The most common form of government intervention in the rural sector has been massive lending at subsidized interest rates. Credit programs generally aim to reach small farmers. However, despite the expansion of credit over the last three decades, few farmers in low income countries seem to have...

Agricultural sectors in Eastern and Central Europe are large so that changes in producer prices, farm employment, and land ownership affect substantial numbers of people. In the past, food in the region was politicized. For decades, governments of Eastern European countries and the USSR offered...

In recent years, agricultural price stabilization policies have been recommended in Brazil as a way to reduce government intervention and open the sector for international trade without internalizing the instability of world prices. The proposal discussed (and eventually implemented in 1987) was...

The reform of formerly centrally planned economies involves freeing the price system, developing a competitive environment, and privatizing many of the state-owned or controlled assets and services, while simultaneously generating the social, economic and legal infrastructure that undergrids a...

Why, when given the same resources, might productivity be lower on farms operated through sharecropping than on owner-run farms? The reason is that sharecropping, much less wage contracts, cannot overcome the divergence of interests between those who till the land and those who own it. Only land...

Subsidized formal credit to the agricultural sector has been advocated as more efficient, equitable, and easier to implement than, say, land reform. But the record on subsidized credit to farmers is dismal. It shows a significant failure either to achieve an increase of agricultural output...

As governments grow richer, the share of their GDP devoted to public spending rises. Public spending in the United States was 7.5 percent of GDP in 1913. It is 33 percent today. Although industrial countries spend twice as much as developing countries, government spending on goods and services...

An important source of failure in markets and justification for government intervention in the health sector of LDCs is imperfect information. Pharmaceutical use is one area in which widespread problems have been noted with substantial misuse, improper diagnosis and problems of compliance noted...

Despite interesting work on infectious diseases by such economists as Peter Francis, Michael Kremer, and Tomas Philipson, the literature does not set out the general structure of externalities involved in the prevention, and care of such diseases. The authors identify two kinds of externality....

The author applies to the health sector an approach to analyzing projects advocated in a recent paper by Devarajan, Squire, and Suthiwart-Narueput. In the health sector, a project evaluation should: 1) Establish a firm justification for public involvement. The author identifies a number of...