Publications

The Power of Participation: PRA and Policy

Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) has much to offer the policy-making process. It provides a way to give poor people a voice, enabling them to express and analyse their problems and priorities. Used well, it can generate important and often surprising insights which can contribute to policies...

Robert Chambers

An Agenda for the World Food Summit

The 1996 World Food Summit is an opportunity for heads of state to make binding commitments to end world hunger. It is an achievable goal, but hard choices will have to be made.

There’s Still Madness in the Method: Testing for Food Market Integration Revisited

IDS working papers;28

This paper evaluates the statistical performance of four commonly used econometric tests for market integration and shows that all four are statistically flawed.

Government Policies and the Development of Banking in Kenya

IDS working papers;29

Financial Repression and Financial Reform in Uganda

IDS working papers;30

The banking system in Uganda is among the weakest in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its liabilities comprise less than 10 per cent of GDP, it is highly oligopolistic and inefficient in performing many basic banking functions, and the largest bank and several smaller banks are insolvent.

The Impact of Public Policy on the Banking System in Nigeria

IDS working papers;31

The banking system in Nigeria has undergone radical changes during the 35 years since independence. Banking developed from an industry which in 1960 was dominated by a small number of foreign owned banks into one in which public sector ownership predominated in the 1970s and 1980s and in which...

Financial Policies and the Banking System in Zambia

IDS working papers;32

For over 20 years until the early 1990s Zambia had entailed extensive government ownership and administrative controls over markets, including financial and banking markets. Interventionist policies, combined with a steep fall in the external terms of trade, led to economic decline.

The Potential for Donor Mediation in NGO-State Relations: An Ethiopian Case Study

IDS working papers;33

Relations between NGOs and states are often characterised by conflict, since each actor is in competition for development resources. This paper looks at situations where cooperation offers benefits to both parties but where conflict remains. It argues that cooperation can offer benefits to both...

Effective District Health Services in Developing Countries: A Busy Manager’s Guide to the Literature

Literature on effective health management and planning is commonly inaccessible to district health managers in developing countries. This bibliography aims to direct managers towards the most useful publications.

Programme Aid as an Appropriate Policy Response to Drought

IDS working papers;34

This paper puts forward the argument for programme aid as a policy response to drought. It suggests its importance lies in the initial impact of the aid transfer, and in the additional opportunities thereby made available to carry out strategic policy.

Poverty, Policy and Aid

27

The World Bank's new strategy for poverty reduction was launched in the World Development Report of 1990. This issue of the Bulletin re-examines the Bank's new poverty agenda focusing on three key issues: the meaning and measurement of poverty, the interaction of poverty and domestic policy, and...

Integrating Gender into Environmental Research and Policy

IDS working papers;27

This study looks at the reasons why this has happened, blaming it on a flawed conceptualisation of gender relations that ignores the differing interests of men and women. Recommendations on how women's interests can be better safeguarded are proposed.

Melissa Leach