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Numerous structural vulnerabilities put developing regions at a disadvantage as they confront the prospect of increasingly frequent extreme shocks. Typical of these regions, South Asia had several characteristics that suggested it would be badly hit by COVID‐19: a sizeable informal sector, growing inequalities in access to health services and social protection, and high levels of hunger and malnutrition. This Special Issue focuses on the South Asian experience through COVID‐19 and distills forward‐looking lessons for the developing world. Included papers point to the importance of strengthening individual resilience, building basic infrastructure and institutional capacity, and implementing inclusive social protection measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because many animal diseases have strong transboundary attributes, their control can be reasonably characterised as an international public good. The potential for reservoirs of transboundary diseases to persist in developing countries that lack the capacity or incentives to control them implies a need for international financial transfers to fund control. However, the costs of control can be large compared with development assistance budgets, and the benefits small compared with the global benefits of control and the local benefits of other priority investments. This article outlines a framework for setting priorities for international development assistance for animal disease control based on the incidence of market and non-market impacts and the context in which outbreaks take place in endemic and susceptible countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small-scale farmers in developing countries may become trapped in poverty by lack of the liquidity needed to make profitable investments. Increased access to credit could generate pro-poor economic growth if poor households are otherwise liquidity-constrained and if liquidity-constrained households benefit from the new financial services. Using household data from rural Tanzania, this paper presents evidence that increased finance for liquidity-constrained households could generate pro-poor agricultural growth, but that general expansion of financial services to households that have no access to credit would not effectively target lower income households or households whose farm activities are liquidity-constrained. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demonstrates how the formula of the Domestic Resource Cost (DRC) indicator used in developing countries to measure comparative advantage and guide policy reforms is biased against agricultural activities that rely mostly on domestic factors. Social Cost-Benefit ratio as superior measure of social profitability; Policy significance of bias in Kenya's DRC.