This paper assesses the causal effect of relaxing equity constraints on the cultivation of tobacco in Malawi, a crop viewed by the local population as Malawi’s green gold. Applying the counterfactual outcome framework we find that relaxing equity constraints substantially increases the amount...

Moral hazard is widely reported as a problem in credit and insurance markets, mainly arising from information asymmetry. Although theorists have attempted to explain how group lending with joint liability can be an important tool for mitigating moral hazard among the poor, empirical studies are...

This paper investigates the impact of access to credit on the adoption of burley tobacco among households that differ in their credit constraint status using a Double hurdle model. The data used in the study is from Malawi collected by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in...

Total LandCare Malawi (TLC) is implementing a three-year USAID-funded Spice Promotion in Commercial Enterprises (SPICE) project in collaboration with NALI Limited and ASSNAP. The main aim of the project is to link small-scale spice producers to high-value markets and develop the competitiveness...

If dryland legumes are to meet the expectations of reducing poverty and hunger in the semi-Arid Tropics, there will be need for a full understanding of their potential for diffusion and the barriers to adoption. We apply a program evaluation technique to data obtained from Tanzania to derive...

A substantial amount of the literature has reported on the impact of access to credit on technology adoption, and many studies find that credit has a positive impact on adoption. However, most existing studies have failed to explicitly measure and analyze the amount of credit that farm...

This study investigates the linkage between attitudes towards risk and adoption. We empirically examine the relative risk premium related to fertilizer-use among 404 farmers from Malawi and examine the relationship between risk aversion on fertilizer-use and the adoption of hybrid maize. Results...

The paper examines the impact of industrial protection, agricultural export taxes, and overvaluation of the exchange rate on the balance between the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors. Various agricultural terms-of-trade indices are constructed to measure the policy bias against...