During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, fixed-rent tenancy gradually replaced sharecropping as the dominant form of land tenancy in China. This paper hypothesizes that the secular shift in land tenure was an adaptation to the change in land utilization system towards more intensive cropping. To test...

Since independence a quiet revolution has taken place in maize production in the Sahel with Mali increasing production more than ten-fold and yields going up ~2% a year. This research work uses farm level panel data from southern Mali's maize growing regions to demonstrate this success in...

This chapter serves to assess the quantity and impact of private agricultural research in developing countries, alongside the policies which affect that research. To provide context, an outline of the history, size and structure of private research presents data on research expenditures by...

Low adoption of agricultural technologies holds large productivity consequences for developing countries. Agricultural extension services counter information failures by deploying external agents to communicate with farmers. However, social networks are recognized as the most credible source of...

New entrants into agriculture are critical for the transformation of food systems. New entrants in OECD countries are younger, have higher levels of education and entrepreneurial skills, and are more likely to adopt new technologies than those already working in the sector. Yet, negative...

New ideas, products, and practices take time to diffuse, a fact that is often attributed to some form of heterogeneity among potential adopters. This paper examines three broad classes of diffusion models -- contagion, social influence, and social learning -- and shows how to incorporate...

This paper examines the role of individual risk attitudes in the decision to adopt a new form of agricultural biotechnology in China. I conducted a survey and a field experiment to elicit the risk preferences of Chinese farmers, who faced the decision of whether to adopt genetically modified Bt...

Urbanisation will continue in China, with the government planning to grant urban residential status to an additional 100 million rural workers by 2020. While this process is transforming the urban economy, the rural economy is also undergoing substantial structural change. Government policy...

Mobile phones promise to bring the ICT revolution to previously unconnected populations. A two- year study evaluates an innovative voice-based ICT advisory service for smallholder cotton farmers in India, demonstrating significant demand for, and trust in, new information. Farmers substantially...

This article deals with the relationships between luxury goods and innovations within the framework of a Socialist country. An original example is taken with the Habanos, the Cuban luxury cigars. In a first part, we analyse the main tendencies of the tobacco sector in general, and those of...