Would Empowering Women Initiate the Demographic Transition in Least Developed Countries?

Industrial Development in Least Developed Countries

Conflict in least-developed countries: challenging the Millennium Development Goals.

Five years before the 2015 deadline for achieving the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the picture on progress is mixed. Persisting challenges include dysfunctional health systems, gaps in reliable morbidity and mortality data, uneven progress between goals and growing inequity between subpopulations. Jan Vandemoortele, one of the architects of the MDGs, emphasizes that the ...

Financing Rural Structural Transformation in the Least Developed Countries

For the least developed countries (LDCs) to reach the Sustainable Development Goals, their rural economies will have to undergo structural transformation, given that most of their population lives in rural areas and agriculture is a main contributor to their economy. To this end, UNCTAD proposes that LDCs engage in the poverty-oriented structural transformation, or POST, of rural areas. It shou...

Globalization and the Least Developed Countries: Issues in Technology

Would preferential access measures be sufficient to overcome current barriers to CDM projects in Least Developed Countries?

Financial support for Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects in underrepresented host countries was agreed on at the Copenhagen conference. The EU rules include special import quotas for Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) from Least Developed Countries (LDCs). This paper discusses whether these measures can contribute to overcoming barriers to CDM development in LDCs, how Programmes of Ac...