The closely interlinked food, fuel and financial crises pose a significant new challenge to the global effort to reduce poverty. In short run, the oil-biofuels nexus was clearly the driving force behind the surge in food prices, but export restrictions and panic purchases turned a tightened...

Agricultural productivity growth is widely seen as an essential instrument of poverty reduction, food security and broader economic growth. Paradoxically, however, the agricultural sector is often neglected by African governments in what is often termed ‘urban bias’. This paper explores what...

This paper argues that investment in agriculture has a large and continuing developmental importance in terms of both economic growth and poverty reduction. Moreover, targeted public resources have proven to be indispensable in achieving these results. Both arguments are supported with novel...

The financial crisis arose in the industrial countries, but has affected developing countries through higher interest rates, sharp changes in commodity prices and reductions in investment, trade, migration and remittances. Some also see the recent food price crisis as a strongly related...

This paper shows that research on international agricultural trade reform can make much greater contributions to understanding than was feasible in earlier trade negotiations. Part of this is due to improvements in the basic data on production, consumption and trade associated with the...

This paper assesses the implications of large-scale investments in biofuels for growth and income distribution. We find that biofuels investment enhances growth and poverty reduction despite some displacement of food crops by biofuels. Overall, the biofuel investment trajectory analyzed...

We use a gendered dynamic CGE model to assess the implications of biofuels expansion in a low-income, land-abundant setting. Mozambique is chosen as a representative case. We compare scenarios with different gender employment intensities in producing jatropha feedstock for biodiesel. Under all...

This article provides estimates of farm household efficiency and its determinants among smallholder farmers in Mozambique. A translog stochastic frontier production function and a first difference model incorporating a model of farm household inefficiency effects are applied to test the...

We examine the performance of the primary school education system in Tanzania over the 1990sa decade characterized by substantial AIDS deaths. Given the relatively robust correlation between educational attainment and productivity established in the literature in both agricultural and...