This paper analyzes the household level impact of an increase in price of major tradable staple foods in a cross section of developing countries, using nationally representative household surveys. We find that, in the short term, poorer households and households with limited asset endowments and...

There is increasing evidence that improved agricultural technologies benefit smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. This evidence is however relatively clearer for innovations in smallholder crop production systems as compared to innovations in livestock production systems. Moreover, it is...

The use of mobile phones in poverty reduction and development has ignited much interest over the past decade. To take advantage of the rapid expansion of mobile phones in developing countries, businesses, government agencies and non-governmental organisations are increasingly turning their...

Income poverty levels are increasingly getting worse among the majority (84%) of rural Ugandans who drive their livelihoods primarily from Agriculture. Mostly driven by declining land productivity resulting from waning soil fertility, limited use of land augmenting technologies and increasing...

Agricultural commercialization, or the transition from food to cash crops, has gained increasing attention over the past few decades. Plans for developing world farmers to focus on labor-intensive cash crops, to exploit their natural comparative advantage, typically depend on stable food markets...

For Bangladesh food security was synonymous with achieving self-sufficiency in rice production and stabilization in rice prices. The country has made good progress in increasing rice production through technological progress, facilitated by private sector investment in small scale irrigation....

Studies in the area of health economics and public health have shown that low socioeconomic status (SES) and poverty are related to lower levels of health. Attempts to explain these differences have often made reference to the observation that poor health behaviours cluster in low SES...

In this paper we examine the impact of commodity price volatility on nutritional attainment of households at the nutritional poverty line in Bangladesh. We focus on the first two moments of the distribution of nutrition and consider the differential impacts across socio-economic groups within...

The social safety nets in Mexico and the United States rely heavily on food assistance programs to ensure food security and access to safe and nutritious foods. To achieve these general goals, both countries' programs are exclusively paid for out of internal funds and both target low-income...