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This inspiring collection analyzes the contribution of EU development policy to poverty reduction. It focuses on various aspects of the policy - trade, agriculture and food security, and modes of policy making and implementation - and covers three geographical areas in relation to Europe - Latin America, Asia and Africa/Middle East. The volume concludes with practical recommendations for improving EU development policy with a view to enhancing its effectiveness.
Markets are increasingly seen as vehicles to solve problems in developing countries. For example, improvements in market performance make potentially important contributions to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Access of smallholders to well-functioning markets is increasingly expected to contribute to poverty alleviation and improvement of both food security and environmental sustainability. This book presents the views of leading experts on where we stand and where we are heading in the field of markets, marketing and developing countries. Twenty essays in this book describe the role of marketing in achieving development goals, the track record of past market policies, the current ...
Kinshasa is sub-Saharan Africa‘s second largest city. The seven million Congolese who live there have a rich reputation for the courageous and innovative ways in which they survive in a harsh urban environment. They have created new social institutions, practices, networks and ways of living to deal with the collapse of public provision and a malfunctioning political system. This book describes how ordinary people, in the absence of formal sector jobs, hustle for a modest living; the famous ‘bargaining‘ system ordinary Kinois have developed; and how they access food, water supplies, health and education. The NGO-ization of service provision is analysed, as is the quite rare incidence of urban riots. The contributors also look at popular discourses, including street rumor, witchcraft, and attitudes to ‘big men‘ such as musicians and preachers. This is urban sociology at its best - richly empirical, unjargonized, descriptive of the lives of ordinary people, and weaving into its analysis how they see and experience life.
This 2012 Global Food Policy Report is the second in an annual series that provides an in-depth look at major food policy developments and events. Initiated in response to resurgent interest in food security, the series offers a yearly overview of the food policy developments that have contributed to or hindered progress in food and nutrition security. It reviews what happened in food policy and why, examines key challenges and opportunities, shares new evidence and knowledge, and highlights emerging issues. In 2012, world food security remained vulnerable. While talk about hunger and malnutrition was plentiful, it remains to be seen whether current and past commitments to invest in agriculture, food security, and nutrition will be met. New data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations suggest that the world will fall short of achieving the first Millennium Development Goal of halving the prevalence of undernutrition by 2015. Translating commitments into action is thus even more urgent.
This study was undertaken as part of a larger learning exercise to assess the outcomes and impacts of the International Food Policy Research Institute’s country programs. It reports on in-depth probing of selected successful research contributions to policy outcomes in order to determine if there are any common approaches and actions taken by country program leaders that helped to foster the successes. The selection of case studies was not comprehensive— there were many more identified by country program leaders—nor random, because we desired to have samples from all the countries with country programs. A semi-structured interview approach was followed by the authors and guided by a list of questions (found in Appendix B). The results showed that important factors making successful contributions to policy were building high credibility with local policy makers and donors, having direct access to senior policy makers, partnering with the right people, conducting research on issues over the longer term and not just responding to crises, organizing conferences and meetings around research evidence, and strengthening national capacity for policy research.
The regulatory systems in place prior to the development and expansion of agricultural biotechnology are still responding to this new form of technology. Such systems include trade law, intellectual property law, contract law, environmental regulations and biosafety regulations.This book reviews these regulatory changes and consists of 24 chapters developed from papers presented at a conference of the International Consortium on Agricultural Biotechnology Research, held in Italy in July 2002. It primarily considers the relationship between these changes and innovation, market development and international trade.
After decades of tremendous growth, Kinshasa-capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo-is now the second-largest urban area in sub-Saharan Africa. And as the city has grown-from around 300,000 people in the mid-1950s to more than five million today-it has experienced seismic social, economic, and demographic changes. In this book, David Shapiro and B. Oleko Tambashe trace the impact of these changes on the lives of women, and their findings add dramatically to the field's limited knowledge of African demographic trends. They find that fertility has declined significantly in Kinshasa since the 1970s, and that women's increasing access to secondary education has played a key role in this...
The paper models export taxation of a primary commodity in a large country under two hypotheses about the structure of its export market. The first is perfect competition among exporters, where there is an indefinite number of buyers of the local product and at least a partial pass-through of international prices to local producers. The second is an oligopsony, a market structure in some low-income countries where numerous scattered local producers face a few powerful exporters that can influence domestic prices. For both hypotheses, export taxation can be justified on efficiency grounds only for the country that adopts the tax. Designed correctly, a low export tax may be welfare-enhancing for that country but will always be welfare-reducing for its trading partners. The models of export taxation for both hypotheses are calibrated for the illustrative case of cocoa exports from Côte d’Ivoire.
Deforestation rates in the Congo Basin are among the lowest in the tropical rainforest belt and are significantly below rates in most other African regions. Local and regional development, population increases and global demand for commodities are likely to increase deforestation and forest degradation in the Congo Basin.