Despite large amounts invested in rural roads in developing countries, little is known about their benefits. This paper derives an expression for the willingness-to-pay for a reduction in transport costs from the canonical agricultural household model and uses it to estimate the benefits of a...

This paper provides evidence of the effects of a large-scale intervention that focuses on the quality of nutritional and child care inputs during the early stages of life. The empirical strategy uses a combination of double-difference and weighting estimators in a longitudinal survey to address...

Madagascar's textile and apparel industry has been among the fastest growing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fueled by low labor costs, a fairly productive labor force, and preferential access to industrial countries, Madagascar's exports of textile and apparel products grew from about US$45 million in...

The main objective of this paper is to provide estimates of the cost of moving out of subsistence for Madagascar's farmers. The analysis is based on a simple asset-return model of occupational choice. Estimates suggest that the entry (sunk) cost associated with moving out of subsistence can be...

This paper explores how the elimination of Madagascar's Marketing Board in 1995 affected prices paid to farmers, incentives, and regional indicators of poverty and inequality. After steadily losing market share, Madagascar has been able to regain some of the lost ground since the mid-1990s....

Monitoring data are generally collected as a by-product of the process of monitoring program implementation. Yet this rich source of data have not been exploited to assess the effectiveness of the program. In this paper the authors use detailed administered data from a large-scale,...

Informal public transport has been growing rapidly in many developing countries. Because urban infrastructure development tends to lag rapid population growth, informal public transport often meets the growing gap between demand and supply in urban mobility. Despite the rich literature primarily...

Important differences exist between communities with respect to their needs, capacities, and circumstances. As central governments are not able to discern these differences fully, they seek to achieve their policy objectives by relying on decentralized mechanisms that use local information....

Using recently completed "poverty maps" for Cambodia, Ecuador, and Madagascar, the authors simulate the impact on poverty of transferring an exogenously given budget to geographically defined subgroups of the population according to their relative poverty status. They find large gains from...

Household air pollution is the second leading cause of disease in Madagascar, where more than 99 percent of households rely on solid biomass, such as charcoal, wood, and crop waste, as the main cooking fuel. Only a limited number of studies have looked at the emissions and health consequences of...