The eradication of child undernutrition and extreme poverty are important objectives for most societies. Countries with higher national incomes usually improve in both dimensions, but not always at the same rate. Using quantile regression, we show that poverty rates tend to decline with...

This paper investigates the Philippine government's price stabilization policy for rice. Seemingly unrelated regressions are used to examine the effectiveness of the program at regional and national levels over a 21-year period (January 1983 to December 2003). Results of the regional analysis...

This paper tests uses nationally representative data from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to test whether a household’s market access, defined in terms of travel costs to the nearest town, facilitates resilience and reduces vulnerability to seasonal influences on child nutrition....

This paper presents case-study results and aggregate data to evaluate the impact of research in African agriculture. Of 32 case studies, all but eight report annual returns over 20% and many are far higher, with most gains arising in the late 1980s and 1990s. Spurred by policy reforms and...

This paper addresses the prospects for technical change in the in·igated rice sector of Senegal, and measures ex-ante the economic returns to recent research efforts. In 1994, three new rice varieties were released to farmers in the Senegal River Valley (SRV), the major irrigated rice region in...

This study integrates biophysical simulation data with a farm household model of intertemporal optimization, to investigate changing crop-livestock management practices in the Sudano-Guinean zone of Mali. Over a 15-yr time horizon we find that free grazing on the commons remains more attractive...

This paper introduces new data on climatic conditions to empirical tests of growth theories. We find that, since 1960, temperate countries have converged towards high levels of income while tropical nations have converged towards various income levels associated with economic scale and the...

This study links intertemporal optimization to a biophysical crop growth model finding that agricultural intensification does not dramatically degrade soils in southern Mali. Productivity growth can be sustained through adoption of new techniques, particularly with policy reforms to reduce...