By focusing on human capital investment, the Mexican Oportunidades program will influence the economic choices of the rural poor. To understand how beneficiaries may alter their behaviour as a result of this intervention, this paper uses administrative data to analyze the economic activities of the Mexican rural poor. Results indicate that investments in education are likely to shift recipients...

The proposed project aims to expand understanding of the local response to an epidemic in a resource-poor setting. Using the severe AIDS epidemic in rural Malawi, a very poor country with high HIV prevalence and low bureaucratic development, we will use mixed methods to explore how local actors respond to the AIDS epidemic, including the local implementation of global policies and HIV/AIDS inte...

Aquaculture is often viewed narrowly as intensive culture of salmon and shrimp to provide high value products for luxury markets and is often associated with environmental degradation. The promotion of aquaculture for rural development has had a poor record in many developing countries, especially in Africa. This paper shows that aquaculture does contribute to the livelihoods of the poor, parti...

Persistently poor rural areas may suffer from spatial mismatches similar to those found in urban inner cities due in part to commuting distances and lack of employment opportunities. Economic development strategies for improving economic outcomes in such persistently poor rural areas can include the strategic placement of higher education campuses. This paper examines the impacts and effects of...

India addressed the requirement for pro-poor service delivery in rural regions by introducing decentralization and affirmative action policies. In order to measure the social preferences of local decision makers, we conducted field experiments which simulated the selection of needy beneficiaries for welfare schemes. While potential recipients with less land were clearly favoured, decision maker...

In this paper we provide an analytical account of the mechanisms through which globalization, in the sense of increased foreign trade and long-term capital flows, affects the lives of the rural poor in developing countries (in their capacity as workers, consumers, recipients of public services or users of common property resources). Globalization can cause many hardships for the rural poor, but...

India accounts for a third of the world’s population without access to electricity and about 40% of those without access to modern energy. Such a situation exists despite several initiatives and policies to support poor households. Alarmed by the gravity of the situation, the government has recently announced an ambitious programme of rural electrification. This paper looks into the energy acce...

This paper analyzes how producer cooperatives may bene t households in rural environments. In particular, it explores if cooperatives help poor households to exit poverty through three mechanisms: increases in prices, total factor productivity, and relaxation of credit constraints. In a multi-period model I characterize the conditions that must hold so that the always poor can exit poverty when...

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) acknowledges climate change as one of the factors affecting rural poverty and as one of the challenges it needs to address. While climate change is a global phenomenon, its negative impacts are more severely felt by poor people in developing countries who rely heavily on the natural resource base for their livelihoods. Agriculture and l...

Gram Vikas is a rural development organization working with poor and marginalized communities, especially the adivasi and dalits, of Orissa. The mission of Gram Vikas is to promote processes which are sustainable, socially inclusive and gender equitable, to enable critical masses of poor and marginalized rural people or communities to achieve a dignified quality of life. Interventions of Gram V...