In the wake of reforms to establish a free market in land-use rights, Vietnam is experiencing a pronounced rise in rural landlessness. To some observers this is a harmless by-product of a more efficient economy, while to others it signals the return of the pre-socialist class-structure, with the...

Trade preferences are expected to facilitate global market integration and offer the potential for rapid economic growth and poverty reduction for developing countries. But those preferences do not always guarantee sustainable external competitiveness to beneficiary countries and may risk...

Game theory provides useful insights into the way parties that share a scarce resource may plan their use of the resource under different situations. This review provides a brief and self-contained introduction to the theory of cooperative games. It can be used to get acquainted with the basics...

Because of high mortality rates, high rates of contagion, and the possibility of cross-species infection to mammals including humans, high pathogenic avian influenza is a major concern both to consumers and producers of poultry. The implications of the avian influenza for international poultry...

This report describes the results of simulating effects of U.S. macroeconomic policy on U.S. agriculture using the USAGMKTS model. The primary purpose for which the USAGMKTS model was developed is to determine the effects of potential changes in U.S. policy on the border prices of corn, sorghum,...

This paper uses a cross sectional method to analyze irrigation choice and crop choice across 8,405 farmers in 28 provinces in China. The findings show that Chinese farmers are more likely to irrigate when facing lower temperatures and less precipitation. Farmers in warmer places are more likely...

Studies of risk and its consequences tend to focus on one risk factor, such as a drought or an economic crisis. Yet 2003 household surveys in rural Kilimanjaro and Ruvuma, two cash-crop-growing regions in Tanzania that experienced a precipitous coffee price decline around the turn of the...

This paper analyzes changes in agricultural production and economic welfare of farmers in rural Peru resulting from a large irrigation infrastructure rehabilitation project. The analysis uses a ten-year district panel and a spatial regression discontinuity approach to measure the causal effect...

The authors explore how Latin American farmers adapt to climate by changing crops. They develop a multinomial choice model of farmer's choice of crops. Estimating the model across over 2,000 farmers in seven countries, they find that both temperature and precipitation affects the crops that...

Policies and external shocks affecting agriculture, the main source of income for rural households, can be expected to have a significant impact on poverty. The authors study the case of Uganda. Throughout the 1990s, more than 90 percent of its poor lived in rural areas and, during the same...