Recent evidence on malnutrition and poverty raise important questions on the role of food assistance policies and programs. In this review article, we examine evidence on the economic and nutritional impacts of international food assistance programs (FAPs) and policies. The returns on...

In this paper, we explore the relationship between dietary diversity and income in pastoralist households in East Africa. Previous estimates of income elasticities of nutrient demand have ranged from zero to unity. However, these estimates are always based on the total income. One possible...

Impact evaluation based on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) offers a powerful tool that has fundamentally reshaped development economics by offering novel solutions to long-standing problems of weak causal identification. Nonetheless, RCTs suffer important and underappreciated pitfalls, some...

This paper uses an unprecedentedly rich data set to estimate the cost of agricultural cargo preference (ACP) restrictions on United States food aid programs, and to document some of the programs' competitiveness and national security impacts. ACP cost U.S. taxpayers $140 million in 2006, 46%...

Supermarkets, specialized wholesalers, and processors and agro-exporters’ agricultural value chains have begun to transform the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low-income economies. We develop a conceptual framework through which to study contracting between...

This paper explores whether there exist differences in groupwise poverty in Madagascar; that is, whether there is a pattern over time of consistently poorer performance among sub-populations readily identifiable by one or more identity markers. Three key messages come out of this analysis....

Risk and its consequences pose a formidable threat to poverty reduction efforts. This study reviews a plethora of community-based risk management arrangements across the developing world. These types of arrangements are garnering greater interest in light of the growing recognition of the...

We employ censored least absolute deviations and multivariate Tobit estimators to investigate whether food aid flows from the main donor countries respond to recipient country needs as reflected in low food availability, low income, or both. We also explore the hypothesis that donor countries...

This article strategically surveys the past century's literature on agricultural development. We organize the discussion around three "grand themes" that reveal the richness of agricultural development as an intellectual endeavor. First, we explore the role of agriculture in the broader...

Fifty years ago, President Eisenhower signed the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954 into law as US Public Law 480. This article addresses how food aid can become a more effective tool for reducing poverty and hunger and reducing costs without sacrificing any benefits to US...