This is a chapter in the new publication "Sustainable Tourism & the Millennium Development Goals: Effecting Positive Change" by The International Ecotourism Society (TIES) which will be launched this year at TIES annual conference, the Ecotourism and Sustainable Tourism Conference (ESTC) being held in Monterey, California, USA from Sept 17-19, 2012.

Focusing on the key challenges and opportunities for sustainable development, the book, through case studies, best practice examples and industry insights, discusses tourism's roles in:

The article examines the characteristics, motivation factors and impacts of seasonal migration in Ethiopia. The study was underpinned by the Sustainable Livelihood Framework. Both urban and rural areas as places of destination and rural villages as origins of migrants have been considered.

Irrigation development has been identified as an important tool to stimulate economic growth and rural development, and is considered as a cornerstone of food security and poverty reduction in Ethiopia. While a lot of effort is being exerted towards irrigation development, little attempt is being made to quantify the contribution of irrigation to national income.

This study is an attempt to quantify the actual and expected contribution of irrigation to the Ethiopian economy for 2005/06 and 2009/10 cropping seasons using adjusted net gross margin analysis.

The paper tested for the relationship between three different measures of efficiency and the degree of openness to trade for a sample of countries from Latin America and the Caribbean plus the Unites States and Canada.

Poverty alleviation would remain a crucial part of the overall development agenda in Ethiopia in the years to come.

We investigate attitudes toward positionality among rural farmers in Northern Ethiopia using a survey experiment.

On average, we find very low positional concerns both for income per se and for income from aid projects. The results support the claim that positional concerns are positively correlated with absolute level of income. The implications of our results on implementation of aid projects are discussed.

Does relative income have an impact on subjective well-being among extremely poor people? Contrary to the findings in developed countries, where relative income has shown a significant and negative impact on subjective well-being, this study (based on different definitions of reference groups) suggests that relative income does not affect subjective well-being among the very poor people in northern Ethiopia.

The paper shows that unstructured lending from international credit markets can create incentives to loot the country; and an enhanced likelihood of looting causes greater political instability, and diminishes growth.