Agriculture is a risky business contingent on risks and uncertainty. Without strong technical knowledge, farmers tend to rely heavily on heuristics and subjective judgments to deal with their daily business. It is crucial to understand farmers’ practices to provide suitable supports. This...

Economic and population growth increasingly pressure the Earth system. Fertile soils are essential to ensure global food security, requiring high-yielding agro-technological regimes to cope with rising soil degradation and macro-nutrients deficiencies, which may be further exacerbated by climate...

The need to enhance food security while reducing poverty along with the growing threat imposed by climate change clearly reveal that it is imperative to accelerate agricultural productivity growth. This paper estimates micro-level production models to identify the major factors that have...

This paper examines the effect of agricultural development on a country's overall development and growth experience. In most poor countries, large fractions of land, labor, and other productive resources are devoted to producing food for subsistence needs. This 'food problem' can delay a...

One of the key economic development challenges facing Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is its low agricultural productivity. Governments, donors, and foreign investors have underinvested in African agriculture even though research evidence shows that higher agricultural productivity would boost economic...

This study investigates the links existing between inflationary trend, agricultural productivity and economic growth in Nigeria using time series data spanning from 1970 to 2011. The results of the analyses indicate a unidirectional causality from inflationary trend to agricultural productivity,...

Das Konzept des Nudgings wird in Wissenschaft und Politik als Mittel diskutiert, um individuelle Entscheidungen zu steuern, ohne die vorhandenen Handlungsoptionen zu verändern. Studien und Pilotprojekte in den Bereichen Gesundheitsprävention, Energiesparen und Finanzen dokumentieren positive...

Rising energy prices for fossil fuels, the unreliable supply of energy imports during the last winters and - concerning the 12 new members states (NMS) - the demand by the European Union (EU) for developing National Renewable Energy Action Plans have stimulated the national discussion and...

Convergence across regional economies has spurred one of the most debatable issues in contemporary research in economics. In this paper we seek to address the question of whether, during the period 1995-2004 the NUTS-2 regions of EU-26 exhibited a tendency to converge in terms of agricultural...

While the majority of micro studies finds that rural education increases agricultural productivity, various recent cross-country regressions analyzing the determinants of agricultural productivity were only able to detect an insignificant or even surprisingly negative effect of schooling. In...