In the 21st century, agriculture remains fundamental to economic growth, poverty alleviation, improvement in rural livelihood, and environmental sustainability (World Bank 2007). Three-quarters of the world's poor live in rural areas, particularly in Asia and Africa (Ravallion, Chen, and...

Rural producer organizations, such as farmers' organizations or rural cooperatives, offer a means for smallholder farmers in developing countries to sell their crops commercially. They hold particular promise for Sub-Saharan Africa, where small-scale farming is the primary livelihood but...

Cheap food has been taken for granted for almost 30 years. From their peak in the 1970s crisis, real food prices steadily declined in the 1980s and 1990s and eventually reached an all-time low in the early 2000s. Rich and poor governments alike therefore saw little need to invest in agricultural...

This training guide introduces development practitioners, policy analysts, and students to social accounting matrices (SAMs) and their use in policy analysis. There are already a number of books that explain the System of National Accounts and SAM multipliers—some of these are recommended at...

Do the economic effects of potential avian flu outbreaks justify policy attention and resource allocation in a poor country like Ethiopia? We address this question by assessing both economywide (macro-level) economic impacts and household (micro-level) livelihood impacts that might be caused by...

In many developing countries, to sustain the provision of agricultural services to farmers, many have advocated the use of service fees. Successful implementation of such schemes requires understanding of determinants of farmers' willingness to pay. In this paper we use a multivariate probit...

The quality of manufactured products made in China has improved tremendously in the past several decades. In this paper, we argue that crises are instruments for the upgrade of Chinese manufactured goods. We first develop a theoretical framework to show that a crisis, if used wisely, could...

This paper seeks to provide a consistent and comparable set of data on the trends in the provision of aid to agriculture over time within the framework of changes in the pattern of sectoral distribution of total development aid. Furthermore, it examines the factors, relating both to the...

In this paper, we employ the choice experiment method to estimate local citizens' valuation of a public intervention that proposes to improve the quality of an important environmental resource, namely, the Ganges River in India. To elicit citizens' willingness to pay (WTP) higher municipality...