This paper contributes to the existing literature on agricultural commercialisation by focussing on the channels through which households sell their crops, as well as considering the determinants of their participation behaviour. An important innovation of this paper is to look at both the type...

A procedure is developed to examine the ex-post impacts of improved maize varieties on poverty in rural Ethiopia. Yield and cost effects of adoption are estimated econometrically under assumptions of both homogeneous and heterogeneous treatment effects. A backward derivation procedure is...

We use the concept of the product space to analyze the key features of the transformation process in Africa with a focus on the agricultural sector. Between 1962 and 2008, we find that both specialization and diversification occur for the overall economy and across sectors. Our findings also...

Approximately 75% of all water used by humans goes towards food production, much of which is traded internationally. This study formally models how this works in the case of crop agriculture, making use of recent advances in international trade theory and new data on the productivity by which...

In 1985, the Commission chaired by Judge Klopper reported on the illegal import into South Africa of chardonnay clones, which turned out not to be chardonnay but auxerrois, an inferior cultivar (variety). This paper examines the Evidence before and the Report of the Commission, and the political...

Larvae of the butterfly Erionota thrax, the banana skipper, destroy the leaves of bananas by eating them and forming massive protective rolls of leaf tissue. They were first observed in north-western Papua New Guinea in 1983 and over the next 6 years spread throughout the mainland at the rate of...