Acknowledging that the agricultural sector can play an important role as an engine of pro-poor growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, the purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that influence the ?political will? of governments to support this sector. The concept of ?political resources? from...

The policy of mandated representation (reservation) for disadvantaged social groups in Indian village councils or Gram Panchayats has been the subject of numerous studies. The implicit, and often unstated, assumption that underlies most of these studies is that the president of the council is...

This article examines how political institutions and local power structures interact with and influence local public resource allocation in the Indian state of Karnataka. We use data from 80 village councils and 225 villages to examine how this local political economy influences the allocation...

Decentralization reforms have been the overwhelming response to failures in the targeting of public resources by the central state in developing countries. The policy debate on decentralization typically revolves around several a priori hypotheses on how the design of formal institutions of...

Turkey's poverty reduction performance in the 2000s has been remarkably consistent. Extreme and moderate poverty have fallen considerably since 2003. Between 2002 and 2011, extreme poverty fell from 13 percent to 5 percent, while moderate poverty halved from 44 percent to 22 percent...

Tajikistan was one of the fastest growing countries in the Europe and Central Asia region during the last decade. The economic growth was widely shared by the population and as a result poverty (measured by the national poverty line) declined from 73 percent in 2003 to 47 percent in 2009...

This paper uses a unique representative household budget survey from the Asian Development Bank to analyze the impact of international migration and remittances on crop income of rural farmers in the Kyrgyz Republic. Unlike other studies we allow the impact of remittances to be different for...