Strategies to reform rural service provision in India have focused on improving people‘s capacity to demand better services from government agencies. However, efforts to reform the public-sector agencies that provide essential rural services have been limited. Moreover, major knowledge...

Onset risk, the uncertainty in the onset of rainy season, is an important element of weather risk for African farmers with little access to formal insurance who engage in traditional rainfed farming. A knowledge gap still exists empirically on how onset risk may affect the investment decisions...

Irrigation is central to Pakistan’s agriculture; and managing the country’s canal, ground, and surface water resources in a more efficient, equitable, and sustainable way will be crucial to meeting agricultural production challenges, including increasing agricultural productivity...

Because many rural poor live in areas far away from markets, we investigate whether better road access could help improve their livelihood and reduce rural poverty. We use three waves of a primary panel survey at the household level conducted in 18 remote natural villages in China to study how...

Although most theoretical models of household decisionmaking assume perfect information, empirical studies suggest that information asymmetries can have large impacts on resource allocation. In this study, I demonstrate the importance of these asymmetries in transnational households, where...

The development debate in Africa south of the Sahara is often cast as “agriculture versus nonagriculture.†Yet this view overlooks the heterogeneity within these broad sectors and the synergies between them. We estimate sectoral poverty–growth elasticities using economywide...

The combination of the recent global food and financial crises has had severe negative consequences on food security in Tajikistan. High dependence on food imports has made Tajikistan extremely vulnerable to the increasing global food prices and the volatility and transmission of global food...

Farmer groups are considered potentially effective mechanisms to increase farmer livelihood by reducing information asymmetries and transaction costs. In many countries, farmers are coordinated in groups for participation in poverty reduction programs. This is common practice in many input...

This paper investigates structural change in Argentina between 1935 and 1960, a period of rapid industrialization and of relative decline of the agricultural sector. This has been the subject of a long-running debate that has exercised Argentine economists throughout the twentieth century, and...

Use of mechanization in African agriculture has returned strongly to the development agenda, particularly following the recent high food prices crisis. Many developing country governments—including Ghana, the case study of this paper—have resumed support for agricultural...