"For the past two decades, Bangladesh has enjoyed steady growth in per capita incomes enabling a significant reduction in poverty. An increase in rice productivity, achieved through a combination of improved seeds, increased fertilizer use, and public and private investments in irrigation,...

We introduce a maximum entropy approach to parameter estimation for computable general equilibrium (CGE) models. The approach applies information theory to estimating a system of nonlinear simultaneous equations. It has a number of advantages. First, it imposes all general equilibrium...

This working paper documents the construction of the 1994 and 1995 Mozambican social accounting matrices (SAMs). The aggregate macro-SAM is called MACSAM, and the disaggregated version is MOZAM. With 13 agricultural and two agricultural processing activities, the primary sectors are particularly...

Improvements in agricultural productivity and reductions in marketing costs in Mozambique are analysed using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. The model incorporates detailed marketing margins and separates household demand for marketed and home-produced goods. Simulations improving...

"Following Mozambique's economic collapse in 1986, the country began a wide-ranging process of reform, with the support of the international community. The diagnosis was of an economy that failed to maintain monetary control, consumed beyond its means, focused production excessively on nontraded...

For the past two decades, Bangladesh has enjoyed steady growth in per capita incomes enabling a significant reduction in poverty. An increase in rice productivity, achieved through a combination of improved seeds, increased fertilizer use, and public and private investments in irrigation, played...

Biofuels provide a new opportunity to enhance economic development in Tanzania. Drawing on detailed cost estimates, we develop a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to estimate the impact of different biofuel production scenarios on growth and poverty. Our results indicate that...

"With the focus of international development resources increasingly turned toward poverty reduction, the demand for reliable empirical estimates of poverty levels has grown dramatically... This paper contributes to the poverty measurement literature by introducing an information theoretic...

"The objective of measuring poverty is usually to make comparisons over time or between two or more groups. Common statistical inference methods are used to determine whether an apparent difference in measured poverty is statistically significant. Studies of relative poverty have long recognized...

"The “Cost of Basic Needs” (CBN) approach to drawing consumption-based poverty lines is widely applied and lays credible claim to being the best practice for estimating poverty measures. Unfortunately, a growing mass of evidence indicates that poverty estimates obtained under the CBN...