For decades, the rural development and poverty alleviation agenda in sub-Saharan Africa has emphasised support for smallholder farming and little else. Foreign large-scale miners and other industrial operators have complied, establishing agriculture-support services and programs for communities...

Proceedings of the 2012 Parliamentary Conference, with Sir John Beddington; Professor Jonathon Foley; Dr Derek Byerlee; Dr Frank Rijsberman and others

Increasing population and consumption are placing unprecedented demands on agriculture and natural resources across the planet. Today, approximately a billion people are chronically malnourished while our agricultural systems are concurrently degrading land, water, biodiversity and climate on a...

Government spending should be regarded as a social and political phenomenon, not merely as a technical choice. We argue that there is an implicit contract between the organized elites and politicians which often leads to a pro-elite allocation of public resources. A natural and simple taxonomy...

Explicitly accounting for certain basic physical laws governing the “earth” sector dramatically enriches our ability to explain a high degree of diversity in observed patterns of economic growth. We provide a theoretical explanation of why some countries have been able to sustain a more or...

This paper explores the conditions for sustainable development through two models of economic growth that elucidates two extremes; an open economy with constant prices, and a closed economy with endogenous prices. Sustainable development is easier to achieve in the case of the former than the...

This paper shows the implications of credit and labor market imperfections on gender differences in agricultural labor productivity, especially highlighting how both imperfections negatively affect female productivity by discouraging off-farm income generating activities and restricting access...

Applying the general question of aid effectiveness to the sector of education, this paper reveals an overall positive effect of development assistance on primary enrolment. However, even the most optimistic estimates clearly show that at any realistic rate of growth, aid will never be able to...

This paper empirically assesses the impact of specialisation on the synchronisation of regional business cycles in two core countries of EMU, namely France and Germany. Several specialisation indices are introduced and some first stylised facts about interregional business cycle correlations are...