In Africa, most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the African context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale -- a premise supported by the often...

Land area is a fundamental component of agricultural statistics, and of analyses undertaken by agricultural economists. While household surveys in developing countries have traditionally relied on farmers'own, potentially error-prone, land area assessments, the availability of affordable and...

In targeting poverty gains, sub-Saharan African governments have emphasized the alleviation of gender differences in agricultural productivity. The empirical studies on the gender gap, however, have frequently used data that were limited regarding geographic and topical coverage, and/or details...

Across the developing world, public goods exert significant impacts on the local rural economy in general and agricultural productivity and welfare outcomes in particular. Economic and social-cultural heterogeneity have, however, long been documented as detrimental to collective capacity to...

Diversification into high-value cash crops among smallholders has been propagated as a strategy to improve welfare in rural areas. However, the extent to which cash crop production spurs projected gains remains an under-researched question, especially in the context of market imperfections...

This paper employs decomposition methods to analyze differences in agricultural productivity between male and female land managers in Ethiopia. It employs data from the 2011-2012 Ethiopian Rural Socioeconomic Survey. An overall 23.4 percent gender differential in agricultural productivity is...

Agricultural commercialization, or the transition from food to cash crops, has gained increasing attention over the past few decades. Plans for developing world farmers to focus on labor-intensive cash crops, to exploit their natural comparative advantage, typically depend on stable food markets...

Using data from the 2005 Albania Living Standards Measurement Study (ALSMS05) survey, this article analyzes the overall impact of household nonfarm income-generating activities (RIGA) on agricultural expenditures as well as technical efficiency of rural farm households. We also differentiate the...

This study uses a unique panel dataset that spans a 20-year period (1985-2005), and estimates the effect of household non-traditional agricultural export (NTX) adoption on changes in livelihood orientation and participation in non-farm employment in Santiago Sacatepéquez municipality of...

This study is the first to document the long-term welfare effects of household non-traditional agricultural export (NTX) adoption. We use a unique panel dataset, which spans the period of 1985-2005, and employ difference-in-differences estimation to investigate the long-term impact of NTX...