In many developing and emerging economies, better employment opportunities in the non-farm sector have increased rural wages due to labour shortages during the peak agricultural season. Increasing wages often cause a substitution of labour for mechanical power, but extensive use of labour-saving...

Labor markets in all economies are subject to transaction costs associated with recruiting, monitoring and supervising workers. Rural labor markets in developing economies, where institutions such as labor and contract law and formal employment assistance mechanisms are not in place, are...

Africa is not only the poorest and most rural continent, it is also the most youthful continent in terms of population. Given the large number of young job seekers that will enter the labor market over the next decade, we need a better understanding of rural non-farm entrepreneurship,...

Although non-farm enterprises are ubiquitous in rural Sub-Saharan Africa, little is yet known about their productivity. In this paper we contribute to filling this gap by providing estimates of labor productivity in enterprises for Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda. Using the World Bank's...

There is no consensus about how globalization -trade and foreign investments ?affects poverty reduction. Using household survey data, this study contributes to the empirical literature on globalization and poverty by analyzing the household-level implications of increased foreign investments and...

During the past decades the global food system changed dramatically with increased trade in high-value food products, increased exports from developing countries, increased consolidation and dominance of large multinational food companies, and increased proliferation of public and private food...

The paper considers the impact of livelihoods oriented agricultural service provision for smallholder farmers on gender relationships and food security. The paper contents that the democratization and liberalization of agricultural services towards participatory, bottom-up approaches, from the...

This paper investigates the economic fortunes of coerced vs. free workers in a global supply chain. To identify the differential treatment of otherwise similar workers we resort to a unique exogenous labor demand shock that affects wages in voluntary and involuntary labor relations differently....

Contract farming recently gained in importance in many developing countries. Various studies analyzed effects of contracting on productivity and income in the small farm sector. A few studies also looked at effects on agricultural labor use, suggesting that contracting tends to increase labor...

The purpose of this study is to present a new piece of conceptual work which analyzes rural-to-urban migration and, in the light of this conceptual work, to examine: (a) some of the migration-related evidence; (b) interactions between rural-to-urban migration and some other key variables; (c)...