Increased productivity and sustainability of the agricultural sector are core policy objectives in OECD and non-OECD countries. This Guide provides an overview of the current state of the art in measuring sustainable productivity of the agricultural sector and analysing sources of growth in a...

According to national accounts data, value added per worker is much higher in the non-agricultural sector than in agriculture in the typical country, and particularly so in developing countries. Taken at face value, this "agricultural productivity gap" suggests that labor is greatly misallocated...

Over 250,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since the mid-1990s. Studies – both case studies of states and at the individual-level - attribute these deaths to credit crunches in the agrarian sector and increased debt burden among farmers. Most of the farm suicides have, however, taken...

The debate on the "curse of natural resources" is a topical issue in empirical research on;economic development. This paper examines the relationship between natural resources and growth rates in a cross-section of countries, by separately analyzing abundance of resources and dependence on...

In most poor countries, large majorities of the population live in rural areas and earn their livelihoods primarily from agriculture. Many rural people in the developing world are poor, and conversely, most of the world's poor people inhabit rural areas. Agriculture also accounts for a...

This paper is the final report of a research project whose aim was to analyse the methodology of calculating the costs and benefits for the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia of the envisaged accession to the European Union. The research focused particularly on the impact of the...

Cross-country labor productivity differences are larger in agriculture than in non-agriculture. We propose a new explanation for these patterns in which the self-selection of heterogeneous workers determines sector productivity. We formalize our theory in a general-equilibrium Roy model in which...

The paper examines long-term strategies of capital modernization under different assumptions about embodied technological change, energy regulation, and substitutability between energy and capital. To describe modernization of physical capital, the authors use a vintage capital model with the...

A large fraction of Uganda's population continues to earn a living from quasi-subsistence agriculture. This paper uses a static general equilibrium model to explore the relationships between high transportation costs, low productivity, and the size of the quasi-subsistence sector. We...

In most poor countries, large majorities of the population live in rural areas and earn their livelihoods primarily from agriculture. Many rural people in the developing world are poor, and conversely, most of the world's poor people inhabit rural areas. Agriculture also accounts for a...