How do the decisions of farmers, financial institutions, and government agencies interact and affect agricultural investment and output in a region - and to what extent are these"actors"influenced by a region's location and agroclimactic endowments (for example, rainfall or the soil's...

Most work on the relationship between farm size and productivity strongly suggests that farms that rely mostly on family labor are more productive than large farms operated primarily by hired labor. This study began as an inquiry into how rental and sales markets for agricultural land in the...

Political outcomes - such as agricultural taxation, subsidization, and the provision of public goods - result from political bargaining among interest groups. Such bargaining is likely to be efficiency-enhancing and growth-enhancing when equally powerful interest groups - aware of the...

The studies and cases reviewed by the authors suggest that settlement programs are too often designed on the assumption that all settlers will or can succeed. This had led to too much centralized administration and rigid designs, rather than reliance on decentralized approaches, flexibility in...

This paper analyzes the enormous obstacles that the Democratic Republic of the Congo faces in forming a stable, development-oriented state. No government could design, implement, and finance a development program for the country without coordinated analytical and financial support from the...

Despite the growing evidence that farmers in low-income environments are risk-averse, there has been little empirical evidence on the importance of risk in shaping the actual allocation of production resources among farmers differentiated by wealth. The authors use panel data on investments in...

Community-driven development boasts many islands of success, but these have not scaled up to cover entire countries. Binswanger and Aiyar examine the possible obstacles to scaling up, and possible solutions. They consider the theoretical case for community-driven development and case studies of...

This paper investigates whether the utilization of microcredit programs has a significant impact on the income and net worth of the participants. Several micro finance institutes are optimistic on the beneficial effects of microcredit programs. Others describe microcredit with interest rates in...

Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in raising living standards and reducing poverty, particularly in previously lagging regions. Rapid solar home system (SHS) expansion in Bangladesh to some 3 million rural households by early 2014 has drawn the attention of donors and governments of other...