This study uses a unique long panel dataset from Sri Lanka to examine the mechanism of social capital formation in an imperfect credit market. The authors show that households in the face of credit constraints reduce the time allocation for social capital investment, such as participation in...

The Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) is renowned for its superior effectiveness compared with other public organizations in Bangladesh. Using the management and organizational theory framework, this paper attempts to answer the following two related questions: (i) why is LGED so...

Using an extensive household-level data set collected in Tanzania, this paper investigates the determinants of technology adoption in rice cultivation by focusing on the role of credit. We find that credit enhances fertilizer use and the adoption of labor-intensive agronomic practices such as...

What is the impact of export costs on the speed and extent to which African firms exports? We answer this question using a sample of 49,584 (mostly formal) firms across 71 countries, including 5,839 firms in 16 African countries surveyed by the World Bank during 2002 and 2003. We find that firms...

This study estimates the effect of farmer field schools in rural Ethiopia on income from agriculture. The farmer field schools were established in association with participatory forest management associations for forest protection funded by Japanese aid. We employ a difference-in-differences...

Most of the reports on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) released by the multilateral development organizations and other agencies focus either on a single goal or on a few goals and examine global/regional trends or cross-country differences. There are few comprehensive cross-country...

Taiwan was one of the few Asian economies that had emerged from the 1997-1998 East Asian financial crisis relatively unscathed. During the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, the island’s shock-absorbing capability turned out to be once more quite respectable. Taiwan inherited a relatively...

The paradox of efforts over the past twenty years to reinvent democracy in Africa has been that rather than dampening the fires of ethnic conflict, they have often made them more intense and in the past decade have been accompanied by the explosion of violent conflicts of autochthony,...

Since early 2000, a type of group-based informal irrigation for irrigating a very small area – less than two hectares on average, has seen widespread adoption among Malawian farmers. The technology, called “temporary” irrigation, uses farmers’ own labor and locally available materials...

This study uses remote sensing data to quantitatively examine the impact of establishing participatory forest management associations in Ethiopia. The results indicate that where there is a forest association, forest area declines more in the year the association is established than it does in a...