Many low-income countries pursue cheap-food policies in which consumers pay subsidized prices for bread, rice and other staples. This paper addresses the issue of why different governments select different food subsidy policies, using multiple instruments rather than a simple across-the-board...

Chronic food production deficits since the early 1970s have prompted policymakers of Burkina Faso to emphasize technological research with the goal of increasing the production of the mostconsumed locally-grown cereals: sorghum, millet and maize. Meanwhile, urban consumers have been developing...

The paper reviews the theory of the impact of loan collateral, and in particular land collateral, in institutional and non-institutional rural credit markets. Evidence from three Asian developing countries is presented, showing extensive use of land collateral among institutional lenders in...

A multioutput model is developed within the adjustment cost framework to analyze the structure of dynamic adjustments in U.S. agriculture during the post-war period. An important feature of this model is that the econometric model is consistent with dynamic economic theory. Fluctuations in...

This paper investigates a central part of the argument that agricultural assistance by the United States to developing nations leads to diminished export markets for U.S. farmers. A sizeable cross section of low-income and lower-middle-income nations is used to provide statistical analyses of: (...

This paper examines the labor supply of farm households in Nepal using a recently developed methodology that accounts for the simultaneity between production and consumption decisions of the households. Estimates of marginal products of male and female labor or shadow wages are obtained from an...

Job creation effects are examined as they would apply to social analysis of rural development programming by public or private sector agencies. A synthesis and critique are provided of approaches to valuing the social opportunity cost of labor. These approaches vary according to whether or not...

This paper assesses the recent changes in rural employment in the OECD countries, highlighting the growing role of employment in services and, in some cases, manufacturing activity. In many, but not all, rural areas the secular decline in agricultural employment has been more than...

Using panel data from Illinois grain farmers, a direct test of the relationship between income risk and farm consumption behavior is conducted. The estimation results indicate that income risk significantly affects farm consumption and the results are robust using alternative risk measures. This...

This paper provides an updated review of the evidence on income pooling across household members. Income pooling is one of the main predictions of the unitary model of the household. New studies come to much the same conclusion as do past studies: income pooling and the unitary model are...