Agricultural insurance, defined here to include crop and livestock insurance, is an instrument of choice in many countries for helping farmers and rural communities cope with risk. This paper explores the reasons why governments and donors subsidize agricultural insurance, and asks: (a) is this...

This paper reviews possibilities for, and experience with, credit-linked crop insurance, including different types of insurance and credit arrangements, ranging from insurance sold to individual farmers to meso insurance sold to financial service providers (FSPs) to cover losses suffered by...

This study was undertaken as part of a larger learning exercise to assess the outcomes and impacts of the International Food Policy Research Institute's country programs. It reports on in-depth probing of selected successful research contributions to policy outcomes in order to determine if...

This paper documents the development of agriculture???s share in total employment in the developing world, and relates it to developments in per capita income. As suggested by Engel's Law, it finds a strong and robust negative correlation between GDP per capita and the share of the labor force...

Do small farms have a future in the developing world? Agriculture and small farms have played a major role in development and poverty reduction in the past, but changing global conditions and donor policies, and the characteristics of today's poor countries are widely acknowledged as making this...

Agricultural insurance has attracted considerable interest in recent years. Innovations in agricultural index insurance have raised expectations that the private sector can overcome shortcomings associated with more traditional indemnity-based products like multi-peril crop insurance, and...

Agricultural growth stimulates rural nonfarm activity by boosting demand for production inputs and consumer goods. But different kinds of agricultural technology promote different patterns of nonfarm linkages. To explore how key features of agricultural technology affect growth in the rural...