Insufficient access to assets is the main determinant of poverty. We analyze the role of access to assets in explaining household labor allocation strategies, sources of income, levels of income achieved, and poverty headcount ratios among classes of Mexican rural households. To assess the gains...

Farmers incur proportional and fixed transactions costs in selling their crops on markets. Using data for Peruvian potato farmers, we propose a method to measure these transactions costs. When opportunities exist to sell a crop on alternative markets, the observed choice of market can be used to...

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs have become extensively used to induce poor parents to increase their investments in the human capital of their children. The condition on school attendance and use of health facilities transforms the transfer into a price effect on the condition....

The financial surplus of agriculture has been central to theories of the role of agriculture in economic development. Morrisson and Thorbecke (MT) have used a constant-price social accounting matrix (SAM) framework to rigorously measure the financial surplus of agriculture and decompose the...

In this paper we consider different strategies for implementing a payment for environmental services (PES) program to mitigate deforestation in Mexican common property forests (ejidos). We begin by discussing the policy context within which PES programs find themselves, highlighting other...

This paper analyzes how electoral incentives affected the performance of a major decentralized conditional cash transfer program intended on reducing school dropout rates among children of poor households in Brazil. We show that while this federal program successfully reduced school dropout by 8...

Mutual insurance has been shown, theoretically and empirically, to be incomplete and limited by asymmetric information and lack of enforcement mechanisms. While some research has shown that networks based on kinship, neighbourhood and ethnicity may provide a locus of insurance and thus a way of...

The diffusion of a new agricultural technology requires farmers to learn about the existence and the benefits of the technology. What do they have to learn, how do they learn it, and from whom, is the subject of a large literature, both theoretical and empirical. The purpose of this brief is to...

The Green Revolution, consisting of using High Yielding Variety (HYV) seeds together with high fertilizer doses, has been widely adopted under irrigated conditions, but generally not in rainfed areas that are prone to stresses like drought and flooding. This puzzling lag in technology adoption...

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goal on poverty eradication requires focusing on agriculture and rural areas. Increasing technology adoption in staple food agriculture—the Green Revolution—will however not suffice. Key is to manage an agricultural and a rural transformation whereby...