Do the economic effects of potential avian flu outbreaks justify policy attention and resource allocation in a poor country like Ethiopia? We address this question by assessing both economywide (macro-level) economic impacts and household (micro-level) livelihood impacts that might be caused by...

In many developing countries, to sustain the provision of agricultural services to farmers, many have advocated the use of service fees. Successful implementation of such schemes requires understanding of determinants of farmers' willingness to pay. In this paper we use a multivariate probit...

The quality of manufactured products made in China has improved tremendously in the past several decades. In this paper, we argue that crises are instruments for the upgrade of Chinese manufactured goods. We first develop a theoretical framework to show that a crisis, if used wisely, could...

This paper seeks to provide a consistent and comparable set of data on the trends in the provision of aid to agriculture over time within the framework of changes in the pattern of sectoral distribution of total development aid. Furthermore, it examines the factors, relating both to the...

In this paper, we employ the choice experiment method to estimate local citizens' valuation of a public intervention that proposes to improve the quality of an important environmental resource, namely, the Ganges River in India. To elicit citizens' willingness to pay (WTP) higher municipality...

Traditional authorities are powerful leaders alongside the state in Ghana. The chieftaincy has been resilient to “modernization”—maintaining land rights, allegiance from citizens, and influence in rural communities. Nonetheless, there are few rules defining their official role in the local...

The top-down public agricultural extension system in China and its early commercialization reforms during the 1990s have left millions of farmers without access to extension services. A pilot inclusive agricultural extension system was introduced in 2005 to better meet the diverse needs of...

The literature regarding consumer demand for safer food in developing countries is scant, and the general assumption is that these consumers' willingness to pay (WTP, as an indicator of their demand) is constrained by their low ability to pay (ATP). There are, however, a number of developing...

Providing safe drinking water in rural areas is a major challenge because it is not easy to establish institutional arrangements that will ensure that drinking water facilities are provided, maintained, and managed in an efficient, equitable, and sustainable way. Like many other countries, Ghana...