The main objective of this paper is to provide estimates of the cost of moving out of subsistence for Madagascar's farmers. The analysis is based on a simple asset-return model of occupational choice. Estimates suggest that the entry (sunk) cost associated with moving out of subsistence can be...

Policies and external shocks affecting agriculture, the main source of income for rural households, can be expected to have a significant impact on poverty. The authors study the case of Uganda. Throughout the 1990s, more than 90 percent of its poor lived in rural areas and, during the same...

This paper has two purposes. It first considers the impact on world food prices of the changes in restrictions on trade in staple foods during the 2008 world food price crisis. Those changes -- reductions in import protection or increases in export restraints -- were meant to partially insulate...

This paper provides evidence on the effects of agricultural productivity on wage rates, labor supply to market oriented activities, and labor allocation between own farming and wage labor in agriculture. To guide the empirical work, this paper develops a general equilibrium model that...

This paper extends the micro evidence on the impact of income shocks on civil conflict using data across Nigerian states over the past decade. The paper uses an innovative empirical strategy matching household survey, oil production, and domestic and international price data to capture three...

Mali, a landlocked West African nation at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, has introduced a program to produce biodiesel using jatropha curcas, a non-edible shrub widely available throughout the country by farmers for generations as a living fence for their gardens. The aim of the program...

Despite the widespread tariff reductions sparked by the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement, borders in the region remain thick, with many hurdles standing in the way of regional trade. Although anecdotal evidence suggests that nontariff measures raise trade costs and inhibit...

This paper proposes a new method for ex ante analysis of the poverty impacts arising from policy reforms. Three innovations underlie this approach. The first is the estimation of a global demand system using a combination of micro-data from household surveys and macro-data from the International...

This paper uses a computable general equilibrium model to assess the welfare impact of commodity price inflation in Tanzania and possible tax policy responses in the short, medium, and long term. The results suggest that global commodity inflation since 2006 may have had a significantly negative...

This paper uses a duration analysis based on adoption data spanning more than 25 years from six communities in the Central Highlands of Guatemala. The analysis explores how household characteristics and external trends play into both the adoption and diffusion processes of non-traditional...