This paper seeks to answer an operational development question: how best to target the poor? In their endeavor, policy makers, program managers, and development practitioners face the daily challenge of targeting policies, projects, and services at the poorer strata of the population. This is...

Guided by the frame work of a household model under credit market failure, this paper aims at investigating the impact of access to credit on the adoption of hybrid maize among households that vary in their credit constraints. The data used in the study is from Malawi collected by the...

In Malawi, maize is the major crop and food staple. Given limited off-farm employment opportunities, much-needed increases in household income for improving food security must come from gains in agricultural productivity through better technology and more profitable crops. In the past, hybrid...

This paper investigates the impact of credit constraints on the adoption of hybrid maize among rural households in Malawi. To address the endogenous and binary nature of the household's credit constraints status, we employ a treatment-effects model to consistently estimate the effect of credit...

Using data from Malawi, this paper examines factors that influence a household’s likelihood of facing credit constraints. Households with larger land holdings have a higher probability of reporting credit constraints, apparently due to lack of secure land rights which could enable households...

This paper presents a new methodological framework for measuring the level of household access to credit. It provides an analytical framework for examining the determinants of household credit limits and derives implications on information needed to examine the extent to which households are...

The objective of IFPRI's multicountry research program on rural financial policies for food security of the poor is to identify policies and institutional arrangements that help the poor integrate themselves into sustainable savings and credit systems such that they have an increased capacity to...

This paper presents a new methodological framework for measuring the level of household access to credit. It provides an analytical framework for examining the determinants of household credit limits and derives implications on information needed to examine the extent to which households are...

In Malawi, maize is the major crop and food staple. Given limited off-farm employment opportunities, much-needed increases in household income for improving food security must come from gains in agricultural productivity through better technology and more profitable crops. In the past,...