty. Accordingly, devising an...

"This paper examines how market institutions can affect links between urban and rural areas with specific emphasis on goods market integration in the national context.Traditionally, development researchers and practitioners have focused either on rural market development or on urban market...

"A methodology to produce disaggregated estimates of inequality is implemented in three developing countries: Ecuador, Madagascar, and Mozambique. These inequality estimates are decomposed into progressively more disaggregated spatial units and the results in all three countries are suggestive...

This study examines how quality, price, and access to curative health care influence use of modern public, modern private, and traditional providers among 3,000 children age 0-2 years in Cebu, Philippines. The analysis relies on a series of household, community, and health facility surveys...

"For effective decisionmaking, policymakers and program managers often need detailed information about the welfare of the population, including knowledge about which specific areas are most affected by poverty and undernutrition. Household sample surveys are an important source of information,...

The Government of Bangladesh launched the innovative Food for Education (FFE) program in 1993. The FFE program provides a free monthly ration of rice or wheat to poor families if their children attend primary school. The goals of this program are to increase primary school enrollment, promote...

The objective of IFPRI's multicountry research program on rural financial policies for food security of the poor is to identify policies and institutional arrangements that help the poor integrate themselves into sustainable savings and credit systems such that they have an increased capacity to...

"The objective of measuring poverty is usually to make comparisons over time or between two or more groups. Common statistical inference methods are used to determine whether an apparent difference in measured poverty is statistically significant. Studies of relative poverty have long recognized...