activity choice labor allocation and forest use in malawi this article examines the determinants of activity choice affecting forest use among low income households in malawi data from three villages are used to estimate a system of household labor share equations for maize production forest employment and non forest employment a system estimation approach is used to identify factors influencing the competing and synergistic livelihood strategies which households undertake at the forest margin results from constrained maximum likelihood estimation indicate heightened incentives to degrade forests when returns to forest use are high factors reducing forest pressure include favorable returns to non forest employment secondary education of the household head and wealth

technical change land quality and income distribution a general equilibrium analysis this paper investigates the distributional effects of technical progress in agriculture a small computable general equilibrium model is developed in which agricultural production occurs in two environments with fixed land resources of different quality the analytical structure permits not only the rate but also the factor biases of technical change to differ between environments distributional results are generated for several classes of households distinguished both by their ownership of factors and by their consumption patterns the results demonstrate that technical change produces distributional outcomes which are highly sensitive to its factor biases and to prior differences in land quality

price distortions in agriculture and their effects an international comparison the central thesis of this paper is that agricultural pricing policies pursued by developing countries produce effects which are diametrically opposite to those produced by the pricing policies of many developed countries and that the policies of both are costly in terms of global welfare in general the agricultural sector in developing countries is heavily taxed while that in the developed countries receives substantial price protection the effects of agricultural price distortions on output consumption trade and rural employment are estimated for nine countries in addition the effects of price distortions on the distribution of income between producers and consumers on government revenue and foreign exchange and the net social losses of the policies are calculated the results indicate that there are large income transfers and impacts on migration from the rural to the urban sector in developing countries and from the urban to the rural sector in developed economies

supply chain information in analyst reports on publicly traded companies abstract analyst reports are an important source of secondary data on companies for understanding a company s performance in the recent past and for getting guidance on its future performance we therefore analyzed the text of 1028 equity analyst reports of 145 fortune 500 global companies not including services sectors like it or banking published between 2009 and 2011 for supply chain related information we found that nearly three fifths of these reports contained supply chain information pertaining to inbound process or outbound aspects of the supply chain of the company at the report level there are significant industry effects for supply chain related content in analyst reports on the other hand aggregating information at the company level it appears that analysts focus on a particular supply chain aspect for a company as well as its sector furthermore logistic regression analysis suggests a link between the supply chain information provided when this is positive in orientation and the buy sell hold recommendation of the analyst regarding the company s stock

non farm income household welfare and sustainable land management in a less favoured area in the ethiopian highlands a bio economic model has been calibrated to the socio economic and biophysical characteristics of a less favoured area in the ethiopian highlands land degradation population growth stagnant technology and drought necessitates development of non farm employment opportunities in the area the model has been used to assess the impact of improved access to non farm income on household welfare agricultural production conservation investments and land degradation in the form of soil erosion the model simulations indicate that access to low wage off farm income is restricted by lack of employment opportunities since households otherwise would have engaged in more off farm wage employment than observed the simulations show that better unconstrained access to low wage non farm income has a substantial positive effect on household income total agricultural production crop and livestock production and farm inputs used are reduced when access to non farm employment is improved and thus increases the need to import food to the area access to non farm income reduces farm households incentives to invest in conservation and this leads to more overall soil erosion and more rapid land degradation even though intensity of production is reduced special policies are therefore needed to ensure land conservation and to sustain local food production

tenure security and land related investment evidence from ethiopia the authors use a large data set from ethiopia that differentiates tenure security and transferability to explore determinants of different types of land related investment and its possible impact on productivity while they find some support for endogeneity of investment in trees this is not the case for terraces transfer rights are unambiguously investment enhancing the large productivity effect of terracing implies that even where households undertake investments to increase their tenure security this may not be socially efficient in ethiopia government action to increase tenure security and transferability of land rights can significantly enhance rural investment and productivity

measuring the forest and income impacts of forest user group participation under malawi s forest co management program abstract we evaluate the impacts of forest user group participation under malawi s forest co management program on forest clearing and household income we use panel data collected in 2002 and 2009 in two districts of malawi we employ a two step regression strategy to control for endogenous selection into the program using propensity score weighting and propensity score analysis with non parametric regression we find that the program lowered the rate and extent of forest clearing we also find that the program had no discernible impact on household forest incomes suggesting that the program helped achieve environmental goals without compromising household livelihoods

is there a future for small farms small farms are seriously challenged today in ways that make their future precarious marketing chains are changing and becoming more integrated and more demanding of quality and food safety this is creating new opportunities for farmers who can compete and link to these markets but threatens to leave many others behind in developing countries small farmers also face unfair competition from rich country farmers in many of their export and domestic markets the viability of many is further undermined by the continuing shrinkage of their average farm size and the spread of hiv aids is further eroding the number of productive farm family workers and leaving many children as orphans with limited knowledge about how to farm left to themselves these forces will curtail opportunities for small farms overly favor large farms and lead to a premature and rapid exit of many small farms adding to already serious problems of rural poverty and urban ghettos if small farmers are to have a viable future then there is a need for a concerted effort by governments ngos and the private sector to create a more enabling economic environment for their development appropriate interventions could unleash significant benefits in the form of pro poor agricultural growth in many developing countries and more than pay for themselves in terms of their economic and social return but they do not seem very likely at the moment and current trends are moving in the opposite direction

forest clearing in rural livelihoods household level global comparative evidence summary this paper examines the factors that influence rural household decisions to clear forestland we use a large dataset comprising 7172 households from 24 developing countries twenty seven percent of sampled households had converted forest to agriculture during the previous 12 months clearing on average 1 21 ha male headed households with abundance of male labor living in recently settled places with high forest cover unsurprisingly tended to clear more but regional peculiarities abounded households with medium to high asset holdings and higher market orientation were more likely to clear forest than the poorest and market isolated households questioning popular policy narratives about poverty driven forest clearing

strategic group formation and performance the case of the u s pharmaceutical industry 1963 1982 the focus of this paper is on three major questions 1 what is the theoretical rationale for the strategic group concept 2 does strategic group membership have performance implications and 3 are strategic groups and membership in strategic groups stable characteristics of industries a statistical procedure is proposed to longitudinally identify strategic groups the empirical setting is the u s pharmaceutical industry over the period 1963 82 while performance differences are found in terms of market share profitability differences between groups are not observed neither are differences found in terms of risk and risk adjusted performance these results are attributed to the existence of performance variation within each strategic group a dynamic model of competitive repositioning is proposed which helps integrate the findings from the study

an economic model of soil conservation by introducing soil depth and soil loss into a simple model of agricultural production this paper seeks to determine when the private path of erosion differs from the socially optimal path considering the depletion of soil only and abstracting from the environmental disruption caused by erosion the paper argues that under most institutional arrangements the social and private rates of erosion are the same the paper concludes that public policy should be directed toward reducing erosion only when it leads to significant pollution externalities

an optimal path to extinction poverty and resource degradation in the open agrarian economy this paper constructs a model of the open agrarian economy in order to explore the tendency of many such economies to evolve along paths characterised by severe environmental degradation it pays special attention to the importance of commodity prices and the transfer system in determining agricultural activity levels in ecologically delicate systems

converting forests to farms the economic benefits of clearing forests in agricultural settlements in the amazon agricultural expansion into tropical forests is believed to bring local economic benefits at the expense of global environmental costs the resulting tension is reflected in brazilian government policy the national agrarian reform program has settled farm families in the amazon region since the 1970s with the expectation that they will clear forests in order to farm the land on the other hand recent brazilian policy initiatives seek to reduce deforestation to mitigate climate change we contribute to the policy debate that surrounds these dual goals for the amazon by estimating the marginal effects of new agricultural land on the full income and assets of farm settlers over a 13 year period from 1996 to 2009 using micro panel data from agrarian settlements where forest was being rapidly cleared and controlling for factors that would otherwise confound the relationship we estimate the effect of converting forest to agriculture on total household income to estimate the opportunity cost of conserving forest our measure of income reflects any re allocation of resources by utility maximizing households and any productivity effects due to loss of forest ecosystem services the estimated effect of new agricultural land on income is positive but small relative to the income per hectare of previously cleared land however we show that income increases investment in physical assets which raises households income generating capacity and future accumulation of assets thus while there is only a small immediate income gain from clearing more forest the long term effects on wealth are still substantial this demonstrates that given the right conditions conversion of forest to agricultural land can be an impetus for asset accumulation by smallholders it also highlights the importance of considering the indirect and long term welfare benefits of new agricultural land when assessing the opportunity costs of forest conservation

rural nonfarm activities and agricultural crop production in nigeria although most rural households are involved in the farm sector the nonfarm sector has grown significantly in recent decades and its role in rural development has become increasingly important this article examines the effect of participation in nonfarm activities on crop expenses of farm households in nigeria the relationship is modeled using a nonseparable agricultural household model that suggests that participating in nonfarm activities can relax the credit constraints facing farm households and reduce risk thereby helping households improve farm production and smooth consumption over time the results show that participation in nonfarm activities by nigerian farmers has a positive and significant effect on crop expenses and in particular on payments for hired labor and inorganic fertilizers separate analysis of the six geopolitical zones in nigeria indicates that it is in the south south and south east zones where nonfarm participation appears to induce more hiring of labor the results support the hypothesis that nonfarm participation helps relax liquidity constraints but suggests how that liquidity is used is zone specific in general the results also indicate that liquidity is used more to pay for inputs into staple production as opposed to cash crops

using evidence of household income diversification to inform study of the rural nonfarm labor market in africa abstract the labor market literature in developing countries has seldom drawn on the studies of rural household income diversification this paper draws on such studies to inform future study of the rural nonfarm labor market in africa the review of evidence provides some surprising departures from traditional images of nonfarm activities of rural households among the most striking is the dominant importance in the majority of case study areas of nonfarm wage labor as compared to self employment of nonfarm sector earnings as compared to farm sector wage earnings and of local nonfarm earnings as compared to migration earnings the most worrying finding was the poor distribution of nonfarm earnings in rural areas despite the importance of these earnings to food security and farm investments this poor distribution implies significant entry barriers and market segmentation it is probable that this will lead over time to an increasingly skewed distribution of land and other assets in rural africa

access to capital and its impact on agrarian structure and productivity in kenya access to capital and its distribution across agents can profoundly shape the structure and performance of an agrarian market economy it is conceptually useful to distinguish between ex ante and ex post capital access ex ante capital access denotes the ability of agents to finance production costs e g labor and purchased inputs costs which must be paid ex ante that is prior to the actual realization of production ex post capital access that is access to capital after the realization of the production process is of particular importance as an insurance substitute in low income agrarian economies where contingency markets are imperfect buoyant ex post capital access would permit an individual to stabilize consumption year to year even as production fluctuates annually a number of theoretical models have ex

investment and abandonment behavior of rural households an empirical investigation this article uses models of irreversible investment under uncertainty to examine the investment and abandonment behavior of poor rural households it considers the decision of ugandan coffee farming households to invest in or abandon coffee trees the observed levels of investment and abandonment are found to be consistent with models of investment that allow for irreversibility uncertainty fixed costs and liquidity constraints the findings highlight the importance of addressing volatility irreversibility fixed costs and liquidity constraints in order to increase households responsiveness to changes in the fundamentals and to enable households to recover from shocks to their capital stock

characteristics of discrete housing market model equilibria abstract a discrete microeconomic model of a market for heterogeneous housing units is presented it is proven that whenever bid rents are lower semicontinuous monotone decreasing functions of utility and asked rents are continuous monotone increasing functions of profits an equilibrium solution exists whose graph corresponds to a bipartite tree this graphical representation of the solutions provides a mechanism for analyzing important theoretical issues using graph theoretic techniques it is demonstrated that bargaining power assumptions are sufficient to ensure unique equilibrium price and utility levels alternatively ruling out the possibility of isolated submarkets guarantees unique market clearing prices unique equilibrium prices imply almost unique location decisions one may still be able to reassign households among housing units for which they are indifferent the model reconciles the dichotomy between open and closed market models by providing a robust mechanism for characterizing conditions when agents leave the market the reconciliation underscores the necessity for carefully choosing bargaining power market exit reservation rent and reservation utility assumptions in closed as well as open models without at least implicitly making assumptions of these sorts neither closed nor open models can determine anything more than relative prices the model generalizes versions of the urban institute housing market model and the market clearing section of the national bureau of economic research urban simulation model it presents an algorithm for computing equilibria and describes an application of this algorithm to the urban institute housing market model the algorithm computes equilibrium solutions at one sixth of the cost of using the original u i model algorithm

agrarian structure and agricultural practice typology and application to western sudan a typology of models that explain patterns of variation in farm endowments and farm practices and yields shows that insecurity in renting land financing constraints and the absence of insurance generate patterns of factor use quite different from the famous inverse relationship caused by labor supervision problems one might expect to observe positive relationships between wealth and yields village level data from western sudan confirm that such positive relationships are not a theoretical curiosity wealthy farmers have higher levels of output per hectare because they use more labor per hectare insurance and financing constraints appear to be the crucial market failures

the distributive impact of land markets in uganda abstract this article presents first hand evidence about land distribution and the impact of land markets in central uganda this area is characterized by unequal distribution of land inheritance rural rural migration and active land markets we show that land markets and particularly land purchases tend to reduce the initial inequality in the initial inherited distribution of land land purchases by landless farmers in their native village represent an important part of this adjustment

land allocation in hyv adoption models an investigation of alternative explanations microeconomic theory provides four competing explanations for partial land allocation to new and traditional seed varieties in hyv adoption decisions input fixity portfolio selection safety first behavior and learning testing a general model that contains each as a special case suggests that they are jointly most likely to explain land allocation in the hyv adoption decisions of malawian smallholders yet when each explanation is tested to the exclusion of the others as is usually the case in the literature competing hypotheses are individually significant results suggest that employing approaches based on single explanations may lead to inappropriately narrow conclusions

rural market imperfections and the farm size productivity relationship evidence from pakistan the subject of this article is the relationships between farm size and productivity and between farm size and profitability in the developing countries the recent controversies over the inverse size output relationship are reviewed and a framework is provided that explains the inverse relationship based on plausible assumptions about imperfections in the markets for labor land credit and risk from this framework a set of testable hypotheses are derived the hypotheses are tested on recent farm level panel data from pakistan a strong inverse relationship between farm size and yield is present in the sample even when household fixed effects are used to account for unobserved heterogeneity moreover the suggested market imperfections framework is consistent with the data

empirical measurement of credit rationing in agriculture a methodological survey empirical analysis of rural credit market failure has been of key scientific and political interest in recent years the aim of this article is to give an overview of the various methods for measuring credit rationing that are employed in the literature furthermore the methods are subjected to a comparative evaluation of their specific strengths or shortcomings six approaches are distinguished measurement of loan transaction costs analysis of qualitative information collected in interviews analysis of quantitative information collected in interviews using the credit limit concept analysis of spill over effects with regard to secondary credit sources econometric household modeling and the econometric analysis of dynamic investment decisions an explicit comparison with a first best solution is impossible in the first three approaches since they essentially rely on a subjective assessment of borrowers access to credit based on qualitative or quantitative indicators the fifth and sixth approaches allow a rigorous interpretation in the framework of neoclassical equilibrium theory the fourth approach takes an intermediate position since spill over on segmented loan markets reveals a willingness to pay with regard to the supposedly less expensive but rationed primary source the approaches are fairly data demanding in general usually requiring specific data on loan transactions even so most approaches are applicable to cross sectional household data with the exception of the first all methods surveyed might plausibly be used to empirically detect credit rationing

impacts of low cost land certification on investment and productivity new land reforms are again high on the policy agenda and low cost propoor reforms are being tested in poor countries this article assesses the investment and productivity impacts of the recent low cost land certification implemented in the tigray region of ethiopia using a unique household and farm plot level panel data set with data from before and up to eight years after the reform alternative econometric methods were used to test and control for endogeneity of certification and for unobserved household heterogeneity significant positive impacts were found including effects on the maintenance of soil conservation structures investment in trees and land productivity copyright 2007 oxford university press

optimal soil conservation and the reform of agricultural pricing policies abstract soil degradation is often blamed for the poor performance of agriculture in developing economies so too are policies which keep the prices of both outputs and inputs artificially low some economists have argued that pricing reforms will encourage soil depletion others say that such reforms will encourage soil conservation to evaluate these claims this paper develops models of the optimal control of soil erosion and soil fertility it is shown that the effect could go either way but that there are strong reasons for suspecting that pricing reforms will not affect soil conservation dramatically

environment specific rates and biases of technical change in agriculture in developing countries growth rates of agricultural technology exhibit wide variation across environments because of heterogeneity of land quality technical change analyses employing aggregate data typically capture this information very imperfectly because observation units rarely coincide with areas of environmental uniformity the author presents a model permitting environment specific variation in the rate and factor bias of technical change when information on environmental qualities is limited an application using philippine data reveals substantial discrepancies between stylized irrigated and nonirrigated areas in the rate and biases of technical change implications of these differences for employment growth and income distribution are analyzed

the distributional impact of a resource boom abstract sizeable export growth led by a booming natural resource extraction sector has recently been experienced in a number of countries this form of growth holds potentially important implications for the distribution of income and in this paper a simple general equilibrium trade model is presented which is aimed at exposing the effects of a resource boom on factor owners real incomes the analysis highlights the critical role played by the real exchange rate and also explores the consequences of a resource boom in the presence of real international capital flows and endogenous protection wherein one group of factor owners uses commercial policy to maintain the group members real incomes

credit constraints and agricultural productivity evidence from rural rwanda while potentially negative impacts of credit constraints on economic development have long been discussed conceptually empirical evidence for africa remains limited we use a direct elicitation approach on a national sample of rwandan rural households to empirically assess the extent and nature of credit rationing in the semi formal sector and its impact using an endogenous switching model elimination of all constraints could increase output by some 17 per cent implications for policy and research are spelled out

the impact of farm credit in pakistan both informal and formal loans matter in agriculture however formal lenders provide many more production loans than informal lenders often at a cost mostly loan default cost higher than what they can recover for example the agricultural development bank of pakistan adbp providing about 90 of formal loans in rural areas incurs high loan default costs yet like other governments the government of pakistan supports the formal scheme on the grounds that lending to agriculture is a high risk activity because of covariate risk hence such policies are often based on a market failure argument as farm credit schemes are subsidised policy makers must know if these schemes are worth supporting using a recent large household survey data from rural pakistan rural financial market studies or rfms we have attempted to estimate the effectiveness of the adbp as a credit delivery institution a two stage method that takes the endogeneity of borrowing into account is used to estimate credit impact results reveal that adbp contributes to household welfare and that its impact is higher for smallholders than for large holders nevertheless large holders receive the bulk of adbp finance the adbp is thus not a cost effective institution in delivering rural finance its cost effectiveness can be improved by reducing its loan default cost and partially by targeting smallholders in agriculture where credit yields better results

farm size and productivity in malawian smallholder agriculture this article contributes to the limited literature on farm size and productivity in smallholder agriculture in sub saharan africa farm survey data and the results from a linear programming farm household model provide evidence for a positive relationship between farm size and productivity in both labour scarce and land scarce smallholder farming in malawi during the 1980 s the absence of an inverse relationship is explained in terms of failures in land capital and produce markets with acute capital constraints which affect both capital and labour inputs on smaller farms implications for rural development policies are discussed

the relation between farm size and farm productivity the role of family labor supervision and credit constraints abstract the paper shows that if the performance of hired farmhands is affected by supervision from family members and if the availability of credit is dependent on the amount of land owned then a systematic positive or negative relationship between per acre yields and farm size will prevail a model with no supervision effects on labor productivity would predict that yields are unaffected by farm size the paper also investigates the relation between land utilization and owned holding size when land rental possibilities are limited results are shown to be compatible with various observed patterns in ldcs

agricultural change rural labor markets and forest clearing an illustrative case from the philippines this paper studies the links between agricultural employment and upland activities at a tropical forest margin a model of lowland agricultural production is combined with a model of labor allocation on a representative upland farm to show how labor productivity agricultural wages and the returns from upland activities determine rates of forest clearing farm level data from the philippines demonstrate how agricultural intensification in the form of lowland irrigation development led to an increase in labor demand an increase in employment of upland inhabitants and small but statistically signi ficant reductions in rates of forest clearing

urban housing with discrete structures abstract competitive equilibrium in an urban housing model with structures that cannot be readily aggregated or subdivided is analyzed in this paper the price and quantity of services forthcoming from each dwelling occupied by a household is determined by the equality of competitive supply and demand a stack algorithm is then developed to ensure households are assigned to dwellings so that they would not prefer to live in any other dwelling with an equilibrium price less than the one they would pay if they lived there using the urban institute housing model as an example the results of this algorithm are compared with those of the algorithm developed by de leeuw and struyk d s the stack algorithm yields greater price discounting of existing dwellings below the price of a new dwelling than does the d s algorithm and thus a greater potential for housing prices to be increased by a demand subsidy such as a housing allowance

land inheritance and market transactions in uganda studies on the role of nonmarket land transactions remain limited this paper addresses two questions is land inheritance driven by underdeveloped land markets how does land inheritance influence land disposal and acquisition we use a switching regression model on household data from rural uganda we find that the initially landless or near landless households due to little or no land inheritance obtain land through land markets while those that are land rich dispose of land through land sales and bequests the results suggest that a process of land equalization is unfolding within the sample

booming sector and de industrialisation in a small open economy this paper presents a theoretical analysis of the dutch disease the phenomenon whereby a boom in one traded goods sector squeezes porfitability in other traded goods sectors both by directly bi

a framework for analyzing changes in strategic performance in this paper we present a framework for analyzing changes in strategic performance traditional measures for comparing the strategic performance across firms or over time have been return on investment roi and its component ratio return on sales ros we decompose the ros ratio into four separate ratios that capture the impact of changes in a firm s productivity price recovery product mix and capacity utilization on its profitability these ratios help to highlight the micro sources of strategic success or failure they can be used to assess changes in the performance of a firm compared to itself over time or to other firms in its industry group this framework can also be used to evaluate changes in the dynamic performance of an industry as a whole we illustrate the use of these ratios with a 4 year analysis of the performance of a large manufacturing company we also demonstrate how the technique can be applied to an industry with an evaluation of the performance of u s telecommunications firms between 1975 and 1987 a period during which the industry experienced a progressive increase in competitive pressure

should african rural development strategies depend on smallholder farms an exploration of the inverse productivity hypothesis 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 observed phenomenon that staple cereal yields decline as the scale of production increases this paper explores a research design conundrum that encourages researchers who study the relationship between productivity and scale to use surveys with a narrow geographic reach when policy would be better served with studies based on wide and heterogeneous settings using a model of endogenous technology choice the authors explore the relationship between maize yields and scale using alternative data since rich descriptions of the decision environments that farmers face are needed to identify the applied technologies that generate the data improvements in the location specificity of the data should reduce the likelihood of identification errors and biased estimates however the analysis finds that the inverse productivity hypothesis holds up well across a broad platform of data despite obvious shortcomings with some components it also finds surprising consistency in the estimated scale elasticities

on price risk and the inverse farm size productivity relationship abstract the oft observed inverse relationship between farm size and productivity has elicited several explanations having important policy and theoretical implications using advances in the analysis of price risk effects on producer behavior and a simple two period model of an agricultural household that both produces and consumes under price uncertainty at the time labor allocation decisions are made this paper demonstrates analytically that a non degenerate land distribution and price risk can together produce an inverse relationship even absent any of the more common explanations empirical evidence from madagascar confirms the plausibility of this intuitive explanation for the phenomenon

supermarkets wholesalers and tomato growers in guatemala the article shows the asset related determinants and the impacts of the participation of small farmers in supermarkets versus traditional market channels in guatemala compared to farmers selling only to the traditional market channels farmers selling to supermarket channels are larger but are in the upper tier of the small farmer category have more capital and are much more specialized in commercial horticulture in general and in tomatoes in particular while they have higher yields they also have higher input use including use of chemicals in fact they severely overuse pesticides and fungicides moreover these greater input expenditures mean that their profit rates are roughly similar to those of farmers in the traditional market channel supermarket channel farmers prefer the more demanding wholesale supermarket channel because it offers lower risks and lower transaction costs to market a variety of quality grades of tomatoes all year long in turn the supermarkets who do not buy direct but rather source from a few specialized dedicated wholesalers rely on this year round supply lower transaction costs and consistency of quality

meso economic filters along the policy chain understanding the links between policy reforms and rural poverty in latin america abstract the paper clarifies the meso economy concept by defining it as comprising both the market mechanisms and administrative procedures through which policy decisions and market signals trickle down to the household level three main bodies of literature are reviewed the policy oriented literature in which the meso economy was initially considered the transaction cost approach analyzing market and policy failures and the micro economy level of agricultural household models the paper develops a synthesis of macro meso and micro economic perspectives which focuses on the roles played by three levels of filters intervening along the policy chain implications for policy and research are drawn

does poverty constrain deforestation econometric evidence from peru this paper examines the relationship between income and land clearing for households living in tropical forest regions a simple model of the agricultural household that clears land for agriculture is developed to investigate the relationship between lagged income and cleared land holdings analysis of panel data from peru suggests that lagged income is positively correlated with clearing though at a decreasing rate and because of labor market constraints clearing is positively correlated with household labor availability this work suggests that small increases in the incomes of the poorest are unlikely to reduce deforestation in this context

debt poverty and resource management in a rural smallholder economy this paper develops a model to capture the key features of poverty credit constraints and resource management faced by poor rural households we assume that due to the existence of asymmetric information and moral hazard the household faces an increasing cost of credit as its debt equity ratio rises a household exploiting a natural resource may fall into a poverty trap but only if it is unable to afford the increasing borrowing costs implied by increasing debt to allow it to avoid such a trap or if it discounts future utility so much that a balanced growth path cannot be financed at any level of long run borrowing in contrast along an optimal balanced growth path the household s asset wealth purchased inputs resource stock and consumption increase at the same constant rate however over the long run there may be carrying capacity limits that prevent the resource from improving further the household may then direct its savings to accumulating financial assets and eventually under certain conditions may become a net creditor with resource exploitation becoming a less and less important source of its income

technical change in agriculture and land degradation in developing countries a general equilibrium analysis this paper analyzes the role of economic linkages between upland agriculture lowland agriculture and other sectors in developing economies and the potential for welfare enhancing shifts from more to less erosive upland land use patterns comparative statics results are obtained from analytical and numerical general equilibrium models they indicate that the green revolution in lowland agriculture helped alleviate upland land degradation and that policies aimed at slowing land degradation through technical progress in upland crops may have the opposite of their intended effects the results highlight the need for integrated policy packages to reduce upland land degradation in developing countries

productivity credit risk and the demand for weather index insurance in smallholder agriculture in ethiopia the article explores the relationship between fertilizer use and the demand for weather index insurance wii among smallholder farmers in ethiopia we examine whether fertilizer use is profitable under current smallholder production conditions whether risk related factors affect fertilizer use and we estimate the returns to inputs in the agricultural production function in the absence of insurance we then study how these primitives of agricultural production functions relate to insurance demand the study compares a survey based estimate of willingness to pay with actual uptake for the weather insurance finding the stated and actual demand to be almost completely uncorrelated while those with high marginal returns to inputs say they would purchase insurance only those with low marginal returns actually do consistent with the stated purpose of the product as input insurance insurance demand proves to be highly responsive to the existence and amount of randomly allocated insurance vouchers jel classifications c83 g22 q12

effect of intergenerational asset transfers on land distribution in rural cambodia case studies of three rice growing villages after land reallocation in the early 1980s inequality in landholdings has re emerged in rural cambodia besides land sales and purchases intergenerational transfers of assets may foster inequality in landholdings among second generation 2g couples who having wed after the 1980s reallocation received no land from the government data analysis of three rice growing villages reveals that land received directly from parents accounts for 18 41 of inequality in landholdings among sample 2g couples although net land gain after marriage primarily through purchases is the largest contributor to the inequality nonland assets received from parents positively affect the net gain direct and indirect effects combined assets received from parents account for 35 57 of inequality in landholdings the effect of assortative matching of the acreage received from parents has hitherto been small

farm productivity in rwanda effects of farm size erosion and soil conservation investments this paper examines the effects of farm size soil erosion and soil conservation investments on land and labor productivity and allocative efficiency in rwanda there were several key results first there is a strong inverse relationship between farm size and land productivity and the opposite for labor productivity for smaller farms there is evidence of allocative inefficiency in use of land and labor probably due to factor market access constraints second farms with greater investment in soil conservation have much better land productivity than average those with very eroded soils do much worse than average smaller farms are not more eroded than larger farms but have twice the soil conservation investments third land productivity benefits substantially from perennial cash crops and the gains to shifting to cash crops are highest for those with low erosion and high use of fertilizer and organic matter program and policy effort to encourage and enable farmers to make soil conservation investments to use fertilizer and organic matter and to participate in cash cropping of perennials will have big payoffs in productivity land markets that allow smaller farmers to buy land could also increase aggregate productivity

is there a farm size productivity relationship in african agriculture evidence from rwanda whether the negative relationship between farm size and productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in africa is of considerable policy relevance this paper revisits this issue and examines potential causes of the inverse productivity relationship in rwanda where policy makers consider land fragmentation and small farm sizes to be key bottlenecks for the growth of the agricultural sector nationwide plot level data from rwanda point toward a constant returns to scale crop production function and a strong negative relationship between farm size and output per hectare as well as intensity of labor use that is robust across specifications the inverse relationship continues to hold if profits with family labor valued at shadow wages are used but disappears if family labor is rather valued at village level market wage rates these findings imply that in rwanda labor market imperfections rather than other unobserved factors seem to be a key reason for the inverse farm size productivity relationship

agrifood industry transformation and small farmers in developing countries summary this article introduces this special issue on the rapid transformation of the agrifood industry in developing countries and its effects on small farmers we review the literature from the late 1980s to the present and find evidence first of food processing then retail transformation and mixed evidence of impacts on small farmers both inclusion particularly with resource providing contracts and exclusion sometimes from scale constraint sometimes from inadequate non land assets the special issue papers contribute to the debate by confirming the mix of cases of inclusion and exclusion the cases are main in horticulture and dairy key hopes for smallholder development

manufacturing strategy and competitiveness the importance of manufacturing strategy ms has never been questioned and has been emphasized in many theoretical concepts frameworks and models there are only a few empirical studies however which examine whether these theories work in practice in this paper the hypothesis that the existence of ms contributes to company level competitiveness ros inventory turnover is tested the study is based on international data which were collected in the second round of the international manufacturing strategy survey the database contains more than 700 companies from the machinery industry isic 381 385 from 23 countries the results partially support the hypothesis the existence of ms seems to have a positive effect on ros however it does not have any relation to inventory turnover r 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

do fertilizer subsidies crowd out organic manures the case of malawi we assess the impacts of the malawian farm input subsidy program on manure use at the farm plot level using more than 3 000 farm plot observations from six districts in central and southern malawi over three years 2006 2007 and 2009 the probabilities and intensities of manure use were investigated with the correlated random effects cre probit and tobit models the endogeneity of access to fertilizer subsidies and fertilizer use intensity was controlled for with a control function approach both the probability of manure use and intensity of manure use were positively correlated with the intensity of fertilizer use a 1 increase in fertilizer use intensity is associated with a 1 94 1 96 increase in the intensity of manure use outside the subsidy program and a 0 62 1 66 increase in manure use with the subsidy program a 1 increase in average fertilizer price was associated with a 0 43 0 76 increase in the probability of manure use and a 3 5 5 3 increase in the intensity of manure use

a linear programming model of housing market equilibrium abstract this paper reviews wheaton s assertion that the herbert stevens linear programming model produces solutions which do not meet alonso s criteria for market equilibrium it demonstrates that although wheaton s criticism is valid in general under certain conditions an alternative specification of the objective function coefficients and the dual variables in the linear program produces a model whose solutions satisfy alonso s criteria finally this paper shows that the nber model is an application in which a linear programming problem computes market equilibria

testing household specific explanations for the inverse productivity relationship the inverse relationship between land productivity and farm size is an old and puzzling empirical regularity most explanations for this relationship rely on market imperfections that jointly determine the farm size and the household s shadow price of some productive inputs we use plot level data from the icrisat vls to assess whether these household specific theories can explain the puzzle the data exhibit plots of different sizes being simultaneously cropped by the same household the inverse relationship is shown to hold true with the same magnitude across the plots of each household thus cross household heterogeneity does not suffice to explain the puzzle

credit market imperfections and the distribution of policy rents this article shows that credit market imperfections have important implications for the distribution of policy rents in a model with land as fixed factor and credit market imperfections when an area payment is given land rents go up by more than the subsidy on aggregate farms may lose from the subsidy the results depend on the extent to which subsidies have direct and indirect effects on the credit constraints on whether farms rent or own land and on farm heterogeneity

equilibrium credit rationing of small farm agriculture it is often argued that externally imposed contractual restrictions lead to inequitable credit rationing this paper argues that unrestricted laissez faire markets may also inequitably ration credit a formal model which grants borrowers autonomy in credit application and use demonstrates that adverse incentive and selection effects may cause banks to endogenously impose interest rate restrictions and ration small farms out of the credit market consequently liberalization of financial markets may be insufficient to guarantee small farms access to credit

new perspectives on farm size and productivity abstract the farm size and productivity debate has been limited by the focus on land or labor productivity generally showing respective productivity advantages to smaller or larger sized farms our purpose is to provide new perspectives on the debate by bringing together evidence from a set of novel case studies in both rich and poor countries common to them are the adoption of total factor productivity tfp as the comparative performance measure and the reliance on panels of farm micro data the present article presents a synthesis of findings from five case studies in i malawi tanzania and uganda ii bangladesh iii brazil iv australia and v the united states the preponderance of evidence from these studies suggests that there is no single economically optimal agrarian structure rather it appears to evolve with the stage of economic development certain farm sizes face relative productivity advantages such as small farms in africa but with economic and market growth that smallholder advantage will likely attenuate moving toward constant and eventually increasing returns to size yet importantly small farms may be quite dynamic and need not be a drag on agricultural growth until perhaps well into the development process

malthus controverted the role of capital and technology in growth and environment recovery in kenya abstract investment in technological improvements coupled with management innovations and skills are commonly held to lead to growth rates which outpace population growth although this applies to both industry and agriculture anderson 1990 typical farm surveys in developing countries neglect to analyze fixed investments or the quality of management this paper provides a nonmathematical case study and model from kenya of the way in which investments in technological change and especially in land improvement have enabled rural incomes per capita to grow substantially with improved environmental conservation through the interactions of increased population density improved information and market opportunities population density and investment are shown to be critical interrelated factors investments require maintenance expenditures these are included in social cost benefit analysis but it is not always realized that labor on maintenance may have a rising opportunity cost which farmers take into account when selecting technologies although the major part of expenditures are made and managed by farmers government investments to stimulate and complement them are required as on the farm this requires wise management of recurrent and maintenance costs if the benefits of investment are to be lasting

financial market efficiency in an agrarian economy microeconometric analysis of the pakistani punjab the shadow price of capital in production is a useful indicator of the efficacy of the rural financial system using data on participants and non participants in a small farm credit programme from the pakistani punjab this article estimates the shadow price of capital endogenous switching regressions techniques are employed to control for the likely heterogeneity of borrowers versus non borrowers results indicate that an individual selected at random from the population of small farmers would experience a 200 per cent rate of return on the first rupee borrowed from the small farm credit programme indicating a high shadow price of capital and a prima facie case for small farm credit programmes

can unobserved land quality explain the inverse productivity relationship abstract an inverse relationship between both farm productivity and labor intensity and farm size is a common empirical finding in developing country agriculture the traditional explanation has been imperfect labor markets recently it has been suggested instead that the inverse relationship is a statistical artifact resulting from omitted land quality using a farm level data set from java i investigate whether omitted variable bias can explain the inverse relationship i show that the inverse relationship and accompanying wage responses are inconsistent with a model of neoclassical farm behavior that ignores omitted variable bias instrumental variables techniques yield parameter estimates in which the inverse relationship is eliminated and the estimated wage elasticities are more in line with economic theory further econometric investigation hints that a model of omitted land quality may be a possible source of the inverse relationship these results emphasize the importance of considering the sources of cross sectional variation in estimating microeconomic relationships