In recent years, many people and parts of the world have been hit by major shocks ranging from conflicts, erratic weather patterns, earthquakes, droughts, and floods to food price spikes. At the same time, poor people and communities remain vulnerable to shocks that may be smaller in...

Eliminating hunger and malnutrition around the globe cannot be achieved without a new approach to dealing with the problem in middle income countries. Here’s why this is so, how the middle income countries should respond, and what the international community can do to help.

How can family farmers best contribute to their country’s agriculture needs as well as broader development goals? First, we should determine which farmers can be profitable and assist them in doing so. Second, for those who aren’t profitable, we need to help them shift to other economic...

The year 2014 saw mixed results for food and nutrition security: some countries made headway on policies to cut hunger, while in other countries conflict and health crises took a heavy human toll. Much of the year’s discourse focused on potential priorities for the future global development...

Though social spending facilitates risk-pooling in the impoverished regions, too many resources devoted to social occasions may impose negative externalities and hinder efforts to alleviate poverty for households living close to subsistence. Conducting three waves census-type panel survey in...

Using data from multiple sources, we show that in Bangladesh, the increase in real wages, particularly female wages, has accelerated since the late 2000s, suggesting that the Lewis turning point (the point at which the labor market starts to shift in favor of workers) has arrived in Bangladesh....

Innovations are a key driver of long-term economic growth. There has been an explosion of patent filings in China in the past three decades. But empirical studies on the pattern of innovations at the firm level are rather scant primarily due to lack of firm-specific patent data. We have made...

As sex ratio imbalances have become a problem in an increasing number of countries, it is important to understand their consequences. With the defeat of the Kuomintang Party in China, more than one million soldiers and civilians, mainly young males, retreated to Taiwan in the late 1940s....