In West Africa, farm income is highly exposed to risks from crop failure in the drier, inland areas, and from fluctuations in (world market) prices in the wetter coastal areas. As individuals and even extended families are poorly equipped to deal with these, provision of social safety nets is...

This paper examines the extent to which Chinese farmers are connected to regional agricultural markets by looking at the intensity of price transmission from retail markets to the farmgate. This intensity is indicative of the extent to which farmers might benefit from improved marketing...

Modifying the national poverty line to the context of observed consumption patterns of the poor is becoming popular. A context-specific poverty line would be more consistent with preferences. This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence that the contrary holds and that the national...

Summary We explore the suitability of the adult Body Mass Index (BMI) to measure health and nutritional inequalities between and within households. The paper applies a macro analysis comparing female BMIs at the country level and a micro-analysis comparing females' and males' BMI in Vietnam. At...

Poverty has halved in Ghana over the period from 1991 to 2005.  Our objective in this paper is to assess how far this fall was linked to the creation of better paying jobs and the increase in education.  We find that earnings rose rapidly in the period from 1998 to 2005, by 64% for men and by...

General equilibrium and AGE modeling are both active fields of research. Yet the applied model builder often finds the style of theoretical papers inaccessible, while the theoretician hardly recognizes the concepts used in the equations of applied models. The Structure of Applied General...