During the world food crisis of 2007-08, the price of staples soared rapidly. Higher food price impacts poor households more as they spend approximately three quarters of their income on food. Together rice and wheat provide more than 50% of the calorific intake in India. Apart from providing...

We analyse the rate and determinants of adoption of modern rice varieties (NERICAs) in Guinea, The Gambia and Cote d'Ivoire. The role of knowledge and information is evaluated using programme evaluation methods. Using household data collected by the Africa Rice Centre we show that the exposure...

Uncertain, yet persistent, real rates of return to capital underpin one argument for using a declining schedule of social discount rates. Yet persistency is only present in approximately the first three-quarters of the time-series of US Treasury bond yields used by Newell and Pizer [37] to...

Policy interventions designed to simultaneously stem deforestation and reduce poverty in tropical countries entail complex socio-environmental trade-offs. A hybrid model, comprising an optimising, agricultural household model integrated into the �shell� of an agent-based model, is...

The case for using declining social discount rates when the future is uncertain is now widely accepted in both academic and policy circles. We present sharp upper and lower bounds for this term structure when we have limited knowledge about the nature of our uncertainty. At horizons beyond 75...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the application of standard environmental accounting practices for estimating long‐term discount rates is likely to lead to the rejection of biodiversity‐sensitive projects that are in the greater societal good....