Governments reform policies in order to improve their efficiency and respond to changing social priorities. Reform is resisted when concerns exist about those who may lose out in the process, or when other policy goals are negatively impacted. Compensation can remove barriers to reform by addressing this resistance, and can contribute to adjustment by speeding its process but may itself impede ...

The agrarian reform in Albania included free distribution of land to rural households and the complete break up of the former collective and state farms. These key features of the Albanian reform are in sharp contrast with other Central and Eastern European countries. Our paper explains the choice of the Albanian agricultural privatization and land reform process and the radical decollectivizat...

Yemen is currently undergoing a major political transition, yet many economic challenges—including fuel subsidy reform—remain highly relevant. To inform the transition process with respect to a potential subsidy reform, we use a dynamic computable general equilibrium and microsimulation model for Yemen; we show that overall growth effects of subsidy reduction are positive in general, but povert...

Extensive land and market reform in Vietnam has resulted in dramatic increases in rice output over the past thirty years. The land and market reforms in agriculture were pervasive, moving the system of rice production from commune-based public ownership and control to one with effective private property rights over land and farm assets, competitive domestic markets and individual decision makin...

Competitive funding has emerged in the late 1990s as an important component of World Bank support to agricultural research systems. This paper outlines the role of competitive funding against a back ground of changing strategies for financing agricultural research. The bulk of the paper is devoted to a synthesis of lessons learned, and ongoing challenges in successful use of competitive funding...

In 1992, the EU initiated the process of decoupling income transfers from agricultural production which has culminated in the 2003 reform of the common agricultural policy (CAP). In this reform 'single farm payments' have been introduced which are based on direct payments during the reference period 2000-2002. We use statistics of such payments to explore the distribution patterns across farm h...

In March 2004 the Kenyan government set out its radical Strategy for Revitalising Agriculture (SRA). Almost a decade on, remarkably little progress has been made on its priority areas. Beyond bureaucratic resistance to economic reform, we explain the political roots of inertia in the SRA case, encompassing both the political logic of maintaining commodity chain-based state organisations and the...