In most poor countries, large majorities of the population live in rural areas and earn their livelihoods primarily from agriculture. Many rural people in the developing world are poor, and conversely, most of the world's poor people inhabit rural areas. Agriculture also accounts for a...

Over the past decade, economic and agricultural growth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has resumed. The secular downward trend in agricultural prices ended in the early 1990s; growing incomes in Asia and Africa, combined with continued rapid population growth, are fueling food demand, which is...

In this chapter we compute measures of total factor productivity (TFP) growth for developing countries and then contrast TFP growth with technological capital indexes. In developing these indexes, we incorporate schooling capital to yield two new indexes: Invention-Innovation Capital and...

The post-Green Revolution period has seen profound changes in the economic situation in South Asia and evolving challenges for the agricultural R&D system. The priorities have changed from a narrow focus on the productivity of food grains to a need for more work on natural resources management...

For decades, earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban bias in own-country policies as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduce national and global economic...

What patterns can be discerned in the distribution of farm sizes across countries and over time? How does the behavior of individual economic agents interact with the natural environment and general economic development to affect farm size? How has concerted human intervention, understood as...

Many rural households in Asia have been able to move out of poverty in the presence of increasing scarcity of farmland, initially by increasing rice income through the adoption of modern rice technology and gradually diversifying their income sources away from farm to nonfarm activities....

Many of the financial and social challenges that face Central and West Asia and North Africa (CWANA) can be addressed through more efficient and sustainable use of arable land and water resources. In recent years improvements in land and water use have come from an agricultural sector that is...

This chapter is motivated by the question of whether development assistance directed at agriculture ("agricultural aid") is effective. It argues that development assistance is continually changing as the ascendant visions of strong global leaders interact with theories of economic growth and...

Large plantations producing tropical cash crops based on hired labor represent a sharp contrast with small family farms, popularly called "peasants" in developing economies. The family farm is an old institution that has existed since time immemorial, but the plantation is a new institution...