Improving the productivity of smallholder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa offers the best chance to reduce poverty among this generation of rural poor, by building on the limited resources farming households already possess. It is also the best and shortest path to meet rising food needs. Using...

This paper investigates the potential of and constraints to a rice Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa's large-scale irrigation schemes, using data from Uganda, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Senegal. The authors find that adequate irrigation, chemical fertilizer, and labor inputs...

Asia's green revolution in rice was transformational and improved the lives of millions of poor households. Rice has become an increasingly important part of African diets and imports of rice have grown. Agronomists point out that large areas in Africa are well suited for rice and are encouraged...

This paper examines how the dismantling of coercive institutions associated with the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 affected the distribution of rents from natural resource exports. It identifies the interplay between coercive institutions and natural resource rents as an important...

This paper argues for night--lights data as an alternative data source for measuring spatial inequalities in Africa, where the paucity of subnational income data is persistent. The analysis compares the statistical relationships between income and lights-based measures of spatial income...

This paper uses simple analytical models to study high-income donor countries' willingness to pay to supply mitigation finance to low-income countries; how this depends on modality for finance supply; and how it changes as the global greenhouse gas mitigation agenda moves forward. The paper...