The moral and economic imperatives to intervene in poverty traps motivate the identification of poverty traps and their structural causes so as to inform the design of appropriate policy responses. However, empirical identification remains challenging because of poverty traps' complexity. After...

Understanding and alleviating poverty in Africa continues to receive considerable attention by a range of diverse actors, including politicians, international celebrities, academics, activists, and practitioners. Despite the onslaught of interest, there surprisingly is little agreement on what...

Fifty years ago, President Eisenhower signed the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954 into law as US Public Law 480, commonly known as PL480. Global food aid programs, the largest of which is PL480, have brought together governments, businesses, multilateral institutions...

Food aid stands at a crossroads today. Major policy decisions will be made in the coming year as to the direction food aid will follow for the next decade or more. NGO leaders need to decide soon how to engage these debates. If the NGOs fail to step forward on these imminent, major decisions,...

Although food aid may have important medium-to-long term effects, there is a glaring absence of empirical research on food aid dynamics. This paper applies vector autoregression methods to data from 18 countries over the period 1961-95. We find evidence that food aid has a pronounced J-curve...

We employ censored least absolute deviations and multivariate Tobit estimators to investigate whether food aid flows from the main donor countries respond to recipient country needs as reflected in low food availability, low income, or both. We also explore the hypothesis that donor countries...