Discussion Papers

The 1991 Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Zimbabwe that we document in this paper is intended to provide benchmark data for economy-wide analysis under the MERRISA Project. Its construction is based on a three-step process: (1) building a macro ...

This paper documents the construction of the 1995 Social Accounting Matrix for Zambia (ZAMSAM). The SAM incorporates economy-wide data in a consistent framework and provides the benchmark data for the analysis under the MERRISA project. Data ...

This paper documents the features of a 1998 social accounting matrix (SAM) for Thailand. It begins with a description of the overall economy both via a macro SAM and a national accounts balance sheet. The macro SAM was the result of aggregating a ...

Since the late 1980s, Mexico has liberalized its agricultural sector, moving from a system of price supports, producer subsidies and consumer subsidies to a less distorting scheme in which market forces play a greater role. Coinciding with these ...

The regulatory approval of genetically modified crops in the field initially requires small, restricted experimental trials known as confined field trials. These small scale experiments provide researchers with important information on ...

This paper uses a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model to simulate the short-run effects of alternative food- subsidy scenarios. Savings from reduced subsidy spending are used to reduce direct taxes uniformly for all household types. The ...

“The paper extends the household hedonic model, as a non-market valuation tool, by estimating a supply function for variety attributes of a subsistence crop in a developing country. The model is applied to bananas in Uganda, making use of ...

This document summarizes findings from the Accra Urban Food and Nutrition Study (AUFNS) about the importance of care as an input to child nutrition and the relative contribution of various maternal and household resources to the provision ...

This paper presents a profile of poverty in Egypt for 1997. It assesses the magnitude of poverty and its distribution across geographic and socioeconomic groups, provides information on the characteristics of the poor, illustrates the ...

During the decade from 1982/83 through 1992/93, Bangladesh was able to increase production of rice, its staple food, at a rate modestly higher than the growth in population. However, the growth in per capita supply remained stagnant, because of ...

“The paper reports on the construction and testing of a Standard International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) computable general equilibrium model for South Africa. A 1998 social accounting matrix (SAM) for South Africa is compiled ...

The link between economic distribution and social conflict-and the notion that this link arises from individuals’ sense of identification with those similar to them and their feelings of alienation from individuals with different ...

In Africa the global food crisis threatens the livelihoods of millions of people who because of high rates of poverty, hunger, malnutrition, and food dependency are already exceptionally vulnerable. In better circumstances, Africa’s ...

Ghana is an emerging success story in Africa and in a couple of years will become the first African country to achieve the first Millennium Development Goal of halving its national poverty rate. The government of Ghana has therefore extended its ...

The purpose of this study is twofold. On one hand, the objective is to assess the impact of new and more complex contracting schemes, as opposed to traditional marketing channels, on small farmers’ welfare. On the other hand, the study ...

As patents and other forms of intellectual property become more pervasive in the next generation of biotechnologies, designing polices and practices to ensure sufficient freedom to operate (i.e., the ability to practice or use an innovation) will ...

“This study focuses on public investments and policy reforms for leveraging growth spillovers at the African regional level. A conceptual framework that is built on the endogenous growth theory and the new economic geography is presented ...

This paper examines the impact of rainfall shocks on a measure of adult health, body mass, drawing on a unique panel data set of households residing in rural Zimbabwe. Controlling for individual, household, and community factors, and individual ...

Uganda has experienced rapid economic growth and poverty reduction over the past decade but has failed to significantly improve incomes in its northern regions where prolonged conflict has hindered growth. We consider three strategies to close ...

Agricultural biodiversity is an environmental resource. Much of the agricultural biodiversity remaining in situ today is found on the semi-subsistence farms of poorer countries and the small-scale farms or home gardens of more industrialized ...

Indian agriculture is diversifying during the last two decades towards High-Value Commodities (HVCs) i.e., fruits, vegetables, milk, meat, and fish products. The pace has been accelerated during the decade of 1990s. HVCs account for a large share ...

Malawi has experienced modest economic growth over the last decade and a half. However, agricultural growth has been particularly erratic, and while the incidence of poverty has declined, it still remains high. The Malawian government, within the ...

Over the past two decades, Uganda has experienced strong economic growth. However, agriculture has not performed as well as the rest of the economy in recent years, and while the incidence of poverty has declined, it is still substantially higher ...

Accelerating growth and poverty reduction, and the ultimate achievement of structural transformation, are the critical policy challenges in present day Ethiopia. This paper examines relevant growth options in terms of their impact on overall ...

The objective of this paper is to derive lessons from selected literature concerning the impact and the conditions of successful agricultural input market reform. The agricultural inputs of interest in this review are: fertilizers, seeds, ...

The high use of modern inputs in Egypt’s agricultural system well before the reforms has been very favorable to the development of private markets, particularly in the fertilizer sector. The level of adoption being very high, the usual ...

As in many other developing countries, the concerns about food security in Indonesia during the 1980s and early 1990s resulted in policies aimed at achieving self-sufficiency in food crops. The Government of Indonesia (GOI) combined price ...

Public spending on agriculture in Nigeria is exceedingly low. Less than 2 percent of total federal expenditure was allotted to agriculture during 2001 to 2005, far lower than spending in other key sectors such as education, health, and water. ...

“This paper argues that the largely unrealized potential of agricultural science and technology (S&T) in promoting growth and poverty reduction in developing countries results from deeply rooted incompatibility among policy ...

Breeding for food-staple plant varieties that load high amounts of iron and zinc in their seeds holds great promise for making a significant, low-cost, and sustainable contribution to reducing iron and zinc deficiencies in humans in developing ...

This paper addresses the potential effects of a world agricultural trade liberalization scenario on poverty and regional income distribution in Brazil, using an interregional applied general equilibrium (AGE) and microsimulation model of Brazil, ...

The author argues that African rural areas behave differently from rural areas in fully commercialized market economies. In commercialized economies, price signals quickly induce factor flows, including items such as investment and technological ...

Events in Zimbabwe during seven years from the start of economic reforms in 1991 have highlighted the contradictions in the ideologies underlying economic development and institutional reform in the country. They have also highlighted the ...

The South Asian countries are gradually diversifying with some inter-country variation in favor of high value commodities, namely fruits, vegetables, livestock and fisheries. Agricultural diversification is strongly influenced by price policy, ...

As in most low-income countries, the majority of the poor population in Viet Nam is found in rural areas, where agriculture provides the primary means of livelihood. It has been argued that an agriculture-based development (ABD) strategy is more ...

Some small-holders are able to generate reliable and substantial income flows through small-scale dairy production for the local market; for others, a set of unique transactions costs hinders participation. Cooperative selling institutions are ...

This paper reports on two methods used for identifying alternative indicators of chronic and acute food insecurity. A need for alternative indicators exists since many of the “benchmark” or “gold standard” indicators (such ...

In this article, we examine the economy-wide effects of three alternative growth paths for Indonesia’s industrial sector using SAM (social accounting matrix) multiplier analysis and CGE (computable general equilibrium) modeling. The context ...

This paper investigates empirically the factors that influence real agricultural wage rates in Ghana, based on 1957 to 1991 data. The Johansen cointegration framework is used to examine long-run relationships among agricultural and urban wage ...

Using both national-sample and program-level census survey data, we evaluate the distributional power of Mexico’s Programa Nacional de Educacion, Salud y Alimentacion (PROGRESA) transfers using the so-called distributional ...

This study reports theory-testing laboratory experiments on the effect of yardstick competition on corruption. The results reveal that on the incumbent’s side, yardstick competition acts as a corruption-taming mechanism only if the ...

“This study examines the poverty reduction implications of the introduction of three different agricultural technologies by government and NGOs in three rural sites across Bangladesh. The first is new vegetable seeds developed by AVRDC ...

With the aid of an intertemporal, multi-region general equilibrium model, the authors study issues of agricultural trade liberalization, growth and capital accumulation in the context of a world economy moving towards a multi-polar structure. ...

We analyze the evolution of Sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) over the past 40 years, looking for evidence of recent changes in growth patterns using a nonparametric Malmquist index. Our TFP estimates show a ...

“This paper discusses a modeling approach that extends and improves the standard parity bounds model (PBM) of spatial market efficiency by analyzing the dynamic effects of marketing policy changes. The model facilitates an improved ...

In many African countries, governments are re-thinking the role of the state in centrally providing certain goods and services. The rights and responsibilities for providing various public goods are being decentralized to lower levels of ...

This paper models the assimilation process of migrants and shows evidence of the complementarity between their destination experience and upon-arrival human capital. Bayesian learning and dynamics of matching are modeled and empirically assessed, ...

A methodology to produce disaggregated estimates of inequality is implemented in three developing countries: Ecuador, Madagascar, and Mozambique. These inequality estimates are decomposed into progressively more disaggregated spatial units and ...

Many prior studies find significant cross-sectional positive ordinary least squares (OLS) associations between maternal human capital (usually maternal schooling attainment) and children’s human capital (usually children’s schooling, ...

The authors evaluate the size of the welfare losses from using alternative “imperfect” welfare indicators as substitutes for the conventionally preferred consumption indicator. They find that whereas the undercoverage and leakage ...

“This study attempts to analyze changing patterns of land transfers and schooling investments by gender over three generations in customary land areas of Ghana’s Western Region. Although traditional matrilineal inheritance rules deny ...

Today’s resource boom in Africa, driven by Asian economic growth, offers new opportunities for resource-rich African countries. Contrary to the experience of previous booms, however, most mining profits now accrue to foreign companies, ...

The objective of this report is to summarize progress towards measurement of selected childcare and feeding practices, and to discuss the feasibility and usefulness of these measurements in research and program contexts. This is the third in a ...

“In this paper, the authors analyze the potential economic impacts of avian influenza (AI) in West Africa, taking Nigeria as an example. They find that, depending on the size of the affected areas, the direct impact of the spread of AI ...

As the goals of international agricultural research move beyond increasing food production to the broader aims of reducing poverty, both agricultural research and studies of its impact become more complex. Yet examining the magnitude and ...

The National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) program of Uganda is an innovative public-private extension service delivery approach, with the goal of increasing market oriented agricultural production by empowering farmers to demand and ...

While agricultural production statistics are reported on a geopolitical - often national - basis we often need to know the status of production or productivity within specific sub-regions, watersheds, or agro-ecological zones. Such ...

This paper highlights the difference between secure investor property rights and loosely defined individual property rights. Globalization and fiscal decentralization have intensified this difference. On the one hand, in the presence of mobile ...

This paper examines attrition in the KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study (1993-1998) and assesses the extent of attrition bias for a specific empirical example. The analysis shows that 1993 first round nonresponse is largely unrelated to ...

The Ugandan coffee industry is facing some serious challenges, including low international prices in the international coffee market, aging coffee trees and declining productivity, and, more recently, the appearance of coffee-wilt disease, which ...

Large private investments in biofuels are presently underway in Mozambique. This paper uses an economywide model to assess the implications of these investments for growth and income distribution. Our results indicate that biofuels provide an ...

We herein investigate the observed discrepancy between real and perceived commercial risks associated with the use of genetically modified (GM) products in developing countries. We focus particularly on the effects of GM-free private standards ...

This paper is devoted to better understanding of the Brazilian agricultural national policies towards domestic support and implications related to WTO rules. Domestic support has taken central stage in the last years and in light of a global ...

Suicides in general, including farmers’ suicides, are a sad and complex phenomenon. Hence, their underlying causes need to be addressed within an equally complex societal framework. Here, we provide a specific case study on the potential ...

The International Service for National Agricultural Research¾on its own from 2002 until 2003, and as a division of the International Food Policy Research Institute thereafter has studied 124 public-private partnerships in agriculture in nine ...

Cash transfer programs are rare in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper describes the evolution of a cash transfer program in major urban centers of Mozambique, from its inception in 1990 through two major reorganizations until October 1998. ...

Qualitative and quantitative methods in social science research have long been separate spheres with little overlap. However, recent innovations have highlighted the complementarity of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The Accra Food and ...

“This paper assesses the economy-wide impact of implementing and financing a universal or basic income grant (BIG) in South Africa. The various financing scenarios suggested by the proponents of the grant are presented, and these are ...

“Strengthening national capacity for designing public policies and program interventions is fundamental for achieving development goals. Yet results of capacity strengthening programs have shown mixed results in the last fifty years. ...

Cash transfer programs induce multiplier effects when recipients put the money they receive to work to generate additional income. The ultimate income effects are multiples of the amounts transferred. This paper analyzes the PROCAMPO program in ...

This paper presents an overview of macroeconomic and agricultural trends in Latin America and the Caribbean. It argues that world-level macroeconomic and agricultural cycles, of expansion during the 1960s and 1970s, and stagnation and ...

This study attempts to identify characteristics of the existing child and the maternal care environment that could be used as a basis for designing policies and programs to improve the nutritional status of children. For the present study, all ...

This study examines how quality, price, and access to curative health care influence use of modern public, modern private, and traditional providers among 3,000 children age 0-2 years in Cebu, Philippines. The analysis relies on a series of ...

This paper investigates children’s time allocation to schooling, home production, and market production using a unique data set collected from northern Mali. Production shocks from harvest period pest infestations induce households to ...

This paper reviews recent agricultural policy changes in China and presents estimates of domestic support for the period 1996-2005. A set of relevant alternative subsidy-definition scenarios and their effects on the calculated levels of support ...

The formula approach used in many trade negotiations involves large formula cuts in high tariffs, with flexibilities that allow smaller cuts for selected products. Difficulties in evaluating the effects of these exceptions can create major ...

Decentralization implies an increase in the number of stakeholders involved in the design and implementation of interventions. This paper draws upon the experience of a multi-stakeholder program in India which has sought to increase the ...

“CARE began PROSPECT (Program of Support for Poverty Elimination and Community Transformation) in 1998. PROSPECT aims to reduce poverty in peri-urban areas of Lusaka. It employs a community-based approach to carry out three types of ...

“To examine how local income distribution affects both a community’s ability to pay for schooling and the quality of that schooling, this research merges household and school census data from South Africa. Empirical results are ...

“This study uses data from 1996/97 through 1998/99 to examine the relative efficiency of production of crops in Bangladesh and their comparative advantage in international trade as measured by net economic profitability (the profitability ...

“The purpose of the research paper is to characterize biological diversity related to millets in the semi-arid regions of India at various spatial scales of analysis (e.g., farm household versus community levels) and place that evidence in ...

This paper investigates whether inferences drawn about a population are sensitive to the manner by which those data are obtained. It compares information obtained using participatory appraisal techniques with a survey of households randomly drawn ...

In this paper we investigate whether a conditional cash transfer program such as the Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA) can simultaneously combat the problems of low school attendance and child work. PROGRESA is a new ...

Intensive double or triple monocropping of rice has caused degradation of the paddy micro environment and reductions in rice yield growth in many irrigated areas in Asia. Problems include increased pest infestation, mining of soil micronutrients, ...

This paper develops a model of differentiated consumers to examine the consumption effects of genetic modification (GM) under alternative labeling regimes and segregation enforcement scenarios. Analytical results show that if consumers perceive ...

“This paper explores risk sharing in the Zone Lacustre, Mali, as viewed through the lens of consumption smoothing. We find that idiosyncratic shocks appear to have little impact on consumption, and that households respond to these shocks in ...

This paper investigates how the control and devolution of productive assets are allocated among husband and wife. Using detailed household data from rural Ethiopia, the authors show that assets brought to marriage, ownership of assets, control ...

Spending per scientist declined precipitously within African agricultural R&D agencies over the past several decades. In 1991, average cost per researcher across 147 R&D agencies was $119,300 in 1985 international dollars - or US$59,500 ...

Using a mathematical-programming agricultural-sector model of Egypt, this paper analyzes mechanisms for allocating scarce water and for charging the farmers the Operation and Management (O&M) costs of irrigation and drainage, currently ...

Cotton, textiles, and apparel are critical agricultural and industrial sectors in India. This study provides descriptions of these sectors and examines the key developments emerging domestically and internationally that affect the challenges and ...

Costa Rican coffee farmers are almost fully exposed to world price variability. Yet, despite small farm sizes, specialization in coffee, and a marketing system that prolongs uncertainty and aggravates cash flow problems, this study finds that ...

Traditional economic theory posits that a well-functioning capital market is a necessary condition for industrialization and economic growth. In reality, micro and small enterprises are ubiquitous because entrepreneurs can undertake low-return ...

The key motivation behind this study is to explore the many patterns of interactions between economic and non-economic factors in sub-Saharan Africa (hereafter referred to as Africa) in order to map out a typology of different types of country ...

Ethiopia holds large potential for dairy development due to its large livestock population, the favorable climate for improved, high-yielding animal breeds, and the relatively disease-free environment for livestock. Given the considerable ...

Decentralization has the potential to improve the accountability of government and lead to a more efficient provision of public services. However, accountability requires broad groups of people to participate in local government. Thus, voter ...

Secondary crops are of increasing interest to policymakers and planners in developing countries because of a desire to diversify economic activities and because of their proven potential to raise farm incomes and rural employment. To assess this ...

The poultry sub-sector is crucially important in the context of agricultural growth and improvement of diets of people in Bangladesh. The sub-sector is particularly important in that it is a significant source for the supply of protein and ...

Although there is growing evidence of the increasing role of nonfarm activities in rural livelihoods, there is still relatively little empirical evidence regarding the factors that influence smallholder farmers to diversify into nonfarm ...

“On farm conservation of crop diversity poses obvious policy challenges in terms of the design of appropriate incentive mechanisms and possible trade-offs between conservation and productivity. This paper compares factors explaining the ...

“Recent estimates showing increase in the incidence of poverty in Uganda has kindled interest in understanding the factors that cause changes in poverty, as the reversal of the positive trend in the 1990s threatens the government’s ...

This study identifies the major methods used by farmers to adapt to climate change in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia, the factors that affect their choice of method, and the barriers to adaptation. The methods identified include use of different crop ...

The paper uses the concept of credit limit to analyze the determinants of household access to and participation in informal and formal credit markets in Malawi. Households are found to be credit constrained, on average, both in the formal and ...

Poverty profiles are a useful way of summarizing information on the levels of poverty and the characteristics of the poor in a society. For Egypt, while there has been some work on a descriptive analysis of the characteristics of the poor, to our ...

Group lending has received much attention in recent years because of its perceived potential in providing financial services to poor households that lack traditional collateral. The analysis in this paper focuses on the effects of program design, ...

The UNICEF-expanded model for nutrition is used to analyze the circumstances of care in urban environments. The model postulates that there are six major types of care behaviors: feeding and breast-feeding, food preparation and handling, hygiene ...

“The paper discusses the application of the Water Poverty Index (WPI) as a monitoring tool for Benin’s water sector. Benin is currently in a process of political decentralization shifting responsibility for and administration of rural ...

“The choices that smallholder farmers are able to make are strongly conditioned by the geographic conditions in which they live. The importance of this fact for rural development strategy is not lost on policy makers. For example, the ...

This paper analyzes the role of social cohesion in economic and institutional development and, broadly, the creation of welfare in Latin America. The paper defines the concept of social cohesion with reference to the notions of social capital and ...

The first section of this paper reviews the most recent evidence on inequality in 18 Latin American countries and shows that in all but four the changes in inequality over the 1990s were small and insignificant. The distribution depends on the ...

“Agricultural diversification towards high-value crops can potentially increase farm incomes, especially in a country like India where demand for high-value food products has been increasing more quickly than that for staple crops. Indian ...

The question whether production flexibility payments to farmers are likely to be minimally trade distorting is considered in an inter-temporal and economy wide context. Our contribution lies in showing the circumstances, over time, under which a ...

This paper addresses the question of whether Africa is an undertrading continent. We answer this question using a much-improved data set for obtaining predicted trade and by employing methods that correct for bias in estimates of undertrading. ...

With growing water scarcity and increasing competition across water-using sectors, the need for water savings and more efficient water use has increased in importance in water resources management. Improvement in the physical efficiency of water ...

“Even though both “good governance” and “pro-poor growth” have become important concepts in development thinking and practice, studies that assess to which extent and how good governance contributes to pro-poor ...

It is widely believed that land tenure insecurity under a customary tenure system leads to socially inefficient resource allocation. This article demonstrates that land tenure insecurity promotes tree planting, which is inefficient from the ...

Using an agriculture-focused CGE model for Zimbabwe with 1991 as base period, this paper examines quantitatively the income and equity effects of trade liberalization in isolation and in conjunction with potentially complementary changes in ...

The paper examines the possible impact of Doha agreement on Philippine poverty. Using a detailed CGE analysis, the agreement is observed to depress world demand for Philippine agricultural exports, and thus slightly increase poverty, especially ...

In a climate of rapid technological change, it is important to evaluate policies on the innovation incentives that result from the introduction of intellectual property rights as they relate to agricultural genetic resources. In this paper, we ...

Like many other Asian countries, the causal relationship between agricultural productivity and the incidence of rural poverty has been a widely debated subject in Bangladesh. A number of studies argued that the real agricultural wage rate was ...

Early childhood nutrition is thought to be an important input into subsequent academic achievement. This paper investigates the nutrition-learning nexus using a unique longitudinal data set, which follows a large sample of Philippine children ...

“Phytoremediation is the use of living plants, known as hyperaccumulators which absorb unusually large amounts of metals in comparison to other plants. The use of classical plant breeding and new molecular techniques offers great potential ...

“Although there is little consensus on the impact of trade liberalization on poverty and food security, it is nevertheless widely acknowledged that there is a need for governments to establish safety-nets to guard against any potentially ...

When a new technology consists of sequences of innovations that culminate in a final consumer product, the balance between successive innovators is one of the main concerns in the design of the patent system. While intertemporal aspects of ...

Weather fluctuations, such as those caused by the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), add to the riskiness associated with agricultural production. Improved predictive capacity may help ameliorate negative impacts of climate and weather shocks ...

We use a dynamic CGE model to quantitatively assess the economywide impact of HPAI in Ghana. The likely effect of an avian flu outbreak is modeled as demand or supply shocks to the poultry sector. Our analysis shows that, while chicken is a quite ...

The number of higher-education institutions and the students enrolled in them has grown rapidly throughout Africa since the early 1960s. The number of universities increased from less than 20 in 1960 to nearly 160 by 1996; student numbers grew ...

“A competitive partial-equilibrium spatial model with heterogeneous goods is constructed to evaluate effects of the removal of tariffs, tariff-rate quotas, and sanitary regulations on world poultry trade. The model distinguishes between ...

“This paper is an empirical analysis of the gains from contract farming in the case of poultry production in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. The paper finds that contract production is more efficient than noncontract production. ...

“This paper uses an asset-base framework to analyze the determinants of rural growth and sustainable poverty reduction for the three poorest countries in Central America: Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua…Using a combination of GIS ...

This paper presents a new methodological framework for measuring the level of household access to credit. It provides an analytical framework for examining the determinants of household credit limits and derives implications on information needed ...

This paper evaluates the effect (in terms of private returns) of investment in education on wages in the rural Philippines. Statistical endogeneity of education in the wage function may result from (1) unobserved determinants of education that ...

There is a continuing need to use recent and consistent multisectoral economic data to support policy analysis and the development of economywide models. Updating and estimating input-output tables and social accounting matrices (SAMs), which ...

A Generalized Maximum Entropy (GME) approach is adapted to empirically estimate crop-specific production technologies in Chinese agriculture. Despite a modest behavior assumption about equal marginal returns of non-land inputs among crops, this ...

Income mobility can be viewed as a first-order Markov process, with a matrix of transition probabilities which measure how individuals move from an income status in time t to a new status in time t+1. Direct estimation of transition matrices is ...

This paper presents the construction of a 1996 regionalized Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Mexico. The SAM differentiates production across five regions, four rural and a fifth “national” urban region. The rural regions are ...

United Kingdom (UK) demand for carnations by exporting country was estimated using a production version of the Rotterdam model, and model estimates were used to assess the effects of EU preferential trade agreements on import demand. Of ...

One of the common criticisms of poverty alleviation programs is that the high share of administrative (nontransfer) costs substantially reduces the programs’ impact on poverty. But very little empirical evidence exists on program costs. ...

The theorized impact of land tenure and titling on access to credit has produced mixed results in the empirical literature. Land tenure and titling is hypothesized to increase access to credit because of the enhanced land security provided and ...

The authors set out a general equilibrium model for the evaluation of a domestically financed transfer program, which helps to combine the results from a computable general equilibrium model with disaggregated household data.Using a Mexican cash ...

There have been different degrees of exchange rate disequilibrium in the developing countries during transition or reform periods since the mid 1980s. The level of the exchange rate and its misalignment can have significant impacts on ...

“Considering the heterogeneity of the countries of southern Africa and the presence of South Africa and other middle-income countries in the region, southern Africa has a unique opportunity to exploit agricultural potential and regional ...

Agriculture plays a dominant role in nearly all the countries of East and Central Africa, and many face similar agroecological, climatic, and development challenges. As a result, significant scale economies can be made through the regionalization ...

To what extent do India’s rural poor share in agricultural growth? Combining data from 24 household sample surveys spanning 35 years with other sources, we estimate a model of the joint determination of consumption-poverty measures, ...

This paper investigates the effects of wheat genetic diversity and land degradation on risk and agricultural productivity in less favored production environments of a developing agricultural economy. Drawing production data from household survey ...

“A typical private good is defined by its excludability and rivalry characteristics. Information embodied in a technology might not generate rivalry among its users. By contrast, excludability is certainly a characteristic of this kind of ...

This study, based on the data of China’s agricultural census of 1997, focuses on the land distribution among rural households and its effects on crop production structure and employment of labor and capital. The Census data show that the ...

The traditional literature emphasizes the causal role of finance in promoting industrial growth. China’s rapid industrialization over the past several decades, which has occurred in the absence of well-functioning financial markets, seems ...

While, politically speaking, China has a centralized government structure with strong top-down mandates, under the country’s current fiscal system, local governments are responsible for providing most local public goods and services. Large ...

“Food aid programs have become increasingly important for disaster relief in many developing countries. In Ethiopia, a drought-stricken economy with one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world, food aid has amounted to almost 10 ...

“Food aid remains significant for food availability in many low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa, helping to reduce the gap between food consumption needs and supply from domestic production and inventories and commercial imports. ...

Many African countries have moved into the production of non-traditional agricultural products, in an effort to diversify their exports and increase foreign currency earnings. However, in order to access developed country markets and urban ...

An important issue in WTO trade negotiations is whether further liberalization of trade and agricultural policies may help or hinder food security in WTO member countries, especially the developing countries. The WTO recognizes various ...

Using urban price data for the period 1976 to 1992 and rural price data for the period 1982 to 1992, the study assesses the degree of market integration for wheat, maize and rice. The study finds that i) reforms have not destabilized foodgrain ...

The paper develops a framework for the design and analysis of pluralistic agricultural advisory services and reviews research methods from different disciplines that can be used when applying the framework. Agricultural advisory services are ...

The community-driven development (CDD) approach has become increasingly popular because of its potential to develop projects that are sustainable, are responsive to local priorities, empower local communities, and more effectively target poor and ...

This paper presents new evidence on the association between gender and poverty based on an empirical analysis of 11 data sets from 10 developing countries. The paper computes income- and expenditure-based poverty measures and investigates their ...

This paper reviews the econometric evidence on gender differences in agricultural productivity. It provides a methodological overview and a critique of (1) production function-based estimates of technical and labor productivity differences by ...

This paper seeks to contribute to the literature on village governance and local public goods provision. Using data from 144 village-level governments in India’s Tamil Nadu state, we examine whether the gender and caste of village ...

This paper analyzes the ways in which gender issues affect property rights and the use of natural resources in developing countries. It examines the informal practices of resource use, usually involving multiple uses by multiple users. ...

Geographic targeting is often recommended as a way to improve the impact of social spending and infrastructure investments on rural poverty. Previous research shows that such targeting is not very accurate unless the geographic units are small. ...

Advocates of the use of genetic engineering techniques in agriculture contend that this new biotechnology promises increased productivity, better use of natural resources and more nutritious foods. Opponents, on the other hand, are concerned ...

This paper analyzes price, production and trade consequences of changing consumer preferences regarding the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food production. The analytical framework used is an empirical global general equilibrium ...

Global climate change poses great risks to poor people whose livelihoods depend directly on the use of natural resources. Mitigation of the adverse effects of climate change is a high priority on the international agenda. Carbon trading, under ...

In the second half of the 1990s, a series of developments led to a renewed academic and policy interest in the intersection of macroeconomic policy and poverty issues in developing countries. The focus of that work was domestic macroeconomic ...

“For the health community, globalization offers opportunities but also poses important challenges. Dramatic progress has been made in the area of health over the past forty years; however, improvements have been unequally distributed across ...

This study uses data from a representative survey of households with preschoolers in Accra, Ghana to (1) examine the importance of care practices for children’s height-for-age z-scores (HAZ); and (2) identify subgroups of children for whom ...

Using case studies from six Asian countries, this paper (a) assesses the relevance of underlying rationales for public intervention in foodgrain markets, (b) documents the existing policies and regulations that support operation of grain ...

Public investment, together with institutional and policy reforms, has contributed substantially to rapid economic growth in rural China since the late 1970s. This rapid growth has also led to dramatic reductions in rural poverty. In this study ...

This paper presents an applied microsimulation model built on household data with explicit treatment of heterogeneity of skills, labor preferences and opportunities, and consumption preferences at the individual and/or household level, while ...

“Trade liberalization is a central part of South Africa’s post-Apartheid development strategy. However, despite considerable reforms, the country has failed to generate pro-poor growth, with both unemployment and inequality worsening ...

Indonesian economy has experienced some major changes during the last three decades and transformed from a predominantly agricultural economy to one that relies more heavily on its non-agricultural sector. Within agriculture, there has also been ...

“We analyze the implications of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Tanzania for labor markets and human capital accumulation. Three analyses are undertaken. First, we examine the 2000/01 Labor Force Survey and compare it with the 1990/91 Labor Force ...

This paper estimates the economic impact of HIV/AIDS on KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) and the rest of South Africa (RSA). We extend previous studies by employing an integrated analytical framework that combines the following: firm-level surveys of workers’ ...

This paper develops a framework to measure the impact of agricultural research on urban poverty. Increased investments in agricultural R&D can lower food prices by increasing food production, and lower food prices benefit the urban poor ...

This paper presents results from a study that identified patterns of social interaction among small farmers in three agricultural subsectors in Bolivia-fish culture, peanut production, and quinoa production-and analyzed how social interaction ...

Almost unaffected by the 2008 wave of soaring world food prices, Ugandan local market prices exhibit signs of high price volatility in the first quarter of 2009. At the household level, while net producers may reap some benefits from this ...

This paper uses project and household data to examine the ability of 100 or so public works projects in Western Cape Province, South Africa, to target benefits-both direct and indirect-to those living below the poverty line. We find that public ...

We develop a detailed trade analysis to assess the potential welfare impacts of a free trade agreement (FTA) on the agricultural sector of southern African countries and to determine opportunities and challenges faced by the region as a ...

The reliability of food security rating, a variant of the more familiar wealth ranking procedure, was tested in a rural area of Western Honduras. Twenty workshop sessions were conducted in 13 different communities, with members of organized small ...

This paper investigates whether human capital affects the productivity and labor allocation of rural households in four districts of Pakistan. The investigation shows that households with better-educated males earn higher off-farm income and ...

The overall objective of this paper is to develop an appropriate conceptual and analytical framework to better understand how prospects for growth and poverty reduction can be stimulated in rural Honduras. We employ complementary quantitative and ...

The paper departs from the standard practice that takes the estimated marginal effects of either the amount of credit received or membership in a credit program as measures of the impact of access to credit on household welfare. The marginal ...

Contract farming is seen by proponents as a way to raise small-farm income by delivering technology and market information to small farmers, incorporating them into remunerative new markets. Critics, however, see it as a strategy for agribusiness ...

Climate change continues to have major impact on crop productivity all over the world. While many researchers have evaluated the possible impact of global warming on crop yields using mainly indirect crop simulation models, there are relatively ...

Previous studies implicitly assume uniform price-effects across regions or provinces within countries. They also do not address the issue of integration between the world food market and local markets. Instead, they assume a complete transmission ...

This study focuses on the possible impact of the MFA phase-out on the world economy. Starting from analyzing trends in world textile and apparel trade, the study found that the developing countries were a growing factor in world T&A trade in ...

The competition for limited water resources between agriculture and more highly valued domestic and industrial water uses is rapidly increasing and will likely require the transfer of water out of agriculture. This paper reviews and synthesizes ...

This study investigated the impacts of access to inventory credit, input supply shops, fertilizer microdosing demonstrations, and other factors on farmers’ use of inorganic fertilizer and other inputs in Niger and on crop yields. We found ...

This paper investigates the impacts of a social forestry program in Indonesia, Hutan Kamasyarakatan (HKm), based on analysis of a survey of 640 HKm and comparable non-HKm plots in the Sumberjaya watershed of southern Sumatra, and of the ...

This paper has been prepared as part of the Zambia country study of the Macroeconomic and Regional Integration in Southern Africa (MERRISA) project and serves as a background paper for modeling exercises. The paper focuses on analyzing ...

“The decline in soil fertility in smallholder systems is a major factor inhibiting equitable development in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Some areas fallow in order to strength soil fertility for later planting, but as populations increase, ...

“We examine access to, use of, and participation in decisions on improved water supply in the Volta basin of Ghana, one of the first countries to introduce a community-based approach to rural water supply on a large scale. While 71 percent ...

This paper examines the impact of wheat transfers and cash incomes on wheat consumption and wheat markets. Using propensity score- matching techniques, the total marginal propensity to consume (MPC) for wheat is, on average, 0.33, ranging from ...

“The paper examines, taking into account the urban-rural divides, the changes and welfare implications of income diversification in Zimbabwe following macroeconomic policy changes and droughts of the early 1990s. Data from two comparable ...

With poverty studies having shifted their focus from household poverty to individual poverty, a number of studies have started to examine ntrahousehold resource allocation, especially gender bias within the household as potential causes of ...

“Pollution of the environment by metals and organic contaminants is an intractable global problem, with cleanup costs running into billions of dollars using current engineering technologies. The availability of alternative, cheap and ...

In this study, we examined India’s domestic support policies to understand their classification and measurement for the purposes of official World Trade Organization (WTO) notifications. We then employed the underlying methods to prepare ...

Rapid industrial development and urbanization transfer more and more land away from agricultural production, threatening China’s capability to feed itself. This paper analyzes the determinants of land use by modeling arable land and sown ...

This paper provides an assessment of information flows and the acquisition of knowledge in water governance of the Upper East Region, Ghana. These flows are patchy, often parallel, disconnected or slow. In many cases a great deal of information ...

The effect of recent agricultural market reforms in many developing countries is often measured through tests for market integration by analyzing co-variation of food prices. However, market integration studies often fail to link the discovery of ...

“This report analyzes the relationship between the adoption of innovation packages in quinoa cultivation and absorptive capabilities in resource poor farming communities in four micro-regions of the Bolivian Altiplano. The innovation ...

Traditional approaches to innovation systems policymaking and governance often focus exclusively on the central provision of services, regulations, fiscal measures, and subsidies. This study, however, considers that innovation systems ...

“Financing for water projects, especially for irrigation, has been moving towards collapse in recent years due to declining donor and government funding. Some Indian states have undertaken innovative institutional reforms by setting up ...

“Poverty mapping applies models of household welfare developed from detailed household consumption and expenditure surveys to the extensive but less detailed data from national censuses. A poverty map for Malawi, developed by drawing upon ...

Increasing competition for water across sectors increases the importance of the river basin as the appropriate unit of analysis to address the challenges facing water resources management; and modeling at this scale can provide essential ...

Survey and ethnographic methods have been combined in the evaluations of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs for the governments of Nicaragua and Turkey. This paper describes the quantitative and qualitative research designs for these ...

Thailand has experienced economic growth well above world averages for about 40 years. It is a challenge to understand the sources of this high growth path, and in particular why growth has not slowed down with assumed decreasing returns to ...

The paper reviews recent theory and empirical evidence testing unitary versus collective models of the household. In contrast to the unitary model, the collective model posits that individuals within households have different preferences and do ...

Banana is a staple crop consumed by Ugandan households. The Uganda National Agricultural Research Organization has implemented conventional and biotechnology programs that seek improving bananas and address the crop’s most important pest ...

This paper reviews the trends in government subsidies and investments in and for Indian agriculture; develops a conceptual framework and model to assess the impact of various subsidies and investments on agricultural growth and poverty reduction; ...

Latin America and the Caribbean are relatively well endowed with water resources. However, population growth and rapid urbanization are putting considerable pressure on water available for irrigation. Local and regional water scarcity problems ...

This paper uses data from national household expenditure surveys to explore whether food insecurity is more severe in South Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa. It employs two indicators of the diet quantity dimension of food insecurity, or the inability ...

Despite its strong growth record, Botswana faces two prominent development challenges: the onslaught of HIV/AIDS and the slowdown in diamond mining. This study estimates the growth and distributional impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and considers ...

There have been intensive debates on the role of aid in promoting economic development in developing countries by using cross-country analyses. Cross-country regression assuming linear relationship between aid and growth and without taking into ...

“The primary goal of emergency food aid after an economic shock is often to bolster short-term food and nutrition security. However, these transfers also act as insurance against other shock effects, such as destruction of assets and ...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of Japan’s agricultural domestic policy since 1995 in the context of the current international negotiations in the WTO Doha Round, which has as one aim further reductions of ...

La biotecnología agropecuaria ha demostrado tener amplio potencial para ayudar a mejorar la eficiencia de la agricultura, el crecimiento económico y las políticas dirigidas a combatir a la pobreza, tanto en América Latina como en el resto del ...

This paper develops a theoretical model of land leasing that includes transaction costs of enforcing labor effort, risk pooling motives and non-tradable productive inputs. We test the implications of this model compared to those of the ...

The tax and subsidy system in Egypt in 1986-88 was very distorted, involving large, sectorally variegated, output taxes and subsidies. In agriculture, there were also major input subsidies and no charges for water. In this paper, an ...

In this paper, the impact of alternative development strategies on growth and poverty is assessed in an economywide framework, using Egypt as a case study. The analysis is guided by the following question: By pursuing a development strategy ...

“This study investigates the impacts of rural poverty on farmers’ land management decisions, crop production and incomes, based upon analysis of data from the 1999/2000 Uganda National Household Survey. We find that the impacts of ...

With high population density and limited land availability, Vietnam’s Red River Delta is undergoing a major transformation as its economic base moves away from subsistence farming towards intensive, high-value food production for export and ...