This paper is only a part of research completed for the PhD degree in agricultural economics in University of Miyazaki. The paper is subjected to further improve and finalised.

Public resources are limited and have competing demands, hence prioritization will be critical. Policymakers want to know what public spending on agriculture sector will have the largest impact on the poor and how the resources should be allocated among the different sub-sectors. This brief...

Investment models typically explain only a small share of the total investment variation within or between firms. A reason for this may be that those models do not explicitly differentiate between the decision to invest and the decision about the level of investment. In this paper, a two-steps...

Systemic weather risk is a major obstacle for the formation of private (nonsubsidized) crop insurance. This paper explores the possibility of spatial diversification of insurance by estimating the joint occurrence of unfavorable weather conditions in different locations. For that purpose copula...

While economies of scope of lending and mobilizing deposits in banking are justified theoretically (Diamond, 1984) and found empirically (see Saunders, 1999), in microfinance, the existence and the magnitudes of scope economies has not been investigated. We use a semi parametric smooth...

In this paper we specify and estimate producers’ risk preference using farm data. We allow heterogeneous risk preference across individuals and propose a specification to model the heterogeneity. We base farmers’ decision making on a utility maximization framework and incorporate both market...

Dr. George Owuor is an Agribusiness Specialist

The paper analyses how the rising agricultural prices affect heterogenous farm access to inputs and production under credit market imperfections in the CEE transition countries. Using farm level panel data which contains 37416 observations, we estimate a farm credit constraint equation and find...

The research was supported by National Natural Science Fund of China with ratification number 70873096.

Accurate targeting is key for the success of any development policy. While a number of factors might explain low targeting efficiency such as governance failure, political interference or lack of political will, this paper focuses on improving indicator-based models that identify poor households...