The Green Revolution converted the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP) into South Asia’s cereal basket. The recent slow down in cereal productivity growth and continuing poverty in the IGP pose a major challenge to agricultural research and development. To address this challenge it merits revisiting...

This paper presents an ex ante analysis of the private and social profitability of the introduction of Bt cotton for a major cotton producing area of northern Mozambique. Cotton is especially relevant to rural poverty reduction because smallholders often have few alternative cash earning...

The article uses the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) to estimate the population potential adoption rates of New Rice for Africa (NERICA) varieties in Nigeria when awareness of the new varieties and access to their seed are not constrained to farmers. It thus extends previous works in the...

Breeding can result in more output per unit of inputs as well as improved quality of outputs. A genetic-based technical change component is introduced into the Malmquist index, and productivity growth due to genetic and nongenetic factors is estimated for Icelandic dairy farms with quality...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

Information Communication Technology (ICT)

We use newly constructed data to model and measure agricultural productivity growth and the returns to public agricultural research conducted in Uruguay over the period 1961–2010. We pay attention specifically to the role of levy-based funding under INIA, which was established in 1990. Our...

Many studies find that areas more dependent on natural resources grow more slowly – a relationship known as the resource curse. For counties in the south-central U.S., I find little evidence of an emerging curse from greater natural gas production during the 2000s. Increases in population...