This handbook devotes most of its chapters to reviewing sectoral policies related to agriculture. This chapter moves to a macroeconomic and macrosectoral view of the policy framework and its possible interaction with the agricultural sector. A previous handbook (Gordon Rausser and Bruce Gardner,...

Since the 1950s, agricultural growth in East Asia (China, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan) has reduced rural poverty and created a strong base for economic development. To gain a better understanding of the nature of this growth, we examine the sources of change in agricultural...

Agricultural productivity in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries between 1961 and 2001 increased due to market regulation, economic openness, and estate reduction. In the six major sections of this chapter, we analyze the evolution of this productivity as well as the output and...

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....