Ghana has made considerable progress over the last 20 years in sustaining economic growth and reducing poverty. The Government of Ghana has declared its new development goal of reaching middle-income status by 2015. Achieving this goal will require Ghana to double its per capita income over the...

The role of intellectual property rights (IPRs) has been extensively debated in the literature on technology transfers and agricultural production in developing countries. However, few studies offer cross-country evidence on how IPRs affect yield growth, for example, by incentivizing...

"This paper is an empirical analysis of the gains from contract farming in the case of poultry production in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. The paper finds that contract production is more efficient than noncontract production. The efficiency surplus is largely appropriated by the...

It has been widely documented that the poor spend a significant proportion of their income on gifts even at the expense of basic consumption. We test three competing explanations of this phenomenon—peer effect, status concern, and risk pooling—based on a census-type primary household survey...

In this study we focus on exclusion from job contact networks, which constitutes a major disadvantage for labor market participants in settings where referral hiring is common and information about jobs hard to obtain. In a mid-size town in northern Ethiopia, where these mechanisms are at work,...

"La comunidad mundial y las instituciones internacionales han dado una alta prioridad al desarrollo y el alivio de la pobreza. Los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio, establecidos por Naciones Unidas para el 2015, hacen un llamado para reducir en un 50% el número de personas que viven con...

"Trade liberalization is expected to act positively on development and poverty reduction... The traditional argument in favor of a positive relationship between liberalization and poverty reduction focuses on... [key] linkages. A large proportion of poor people work in the agricultural sector,...

"Zambia is one of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Almost three-quarters of the population were considered poor at the start of the 1990s, with a vast majority of these people concentrated in rural and remote areas. This extreme poverty arose in spite of Zambia's seemingly promising...

We use firm-level data from the World Bank’s Regional Program on Enterprise Development, covering Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania for 1991–2003. Econometric results confirm well-known relationships, such as a positive association between export intensity and TFP, which implies...

The Atlas of African Agriculture Research & Development is a multifaceted resource that high­lights the ubiquitous nature of smallholder agriculture in Africa; the many factors shaping the location, nature, and performance of agricultural enterprises; and the strong interde­pendencies among...