There is increasing concern about the vulnerability of poor and near-poor rural households, who have limited capabilities to manage risk and often resort to strategies that can lead to a vicious cycle of poverty. Household-related risk is ususally considered individual or private, but measures...

Adoption of agricultural technology can lead to multiple benefits to farm households, including increased productivity, incomes and food consumption. However, specific causal linkages between agricultural technology adoption and child nutrition outcomes are rarely explored in the literature....

Using data from the Malawi Financial Markets and Household Food Security Survey, this paper examines the effect of access to credit from formal sources, and tobacco plot size, on cost inefficiency among Malawian smallholder tobacco cultivators. Farm-specific cost inefficiency is estimated within...

This article draws on the donor experience in agriculture-sector reforms to analyse the contribution of Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) to improved rural policy. A decision-theoretic framework is presented showing that effective PSIAs should target reforms where institutional...

Intro -- Contents -- Abbreviations and Acronyms -- Abstract -- Introduction -- 1 Country Overview -- 2 Economic Change and Poverty in the 1990s -- 3 Nonparametric Decompositions -- 4 Parametric Methods -- 5 Conclusions -- APPENDIX A: ICES Data and Deflators -- APPENDIX B: Density-Reweighting...