This Elmhirst lecture first discusses the features of the institutional environment which allow rural people in low income countries to design, plan and implement their own rural development. These are divided into two broad groups: the institutional environment for rural development...

The study explored the response of aggregate farm output, input use, and farm investment decisions to output and input prices, wages, technological change, public investments, and climatic factors using district-level panel data of over 39 years from Andhra Pradesh. It confirms the low,...

Attitudes toward risk were measures in 240 households using two methods: an interview method eliciting certainty equivalents and an experimental gambling approach with real payoffs which, at their maximum, exceeded monthly incomes of unskilled laborers. The interview method is subject to...