A rapid agricultural supply chain risk assessment, recently developed by the World Bank, constitutes a useful tool for a system-wide approach to identify risks, risk exposure, the severity of potential loses, and options for risk management either by supply chain participants (individually or...

Agriculture plays an important role in the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil. Most of its production depends on small family-owned farms, which are greatly exposed to climatic and price shocks. In order to help small farmers to manage risks, the federal and state governments have been carrying out...

Agricultural insurance is a tool to manage agricultural production risks and help producers reduce the effects of negative shocks and improve the allocation of resources. It provides a mechanism to transfer a variety of risks faced by crop, livestock, forestry, or aquaculture production. The...

To many, reducing water losses is seen as key to more sustainable water management. The arguments to reduce water losses are compelling, but reducing water losses has turned out to be challenging. This paper applies a panel data analysis with fixed effects to determine the major drivers of...

Aid is good for the poor. This paper uses detailed aid data spanning 60 developing countries over the past two decades to show that social aid significantly and directly benefits the poorest in society, while economic aid increases the income of the poor through growth. This new and unequivocal...

This paper uses the gravity model to analyze whether the varying export performance of Croatian counties can be explained by their proximity to border gates, ports, and other county-specific characteristics. The analysis finds that longer distances to border gates increase trade frictions...

Extension services are a keystone of information diffusion in agriculture. This paper exploits a large randomized controlled trial to track diffusion of a new technique in the classic Training and Visit (T&V) extension model, relative to a more direct training model. In both control and...

Market integration is key to ensuring sufficient and stable food supplies. This paper assesses the impediments to market integration in Central and Eastern Africa for three food staples: maize, rice, and sorghum. The paper uses a large database on monthly consumer prices for 150 towns in 13...

As the world approaches the target year of the Millennium Development Goals and passes into the new, post-2015 era, the development community has made a call for a new international development goal of eradication of extreme poverty by 2030. How feasible is that? For most of the developing...