This paper reviews rural women’s access to financial services, a key factor of successful rural development strategies. Designing appropriate financial products for women to be able to save, borrow and insure is essential to strengthen...

This paper examines gender differentiated asset dynamics over a 20 year period (1988-2008) in Northern Nigeria. The paper first examines the state of the literature on poverty dynamics, especially with respect to gender differences and...

This paper explores a 15-country household data base to evaluate the impact of three key assets (land, education and infrastructure) on rural poverty. Using both a descriptive analysis and a quadratic probit model, with the...

This paper has two main objectives. Firstly, it provides an overview of trends in the magnitude, location and nature of rural poverty, with emphasis on least developed countries. Secondly, it offers new evidence that advances...

Rural agriculture uses more than one-third of the earth’s land and employs more than 40% of the population, a figure that approaches 75% in developing countries. As a result, rural demographic change is of vital...

This paper uses the well-known Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition technique to understand the determinants of wage-gaps between men and women, between urban and rural workers, and between those employed in the rural agricultural versus the rural non-agricultural...

International cereal prices (in US dollar terms) have been increasing since 2003, but it is domestic prices that affect food consumption and production. This paper analyzes, for seven large Asian countries, the extent to which...

This paper assesses the current rural development practice against the main trends in recent rural development thinking, based on evidence from four country case studies. While much progress has been made in understanding the need...

This paper provides a long-term and global view at current farming trends by analyzing a specially created database of farming characteristics of 17 countries across 43 different agricultural censuses representing the different developing regions of...

The migration of labor out of rural areas and the flow of remittances from migrants to rural households is an increasingly important feature of less developed countries. This paper explores ways in which migration influences incomes and...