We introduce a fast and inexpensive method to rule out potential barriers to adopting a technology. We use this method to asses the role of exogeneous contract enforcement as a barrier to market for Kenya's French Bean export market. We survey 240 farmers in Kirinyaga County, Kenya who were...

Self management of natural resources has started to gain increasing attention as an alternative tool to command-and-control and market-based tools, but the fundamental question remains: is self management economically beneficial such that it should be promoted in the first place? This article...

Effective socio-economic service delivery is vital for alleviating poverty in developing countries.Increased financial support without complementary investment in service delivery mechanisms oftenresults in little or no impact. This paper contributes to the discussion on how to maximize the...

This paper is based on an ongoing joint work with David Sahn and Xiaobo Zhang.

Coffee consumption in China is increasing rapidly over the recent years. This study offers one of the few initial attempts to not only understand general consumption behavior associated with Chinese coffee, but to explore the viability of niche markets for coffee with the credence attribute...

The Mekong Delta in Vietnam has become an important production area for pangasius. The importance of the sector in providing an income to many households means that it is relevant to study its economic production characteristics. In this article we use a stochastic cost frontier model to assess...

We analyze the correlation between farm productivity and market participation using comparable household data from Tanzania, Vietnam and Guatemala. Each farm’s input use and output levels provide a within-sample measure of relative productivity, which we relate to that household’s level of...

This study estimates an econometric model that incorporates the linkages among agriculture, manufacturing, service and trade sectors using a vector error correction model for Poland and Romania. Three cointegrating vectors for Poland and one for Romania confirm that the different sectors in the...

This paper uses a uniquely rich project-level dataset to analyze determinants and trends of FDI flows to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. We control for the source of the investment, the sector in which the investment is undertaken, and the investment type in addition to...

While economies of scope of lending and mobilizing deposits in banking are justifiedtheoretically (Diamond, 1984) and found empirically (see Saunders, 1999), in microfinance, theexistence and the magnitudes of scope economies has not been investigated. We use a semiparametric smooth coefficient...