International commodity Organizations can play a role in reducing transaction costs between producer and consumer. The current organisations do this partly through statistics and collecting and disseminating market information, undertaking projects and convening meetings. Of a traditional focus...

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...

The collection, primary processing, and subsequent sale of shea-based products make an important contribution to rural women’s cash income in many of Mali’s shea producing areas. Internationally, shea has recently become popular in high-valued cosmetics thanks to its therapeutic...

The civil war in Côte d’Ivoire has caused an increase in household size due to returnees and a decrease in remittance received in rural Burkina Faso. This paper, taking advantage of a rare dataset covering the covariate shocks caused by the Ivorian Crisis, examines empirically the impact of...

Paper accepted for presentation at the 27th Conference of the International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE), Beijing China, August 16-22, 2009, (Ref 690)

There is a widely held view that off-farm income in developing countries tends to reduce poverty, leading to the conclusion that policies should focus on the further diversification of income options of rural households. However, much off-farm employment might be initiated rather as a survival...

Blessed with abundant land and water resources, Nigeria’s agricultural sector has a high potential for growth, but this potential is not being realized. Productivity is low and basically stagnant. Farming systems, which are mostly small in scale, are still predominantly subsistence-based and...

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...

This paper explores the impact of the recent soar in world commodity prices on economic activity and household welfare in Tanzania, and the possible policy responses to that shock. The analysis is based on a single country computable general equilibrium model that includes considerable factor...

We used unit root and cointegration techniques to determine the long run relationship between GDP and investment for 90 countries using data from World Bank for the period 1960-1992. In the first step of our analysis we found GDP and investment integrated of different orders for 33 countries....