The paper reviews and evaluates the global political discussions of G-8 and G-20 Member countries on food security and food price volatility since the L’Aquila Initiative in 2009. It shows that some progress was achieved with respect to better coordination of agricultural policies and stricter...

Although Pakistan's surface irrigation development has a long history, it is only about 30 years ago that the development of groundwater resources was begun. During the past decade, government policy has been reoriented towards private, instead of public, tube well development in fresh...

The Economic Research Service (ERS), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), estimates gross farm income and its component cash receipts and government payment accounts annually. Loan activity data from USDA's Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) are critical to these estimations. This report...

U.S. agriculture entered the most recent recession better positioned than most U.S. industries, was less affected by the recession than most other U.S. industries, and is likely to continue to do well in the years ahead. The farm sector was bolstered by several years of strong income growth,...

This paper assesses the impact of the composition of government spending on economic growth in developing countries. We use a dynamic GMM model and a panel data set for 44 developing countries between 1980 and 2004. We find that the various types of government spending have different impact on...

This paper evaluates the potential of Jatropha curcas Linnaeus (Jatropha) as an alternative source of energy for rural households. The plant is said to have potential to diversify rural incomes, reclaim unproductive lands, reduce importation of fossil fuels, and consequently accumulation of...

The objective of this paper is to analyze the factors that determine productivity of fruit and vegetable growers in central Chile, focusing especially on the effect of short-term credit on farm productivity for market-oriented farmers. We explicitly test for possible selection bias using a panel...

Most of the research evaluation and priority setting studies in the past are not likely to incorporate the cross-commodity effects in the estimation of welfare benefits since the cross-price elasticities are often unavailable and cross-commodity spillovers of technologies may be difficult to...