Does the provision of livestock insurance raise the unintended consequence of stimulating excessive herd accumulation and less environmentally-sustainable herd movement patterns? The impact of insurance is theoretically ambiguous: if precautionary savings motives for holding livestock assets...

Much has changed in the 50 years since modern food aid began with the enactment of U.S. Public Law 480 in 1954. Yet contemporary policy debates often become derailed by failures to appreciate the significant changes that have already occurred. This paper identifies the most important of these...

This study employs a multivariate Tobit model to investigate whether food aid flows of the main donor countries – USA, EU (Community Aid and Member States), Canada, Japan and Australia – respond to recipient countries’ needs and the extent to which the donors interact in their food aid...

Food-for-work (FFW) programs are commonly used both for short-term relief and long-term development purposes. In this paper we assess the potential of FFW programs to reduce poverty and promote sustainable land use in the longer run. There is a danger that such programs distort labor allocation...

This paper offers an informal theory of fractal poverty traps that lead to chronic poverty at multiple scales of socio-spatial aggregation. Poverty traps result from nonlinear processes at individual, household, community, national and international scales that cause the coexistence of high and...

In this world of plenty, almost half of the world's six billion people live on two dollars a day or less and the number living on less than one dollar a day has increased over the past fifteen years (World Bank 2000). Between one third and one half suffer under nutrition due to insufficient...