This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion,...

Cambodia has been growing rapidly over the past few years but still remains one of the poorest countries in East Asia. In particular, poverty is widespread in rural Cambodia. This paper examines rural poverty in Cambodia with a view to furthering our understanding of the factors that might...

Timor-Leste's first ten years of independence have been turbulent and a large share of the population remains poor. Broad-based improvements in living standards will require improvements in agricultural production since most Timorese are subsistence farmers and since there is no modern sector to...

Price controls are measures that can significantly affect the sectors subject to such policies. Using a dynamic general stochastic equilibrium model with two types of agents: farmers and city dwellers, calibrated to Bolivia, it is shown that with falling productivity in the agricultural sector,...

This paper analyzes total factor productivity growth in agriculture in Latin America and the Caribbean between 1961 and 2007 employing the Malmquist Index, a non-parametric methodology that uses data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods. The results show that among developing regions, Latin...

Technical change in general milk processing is estimated within a homothetic frontier production function allowing neutrally variable scale elasticity. The results show that technical progress is characterized by a rapid increase in optimal scale and a small capital saving bias, increasing the...

This paper is concerned with the measurement of productive efficiency. Farrell's measures of efficiency are generalized to nonhomogeneous production functions. Several new measures of efficiency have been introduced and applied to the Swedish milk processing industry. The empirical analysis is...

Low adoption of productive agricultural technologies is a puzzle. Agricultural extension services rely on external agents to communicate with farmers, although social networks are known to be the most credible source of information about new technologies. We conduct a large-scale field...

For several decades, the government has sought to develop the agriculture sector through programs like agrarian reform, agricultural modernization and rural finance, but farmers and fisherfolk remain to be the poorest sector in the Philippines. This paper seeks to explore ways to improve small...

Recent distressing trends in climate change, population explosion and deforestation inspired this paper, which completes existing literature by providing empirical justification to hypothetical initiatives on the impact of population growth on forest sustainability in Africa. Using three...