The European Union has a common rural development policy, motivated by the fact that more than 90% of the entire European territory can be classified as rural and 56% of European citizens live in rural areas. Each Member State sets out a Rural Development Programme (RDP) focused on three main...

The last decade has seen a resurgence of parastatal crop marketing institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, many of which cite improving food security and incomes as key goals. However, there is limited empirical evidence on the welfare effects of these programs. This article considers one such...

This study utilizes a panel fixed effects model to explore the economic impact of hurricanes on local crop production in Jamaica using quarterly 1999-2008 micro level data. We find, in general, that hurricanes will have a negative impact on production but not for crops grown below ground. The...

African agriculture's importance for sustainable development is well appreciated. Indeed, recent years have seen a thorough reappraisal of the sector. What are less well understood, however, are the drivers that reallocate scarce human and physical resources across occupations and space, and...

In dynamic resource allocation models, the non-existence of voting equilibria is a generic phenomenon due to the multi-dimensionality of the choice space even with agents heterogeneous only in their discount factors. Nevertheless, at each point of time there may exist a "median voter" whose...

Energy and agricultural commodities and markets have been examined extensively, albeit separately, for a number of years. In the energy literature, the returns, volatility and volatility spillovers (namely, the delayed effect of a returns shock in one asset on the subsequent volatility or...

While productivity growth in electricity generation is associated with multiple positive effects from an economic and environmental perspective, measuring it is challenging. This paper proposes a framework to estimate and decompose productivity growth for a sector characterized by multiple...

Small farms are the largest employment and small business group among the poor. Their businesses use mostly labor and local resources and face local constraints, but at the same time, they are affected by increasingly complex national and global economic changes, which lead to shifts in...

This study examines the impact of multiple shocks on assets by employing two waves of a panel data set of 360 rural households in three agro-ecological zones in Kenya. To control for unobserved heterogeneity, a "within" household fixed effects model was employed. One major finding is that...

An important question in development studies is how abundance of natural resources affects long-term economic growth. No consensus answer, however, has yet emerged, with approximately 40% of empirical papers finding a negative effect, 40% finding no effect, and 20% finding a positive effect....