Reducing poverty and hunger in India: the role of agriculture

"India's strategy for reducing poverty and hunger has always placed a great deal of importance on the agricultural sector, reflecting the fact that 70 percent of the population lives in rural areas and the overwhelming majority of them depend upon agriculture as their primary source of income. The focus of attention has of course changed over time." from Textindia, Asia, Poverty reduction, Hunger, agricultural sector, rural areas, Irrigation, Water Management, Seeds, Agricultural productivity, Fertilizers, Agricultural diversification Economic aspects, Public investment,

Distribution des revenus et développement : quelques faits stylisés

In recent years, the relationship between income distribution and the process of development has come under increasing scrutinity. Much of the debate has focused on the hypothesis, originally advanced by Simon Kuznets, that the secular behavior of inequality follows an inverted U shaped pattern which inequality first increasing and then decreasing with development. This hypothesis has become so much a part of the conventional wisdom on this subject that it has generated considerable skepticism about the welfare implications of the development process. Indeed, on some interpretations, developing countries face the grim prospect not just of increasing relative inequality, but also of declining absolute incomes for the lower income groups.The object of the article is to re-examine the empirical basis for this hypothesis using a recent compilation of cross-country data made at the World Bank. The author uses multiple regression to estimate cross country relationships between inequality, as reflected in the income shares of various percentile groups, and selected explanatory variables reflecting different aspects of the development process. The results suggest that while there may be a secular time path for inequality which developing countries must traverse and which contains a phase of increasing inequality, there is at least no evidence that faster growing countries show higher inequality at the same level of development than slower growing countries

Distribution des revenus et développement : quelques faits stylisés

In recent years, the relationship between income distribution and the process of development has come under increasing scrutinity. Much of the debate has focused on the hypothesis, originally advanced by Simon Kuznets, that the secular behavior of inequality follows an inverted U shaped pattern which inequality first increasing and then decreasing with development. This hypothesis has become so much a part of the conventional wisdom on this subject that it has generated considerable skepticism about the welfare implications of the development process. Indeed, on some interpretations, developing countries face the grim prospect not just of increasing relative inequality, but also of declining absolute incomes for the lower income groups.

A Comment

SUMMARY These comments on Professor Leys' article do not constitute a rejoinder in the ordinary sense of the term. They simply highlight certain aspects of the argument in RwG for those who have read Leys, but notthe book itself. RESUME Un commentaire Les commentaires sur I'article du professeur Leys ne constituent pas une réplique à vrai dire. Ils se contentent d'éclairer certains aspects de I'argument du RAC pour ceux qui ont lu Leys mais pas ce livre même. RESUMEN Un Comentario Estos comentarios sobre el artículo del Profesor Leys no constituyen una réplica en el sentido ordinario del término; simplemente destacan ciertos aspectos de la argumentación de RCC para aquellos que han leído a Leys, pero no el libro mismo

Lessons learned from the dragon (China) and the elephant (India): Essays from IFPRI's 2004-2005 Annual Report

"The world made significant progress on reducing poverty between 1981 and 2001 — the number of people in developing countries living on less than US$1 a day fell from 1.5 billion to 1.1 billion, or from 40 to 21 percent of the world's population. In fact, however, nearly all this progress reflects gains made in reducing poverty in China and India, two of the world's fastest-growing economies. The rapid economic growth and enormous poverty reduction achieved by China, and to a lesser extent India, are remarkable accomplishments that bear closer investigation. What do the experiences of these two countries reveal about how to sequence reforms and about what kinds of reforms are most effective in stimulating growth and combating poverty? These three essays compare the experiences of China and India to learn what steps each country took and what lessons they each have to offer." from TextPoverty reduction, economic growth, Economic reform, Governance, Food policy, Food systems, Agriculture, Rural development Asia,

Multilateral development banking for this century’s development challenges: five recommendations to shareholders of the old and new multilateral development banks

The multilateral development banks (MDBs) emerged as one of the international community’s great success stories of the post–World War II era. Set up to address a market failure in long-term capital flows to post-conflict Europe and developing countries, they combined financial heft and technical knowledge for more than five decades to support their borrowing members’ investments in post-conflict reconstruction, growth stimulation, and poverty reduction. However, the geo-economic landscape has changed dramatically in this century, and with it the demands and needs of the developing world. Developing countries now make up half of the global economy. The capital market failure that originally motivated the MDBs is less acute. Almost all developing countries now rely primarily on domestic resources to manage public investment, and some of the poorest countries can borrow abroad on their own. Similarly, growth and the globalization of professional expertise on development practice have eroded whatever near-monopoly of advisory services the MDBs once had. At the same time, new challenges call for global collective action and financing of the sort the MDBs are well suited to provide but have been handicapped in doing so effectively. The list goes beyond major financial shocks, where the IMF’s role is clear—ranging from climate change, pandemic risk, increasing resistance to antibiotics, and poor management of international migration flows and of displaced and refugee populations. Other areas include the cross-border security and spillovers associated with growing competition for water and other renewable natural resources, and, with climate change, an increase in the frequency and human costs of weather and other shocks in low-income countries that are poorly equipped to respond. These new and urgent challenges—including a restart of the healthy rates of economic growth that are at the heart of the MDBs’ contribution to the globally agreed sustainable development goals—have in common disproportionate risks and benefits for the developing world, and a particular need to combine financing, technical and country expertise, and a coordinated international policy response. The MDBs may no longer hold a monopoly on financing, expertise, and coordination, but they remain uniquely suited to combine these assets to deal with new and diverse challenges. In short, if the MDBs no longer existed today, the international community would have to reinvent them. We recommend that the shareholders of the seven major MDBs treat these global challenges not in the incremental and piecemeal manner that has become the habit of the last several decades, but instead as a system for the whole to be more effective than the sum of its parts. The system should hold in common the key principles of transparency, accountability, and sustainability. But specific roles and mandates across the MDBs should vary to recognize their inherent differences in comparative advantage, particularly between the World Bank and the regional MDBs. Recognizing the growing global premium on environmental sustainability in a climate-challenged world, we call on member governments of the World Bank to take the first step in that direction by renaming the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Sustainable Development (IBRSD)—and to reshape its mission accordingly, toward leadership on issues of the global commons or global public goods that are squarely in the development domain and require a global shareholder base to respond collectively. Shareholders should in turn look to the regional MDBs to take leadership in supporting the new imperative of sustainable development through country and regional operations across all sectors, but particularly in increasing investment in infrastructure that takes into account the logic of low-carbon and climateresilient economies in the developing world. In line with this approach to differentiated roles within an MDB system, the panel makes five recommendations to better realize the MDB system’s potential for meeting today’s development challenges

Lessons learned from the dragon (China) and the elephant (India): essays from IFPRI's 2004-2005 Annual Report [In Chinese]

"The world made significant progress on reducing poverty between 1981 and 2001 — the number of people in developing countries living on less than US$1 a day fell from 1.5 billion to 1.1 billion, or from 40 to 21 percent of the world's population. In fact, however, nearly all this progress reflects gains made in reducing poverty in China and India, two of the world's fastest-growing economies. The rapid economic growth and enormous poverty reduction achieved by China, and to a lesser extent India, are remarkable accomplishments that bear closer investigation. What do the experiences of these two countries reveal about how to sequence reforms and about what kinds of reforms are most effective in stimulating growth and combating poverty? These three essays compare the experiences of China and India to learn what steps each country took and what lessons they each have to offer." from TextPoverty reduction, economic growth, Economic reform, Governance, Food policy, Food systems, Agriculture, Rural development Asia,