Advances in agricultural development have largely been a direct result of increased usage of new technologies. Among other important factors, farmers’ perceptions of risks associated with the new technology as well as their ability or willingness to take risks greatly influences their...

The first of three books in IFPRI’s climate change in Africa series, West African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis examines the food security threats facing 11 of the countries that make up West Africa — Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea,...

Despite the fact that nonincome dimensions of well-being such as nutrition and health are now placed on the global development agenda, substantial gaps remain in our knowledge about patterns and trends in nutrition inequalities in many developing countries. The main objective of this paper is to...

Public investment, together with institutional and policy reforms, has contributed substantially to rapid economic growth in rural China since the late 1970s. This rapid growth has also led to dramatic reductions in rural poverty. In this study we use a simultaneous equations model and...

This paper presents new evidence on the association between gender and poverty based on an empirical analysis of 11 data sets from 10 developing countries. The paper computes income- and expenditure-based poverty measures and investigates their sensitivity to the use of per capita and per adult...

This paper uses income decomposition techniques to demonstrate the importance of livestock income in improving rural income distribution. It is based on three-year household panel data (1986 to 1989) from rural Pakistan. The paper first decomposes total income among five sources: agricultural,...

This paper seeks to understand how market imperfections affect the behavior of consumers in China's rural economy. A theoretical and empirical model is developed and estimated using a household-level data from six counties in Hebei Province. The results show that market development plays an...

This paper evaluates the effect (in terms of private returns) of investment in education on wages in the rural Philippines. Statistical endogeneity of education in the wage function may result from (1) unobserved determinants of education that also influence wages and/or (2) measurement error....

The first of three books in IFPRI’s climate change in Africa series, West African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis examines the food security threats facing 11 of the countries that make up West Africa – Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia,...

While government spending on pro-poor community asset creation and income-transfers could have compounding positive effects on poverty reduction, it is important to first study trends in the allocation of funds, particularly as they relate to the susceptibility of the program to political...