Over the past sixty years, most Asian countries have undergone relatively rapid agricultural transformations that helped jumpstart broader economic development. However, the changes have differed markedly in nature and speed across countries of the region. In much of East and Southeast Asia, the...

This paper studies how agricultural production responds to the loss of agricultural labor during the process of urbanization and structural transformation. Using household microdata from India and exogenous variation in migration opportunities induced by urban income shocks, we show that...

This paper seeks to explain the U-shaped relationship between farm productivity and farm scale - the initial fall in productivity as farm size increases from its lowest levels and the continuous upward trajectory as scale increases after a threshold - observed across the world and in low-income...

In this paper the core issues that need resolution before water development especially by the private sector, and efficient usage can happen, are very briefly outlined. These are Water rights have to be defined more functionally to include tradability. There is a need to move away from price...

Migration is an important risk-reduction strategy for households in developing countries. In this paper, we examine the impact of irrigation and its interaction with rainfall on short-term migration decisions in India. Our results show that migration responds to costs, and that deep fossil-water...

The new agenda in Indian agriculture should have a goal that explicitly focuses on improving agricultural systems and addresses rural development in an integrated manner. While Indian agriculture has crossed the threshold of traditional farming to modern agri-business, the objective of ensuring...

Land grabbing appears to be driven by a variety of factors that seem destined to expand in the long term. The aim of this paper is to highlight the behavior and the role of China (a net food importer country) and India (which is facing a problem of energy insecurity) in the current escalation of...

About forty lakh hectare of land is under cotton cultivation in Maharashtra. Once known as the prosperous cotton-belt; today the irony is that the state tops the list when it comes to suicides by farmers. Further, almost all of them are cotton farmers mostly from Vidarbha. At present, Vidarbha...

Increasing evidence shows the significance of de jure land ownership in determining agricultural productivity. Yet, causal evidence of the effectiveness of land rights is scarce. We leverage experimental variation induced by nudging Indian farmers to obtain formal land titles. We find that...