The objectives of this paper are to develop a measure of risk aversion based on the safety-first principle. The risk coefficient for a large number of farmers was positive indicating the tendency towards gambling in Bangladesh agriculture. Farmers who were near subsistence income (disaster level...

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...

The data set of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS, round 1, 1987 /1988) was utilized to analyse the principal determinants (publicly and privately) of health and nutrition of children under five in Ghana. While in most health and nutrition studies the emphasis is either on health-related...

The linear approximate version of the almost ideal demand system (LA-AIDS) model is estimated using data from the Lithuanian household budget survey (HBS) covering the period from July 1992 to December 1994. Price and real expenditure elasticities for 12 food groups were estimated based on the...

Do increases in the food supply per person in a country, i.e., national food availability, contribute substantially to reductions in malnutrition among its children? This paper sets out to answer this controversial question using panel data from 63 developing countries over 1970-1996. This paper...

Food security for the world in 2025 is possible and probable if the right set of things are done, starting now. But the task will not be easy. It is both a technology and a political/economic challenge. The challenge for sub-Saharan Africa is even greater. While other regions improved per capita...

To achieve its strategic objective of food security, the Government of India (GOI) maintains an elaborate set of food grain policies which include public procurement and price support operations, price stabilisation through buffer stocks, public food grain distribution, and extensive controls on...

At the 1996 World Food Summit, 186 countries made a commitment to reduce the number of chronically undernourished people by half by 2015. In order to formulate effective policies for reaching this goal, a thorough understanding of the location and causes of food insecurity is needed. This paper...

The 1998 flood in Bangladesh caused a shortfall of 2.2 million tonnes (mill.t) in the rice production and threatened the food security of tens of millions of households. Despite the best efforts of donors and the government, the public distribution ofrice and wheat was only 188,000t more than...