The agricultural sector's perceived importance in the international development circle waned dramatically after the 1980s, and investments in rural development and agricultural research and development declined sharply. This volume reasserts the role of agricultural and rural development in the...

Despite the large and expanding literature on pro-poor growth, quantitative studies identifying policy levers leading to pro-poor growth remain scarce, and this paper addresses this lacuna in the literature. The main driver of rural poverty reduction shifted from agricultural to non-agricultural...

This paper analyzes the processes of growth and poverty reduction simultaneously under a neoclassical growth model framework, using provincial data from the Philippines. We obtain a high rate of provincial income convergence and a trade-off between equity and growth. The lack of political...

Improving the productivity of smallholder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa offers the best chance to reduce poverty among this generation of rural poor, by building on the limited resources farming households already possess. It is also the best and shortest path to meet rising food needs. Using...

Using a rare individual-level data set, this paper explores the role of education and farmland on the choice of job of three generations of household members in rural Laos. While the first (G1) and the second (G2) generations are mainly engaged in farming, the youngest generation (G3) is engaged...

Many rural households in Asia have been able to move out of poverty in the presence of increasing scarcity of farmland, initially by increasing rice income through the adoption of modern rice technology and gradually diversifying their income sources away from farm to nonfarm activities....