Developing countries as a group have experienced rapid economic growth in the last three decades: between 1965 and 1990, their gross national product (GNP) per capita grew at an average annual rate of 2.5 percent to reach US$840 in 1990. However, economic performance has been uneven across...

Two sets of issues loom large on the economic horizon of Malawi: poverty alleviation and the country's vulnerability to shocks emanating from the outside world. In this paper, simulations with a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model of Malawi are used to analyze aspects of these issues. Two...

Agricultural price volatility is "bad". But where does it come from? Remedies are completely different for "endogenous" or "exogenous" fluctuations. The recent crisis seems to indicate that exogenous remedies have been applied to endogenous fluctuations.

On the back of both a global food crisis and various domestic factors, Ethiopia has experienced one of the world’s fastest rates of food inflation in recent years. Yet the lack of high frequency survey data means that very little is known about the welfare impacts of these price changes....

Because trace minerals are important not only for human nutrition, but for plant nutrition as well, plant breeding holds great promise for making a significant low-cost and sustainable contribution to reducing micronutrient deficiencies in humans, and may have important spinoff effects for...

Assessment of the welfare impacts of low-frequency events, such as macroeconomic crises and stabilizations, are often confounded by sampling and nonsampling errors that generate fluctuations in household survey-based welfare indicators; they are also limited by our ability to explain...

This paper analyzes the repayment rates of credit groups belonging to three group-based credit programs in Bangladesh: the Association for Social Advancement (ASA), the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), and the Rangpur Dinajpur Rural Service (RDRS). Hypotheses are drawn from...

Human milk is a food that meets all conditions for an infant's nutrition security and is the most important food for more than 10 percent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa (children less than three years of age). Statistics on production of human milk at local and national levels are...