Low efficiency is a problem in most developing agriculture, and is one of the reasons for food insecurity. This paper provides information on smallholder production efficiency in one of the developing Sub-Saharan Countries: Kenya. It applies Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to farm-level seasonal...

The paper analyses the impact of agricultural technologies on the four pillars of food security for maize farmers in Tanzania. Relying on matching techniques, we use a nationally representative dataset collected over the period 2010/2011 to estimate the causal effects of using improved seeds and...

This paper provides microeconomic evidence on food security impacts of privately organized biofuel outgrower schemes in Ethiopia. We conducted a household and community level survey and evaluated the impact of castor bean farming. We use endogenous switching regressions to analyze the impact on...

The inverse productivity-size relationship is one of the oldest puzzles in development economics. Two conventional explanations for the inverse relationship have emerged in the literature: (i) factor market imperfections that cause cross-sectional variation in household-specific shadow prices...

Radical changes took place with respect to several agricultural policies in Ethiopia in 1990-91. Different agricultural technologies were being delivered by several international agencies. Shifts in government policies and technological intervention would induce changes in the production...

Agricultural information and indigenous knowledge were examined among peasants of the central Ethiopian highlands. Measures of central tendency, logical explanation, descriptive analysis, problem solving tests, scoring and logit analysis were performed. The findings indicate that information...

El derretimiento y retroceso de los glaciares colombianos reducen la oferta de agua, afectando al sector agrícola, responsable del 10-14% del PIB colombiano. Utilizando juegos económicos experimentales estudiamos las decisiones sobre el uso del agua y la respuesta a instituciones que facilitan...

This paper identifies several positive synergies between social protection programmes and food security outcomes. One function of social protection is to manage and reduce vulnerability, and several instruments are reviewed – weather-indexed insurance, public works programmes, emergency food...

In recent years it has become clear that climate change is an inevitable process. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the expectation is that climate change will have an especially negative impact, not only a result of projected warming and rainfall deficits, but also because of the vulnerability of the...

This paper evaluates the effects of cash transfer (CT) programmes introduced during the 1990s and 2000s on food security in a sample of sub-Saharan African countries. We apply the synthetic control method to compare changes in the post-intervention food insecurity trajectories of economies...