The first of three books in IFPRI’s climate change in Africa series, West African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis examines the food security threats facing 11 of the countries that make up West Africa – Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia,...

The Ethiopian government has been promoting a package-driven extension that combines credit, fertilizers, improved seeds, and better management practices. This approach has reached almost all farming communities, representing about 2 percent of agricultural gross domestic product in recent...

This study examines the existing status, policies, and institutions for promoting agricultural output in Nepal, in particular cereals. In this context, it reviews the policies on agricultural input such as seed, fertilizer, water, agricultural equipment, research and extension, and agricultural...

We study the impact of export bans in Tanzania using a computable general equilibrium model. We find that although maize is an important food crop in Tanzania, its contribution to food price inflation is rather limited, and that banning cross-border maize exports lowers the national food price...

Malawi has struggled to achieve sustained agricultural growth over the last four decades. As such there is need for in-creased investment and supportive policies if greater success is to be realized. As a prerequisite to identifying the role that improved policies and investment can play, a...

This study tests the long-run and short-run integration of maize markets in Malawi using the co-integration approach within the Vector Autoregressive modeling framework. The analysis is extended to Wald-F Granger Causality tests to see the direction of causality between maize markets. A total of...

One of the main drawbacks of current methods to measure market integration is the assumption of constant transaction costs. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric extension to the commonly used threshold models, allowing us to estimate transaction costs in a more flexible way. We illustrate...

The study aims to provide up-to-date and rarely collected nationwide data and analysis on the patterns of adoption of improved technologies for maize in Ghana.

Despite recent studies on improved seed varieties estimating the adoption rates of maize in 1998 at 40 percent (Manyong et al. 2000) and rice at 60 percent (Larsson 2005), true adoption rates appear to be unknown. This knowledge gap exists due to the ambiguity surrounding what constitutes...