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Rural Transport : Improving its Contribution to Growth and Poverty Reduction in Sub-Saharan AfricaPoverty reduction is a long-standing development objective of many developing countries and their aid donors, including the World Bank. To achieve this goal, these countries and organizations have sought to improve smallholder agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as part of a broader rural development agenda aimed at providing a minimal basket of goods and services in rural areas to satisfy basic human needs. These goods and services include not only food, health care, and education, but also infrastructure. As a result, rural transport remains a constraint to increasing agricultural productivity, achieving rural growth, and thus alleviating rural poverty. The first major finding of the review of rural transport theory and practice is that many of the approaches needed to improve the impact of rural transport interventions on poverty reduction are known, particularly from the work of the Rural Travel and Transport Program (RTTP) of Sub-Saharan Africa Transport Policy Program (SSATP). Unfortunately, many of the recommended approaches remain untested within Sub-Saharan Africa beyond the pilot scale, notwithstanding their influence on rural transport policy and project design in other operational regions of the Bank. For SSA, these are missed opportunities. Even where SSA countries have applied these approaches, institutional and financial sustainability and scaling up local successes remain significant challenges for both their agriculture and transport sectors. The second key finding is that rural households are rarely the point of focus in the design of rural transport interventions in SSA, even though a methodology to allow this focus has been developed and successfully tested in several pilot projects since the 1980s, the result is that the transport needs of rural households continue to be analyzed and understood by means of an indirect assessment of those needs, which means that most projects have a less than desirable impact on improving the rural access and mobility situation of such households.
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The Impact of Remittances on Rural Poverty and Inequality in ChinaLarge numbers of agricultural labor
 moved from the countryside to cities after the economic
 reforms in China. Migration and remittances play an
 important role in transforming the structure of rural
 household income. This paper examines the impact of
 rural-to-urban migration on rural poverty and inequality in
 the case of Hubei province using the data of a 2002
 household survey. Since remittances are a potential
 substitute for farm income, the paper presents
 counterfactual scenarios of what rural income, poverty, and
 inequality would have been in the absence of migration. The
 results show that, by providing alternatives to households
 with lower marginal labor productivity in agriculture,
 migration leads to an increase in rural income. In contrast
 to many studies that suggest the increasing share of
 non-farm income in total income widens inequality, this
 paper offers support for the hypothesis that migration tends
 to have egalitarian effects on rural income for three
 reasons: (i) migration is rational self-selection - farmers
 with higher agricultural productivities choose to remain in
 local agricultural production while those with higher
 expected return in urban non-farm sectors migrate; (ii)
 poorer households facing binding constraints of land
 shortage are more likely to migrate; and (iii) the poorest
 poor benefit disproportionately from remittances.
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Small Enterprise Growth and the Rural Investment Climate : Evidence from TanzaniaThis paper analyzes characteristics of nonfarm enterprises, their employment growth patterns, and constraints in doing business in rural Tanzania. Using unique survey data, the authors describe a low-return sector struggling to compete in a difficult business environment. However, about one-third of rural enterprises are growing fast. Most enterprises engage in agricultural trade. Due to a rapidly growing agricultural sector in recent years, limiting demand-side constraints, rural enterprise constraints in Tanzania mainly operate from the supply side. This suggests that, in particular, access to finance, road infrastructure, and rural cell phone communication is correlated with employment growth. A major finding is that subjective and objective measurements of business constraints are broadly comparable. The authors discuss a number of factors that would help to unleash the full potential of private sector-led growth in rural areas. The findings show that marginal improvements in the rural investment climate matter for growth.