Improving farmers’ access to markets is widely recognized as a major development challenge. A review of the literature suggests that indicators of market access may bear little relationship to the specific processes of interest and hence provide misguided evidence of the impacts of improved...

Previous studies emphasize that shocks can cause households to fall into poverty traps and to remain there because of risk aversion, yet to date there has been no attempt to discern whether shocks increase risk aversion over time in a developing country. We examine whether shocks increase risk...

This study utilize two-wave household level panel data spanning 5 years on smallholder vegetable producers in Central and Eastern Kenya to assess the effects of commercialization of horticulture on two major poverty outcomes: household income and asset holdings. Methods that exploit panel nature...

The allocation of variable inputs among crops is a common problem in applied studies that use farm accountancy data. Standard farm accounting information is typically restricted to aggregate or whole-farm input expenditures; there are usually no details on how these expenditures are split among...

The climate change in the agricultural sector acting on multiple weather variables at different times of the various crop cycles. In several cases by changing the mean level of variables (rainfall, temperature, etc..), in other cases by changing the distribution of events. This work provides an...

This paper analyzes the sequential decision to adopt two site-specific technologies, soil testing and variable rate technology (VRT), and their impact on nitrogen productivity in four Midwestern states. The results indicate that while farm location was a key variable influencing the adoption of...

A four-region econometric model of U.S. apple production and consumption is developed. Technical progress has benefited growers in the Northwest the most, but prices there are much lower in comparison to other regions. Estimated elasticities are used to estimate national and regional welfare...

This paper analyses efficiency and total factor productivity (TFP) in Hungarian sugar beet production applying non-parametric frontier techniques. For 2004 and 2005 efficiency and TFP are calculated by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and by a Malmquist index respectively. Between 2004 and 2005...

This paper concerns the economic assessment of a nonconventional technology to provide a cheap food and/or feed for many developing countries, using wasted resources, i.e. coastal arid areas irrigated directly with seawater to grow a halophyte crop(Salicornia-sos-7). It was cultivated for two...