This paper develops a new indicator for human development, the Composite Global Well-Being Index (CGWBI), spanning ten well-being dimensions: safety and security, health, education, housing, environment and living space, employment, income, life satisfaction, community and social life, and civic engagement. The index includes both subjective survey data and socio-economic indicators, and uses the same methodology as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Better Life Index, by extending it to developing countries. The paper's results show that the devised CGWBI is highly correlated with the widely used Human Development Index (HDI); however, the CGWBI is less sensitive to income effects than the HDI. The CGWBI provides therefore an improvement over the HDI, by covering additional key well-being dimensions and minimizing the impact of per capita income on overall human development rankings.

With increasing food insecurity and climate change, conservation agriculture has emerged as a sustainable alternative to intensive conventional agriculture as a source of food supply. Yet the adoption rate of conservation agriculture is still low. Our paper analyses the factors affecting farmers' willingness to adopt conservation agriculture in Lebanon. The findings show that household characteristics-years of farming and farm size affect conservation agriculture adoption. However, household characteristics alone were insufficient to explain conservation agriculture adoption. We found that farming experience, information sources, frequency of irrigation, and severity of weed infestation in the past, participation in specific trainings, and farmers' perception about the long-term impact of conservation agriculture, were key determinants of conservation agriculture adoption. Our paper encourages policymakers to invest in conservation agriculture to overcome food insecurity and environmental changes affecting food systems in the Middle East. The paper also informs agribusiness firms to view conservation agriculture as a viable alternative to strengthen their business relationship with farmers in arid and semi-arid regions.

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11We propose an empirical method for improving food assistance scoring and targeting, which minimizes under-coverage and 12 leakage of food and cash assistance programs. The empirical strategy relies on a joint econometric estimation of food insecurity 13 and economic vulnerability indicators at the household level, using data-driven instead of predetermined quantiles. We apply the 14 method to recent micro data on Syrian refugees in Lebanon, to explore how regional and community-based aggregates can 15 improve the targeting effectiveness of aid programs, notably food aid by the World Food Program in Lebanon. Our results 16confirm that using regional aggregates are useful for augmenting the Balanced Poverty Accuracy Criterion, and our method 17 performs much better than the current policy in terms of targeting effectiveness and accuracy for economically vulnerable 18 households. 19