technology adoption impact and extension in developing countries agriculture a review of the recent literature given the stagnant agricultural productivity and persistent food insecurity in low income countries notably in sub saharan africa ssa there has been continued interest in the adoption of new technology and its impact on productivity in these regions interestingly there are signs of green revolution in maize and rice in ssa reflected in sharply increasing yield trends in advanced regions to increase crop yields and sustain yield gains recent case studies of technology adoption unanimously recommend the adoption of integrated farm management systems particularly in ssa on the other hand since the 2010s there have been increasing numbers of studies on social network or farmer to farmer technology extension these studies explore more efficient extension systems than traditional public sector extension approaches this article reviews both recent case studies of technology adoption and its productivity impacts as well as studies on agricultural extension to identify common findings shortcomings and major remaining issues

world poverty and the role of agricultural technology direct and indirect effects agricultural technology can help reduce poverty through direct and indirect effects direct effects are gains for the adopters while indirect effects are gains derived from adoption by others leading to lower food prices employment creation and growth linkage effects conceptualising and measuring these effects is highly complex yet is needed for each region if technology is to be used as an effective instrument for poverty reduction we propose a methodology for doing this in the context of computable general equilibrium modelling and apply it to archetype models for africa asia and latin america results show that the dominant effect of technology on poverty is through direct effects in africa indirect agricultural employment effects in asia and linkage effects through the rest of the economy in latin america in each case increasing the poverty reduction effect through the targeting of technology across crops and through complementary rural development programmes is also explored

technical efficiency and productivity of maize producers in eastern ethiopia a study of farmers within and outside the sasakawa global 2000 project abstract this paper investigates the technical efficiency of two samples of maize producers in eastern ethiopia one involving farmers within the sasakawa global 2000 project and the other involving farmers outside this program the study uses stochastic frontier production functions in which the technical inefficiency effects are assumed to be functions of the age and education of the farmers together with the time spent by extension advisers in assisting farmers in their agricultural production operations for the cross sectional data obtained for the 1995 96 agricultural year cobb douglas stochastic frontiers are found to be adequate representations of the data given the specifications of the translog stochastic frontiers for farmers within and outside the project the empirical results indicate that farmers within the sg 2000 project are more technically efficient than farmers outside the project relative to their respective technologies the mean frontier output of maize for farmers within the sg 2000 project is significantly greater than that for the farmers outside the project

devaluation fiscal deficits and the real exchange rate this article examines the use of fiscal policies to sustain the effects of a nominal devaluation on the real exchange rate it is shown that the magnitude of the change in the real exchange rate depends not only on the size of the devaluation and the degree of fiscal adjustment but also on the means by which the fiscal deficit is reduced the change in the nominal exchange rate necessary to maintain the depreciation of the real exchange rate will depend on whether the fiscal deficit is eliminated by increasing taxes or by reducing government expenditures on traded and nontraded goods the required depreciation of the domestic currency will be larger if the fiscal deficit is reduced by increasing taxes than it will be if the deficit is cut by lowering government expenditures further the depreciation would be smaller if the cuts in expenditure fell on traded rather than nontraded goods this result implies that the authorities must ensure consistency between exchange rate action and policies to reduce fiscal imbalances in order to achieve a desired level of the real exchange rate necessary to attain balance of payments equilibrium the real exchange rate represents a key relative price in the economy and policies to change it are often the centerpiece of adjustment programs designed to improve international competitiveness and shift resources toward the production of tradable goods consequently it is critical for policymakers to have some idea of the magnitude and time path of the likely response of the real exchange rate to nominal exchange rate action it is a well accepted proposition however that a nominal devaluation will only have a transitory effect on the real exchange rate in the long run domestic wages and prices will rise by the full amount of the devaluation and the real exchange rate will return to its original level to alter the real exchange rate on a permanent basis therefore devaluation has to be supplemented by policies that restrain the increase in domestic factor costs that results from a devaluation generally speaking the effects of a devaluation on the real exchange rate can

poverty and household size the widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy the scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view we find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0 6 this turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales by contrast some measures of child nutritional status indicate an elasticity of unity consideration of the weight attached to child versus adult welfare may help resolve the non robustness of demographic profiles of poverty excerpt

ex post impacts of improved maize varieties on poverty in rural ethiopia public agricultural research has been conducted in africa for decades while many studies have examined its aggregate impacts few have investigated how it affects the poor this paper helps fill this gap by applying a new procedure to explore the ex post impacts of improved maize varieties on poverty in rural ethiopia plot level yield and cost changes due to adoption are first estimated using instrumental variable and marginal treatment effect techniques where possible heterogeneity is carefully accounted for a backward derivation procedure is then developed to link treatment effect estimates with an economic surplus model to identify the counterfactual household income that would have existed without improved maize varieties poverty impacts are finally estimated by exploiting the differences between observed and counterfactual income distributions improved maize varieties have led to a 0 8 1 3 percentage drop of poverty headcount ratio and relative reductions of poverty depth and severity however poor producers benefit the least from adoption due to the smallness of their land holdings

aggregate sources of relative price variability among agricultural commodities a measure of relative price variability among forty seven agricultural commodities is developed for the period 1962 to 1987 econometric models are used to explore the effects of macroeconomic instability on relative price variability within the agricultural sector the results show that these relative prices are more variable when actual and unanticipated inflation rates are higher they may also be more variable during periods when real shocks to the macroeconomy are relatively large thus monetary and fiscal events are not neutral with respect to the agricultural sector because macroeconomic instability appears to create instability and increased uncertainty in agricultural markets

estimating the productivity impacts of technology adoption in the presence of misclassification this article examines the impact that misreporting adoption status has on the identification and estimation of causal effects on productivity in particular by comparing measurement error ridden self reported adoption data with measurement error free dna fingerprinted adoption data we investigate the extent to which such errors bias the causal effects of adoption on productivity taking dna fingerprinted adoption data as a benchmark we find 25 false negatives and 10 false positives in farmers responses our results show that misreporting of adoption status is not exogenous to household characteristics and produces a bias of about 22 percentage points in the productivity impact of adoption ignoring inherent behavioral adjustments of farmers based on perceived adoption status has a bias of 13 percentage points the results of this article underscore the crucial role that correct measurement of adoption plays in designing policy interventions that address constraints to technology adoption in agriculture

the developing world is poorer than we thought but no less successful in the fight against poverty a new data set on national poverty lines is combined with new price data and almost 700 household surveys to estimate absolute poverty measures for the developing world we find that 25 of the population lived in poverty in 2005 as judged by what poverty typically means in the world s poorest countries this is higher than past estimates substantial overall progress is still indicated the corresponding poverty rate was 52 in 1981 but progress was very uneven across regions the trends over time and regional profile are robust to various changes in methodology though precise counts are more sensitive

a monetary analysis of food price determination erratic food price movements during the 1970s have received much attention in recent literature salathe and boehm found that movements in retail food prices since 1970 have been substantially more volatile than in earlier periods and that the food component of the consumer price index cpi has often displayed an annual rate of change different from that of the total cpi such changes in agricultural prices reflect low price elasticities for food products and the difficulty of predicting weather patterns and their effects on farm output research interest stems from relatively larger recent price changes caused by persistent general inflation and unexpected supply disruptions several recent studies of retail food prices are based on cost push theories these models posit that as input costs faced by food manufacturers rise the increases are passed through to consumers in the form of higher product prices to model cost push behavior changes in components of the marketing bill such as processing packaging and transportation costs are measured and related to subsequent changes in retail product prices examples of such empirical studies are those by lamm heien and lamm and westcott however these models represent only one perspective of the pricing process this paper suggests the use of a family of alternative models in particular by making a clear distinction between changes in nominal and real values a different set of variables is selected to measure each component of overall price change it is argued that not all models can explain behavior of both real and nominal price changes

credit constraints interest rates and agricultural prices although there are some earlier contributions the paper by schuh the exchange rate and u s agriculture touched off a controversy within the agricultural economics profession that has yet to be resolved in its original form the controversy centered around whether or not exchange rates had a significant effect on u s agricultural prices exports and farm income later the argument seems to have moved one step further back along the logical line to a question of whether or not monetary phenomena can have real effects thus to some extent agricultural economists interested in this issue have polarized themselves into two camps that closely resemble what for lack of a better term might be called keynesians and non keynesians this paper is not an attempt to settle this dispute indeed if observations based on developments in macroeconomics offer any guide i think that the dispute is based upon such fundamentally different perceptions of the world that no single paper or series of papers will ever settle the issue rather in this paper i want to discuss what i perceive to be one of the key issues in this debate are agricultural prices more flexible than nonagricultural prices my choice of this topic is somewhat personal and i choose it mainly because i feel that if monetary variables are going to have real effects these effects can only be short run in nature and are best explained by differential price adjustments the argument is simple suppose you have two goods a and b and suppose that good a is priced administratively a la gardiner means while good b s price is perfectly flexible now suppose further that the money supply is artificially inflated in the current instances the price of a will not adjust instantaneously while the price of b is free to adjust if the price of b does adjust as a result of an increase in the money s pply then manipulation of the money supply has caused a real change since the price ratio between a and b changes in this case therefore we can also expect other real changes in the economy but such effects should be only short run in nature the real effects set in motion by the relative price change should ultimately be self correcting under the usual ceteris paribus assumptions since even administered prices have to adjust in the long run to maintain entrepreneurial profitability however even if such issues of relative flexibility are not a central element in the discussion that is germane to the present paper and the associated controversy the general belief that agricultural prices are more flexible than nonagricultural prices is firmly rooted in the stylized facts of agricultural economics moreover the high degree of instability of agricultural prices is often given as the primary argument for extensive government interference in the agricultural economy in what follows i will first offer a brief survey of some of the studies of the effects of monetary phenomena on u s agricultural prices exports and incomes in this part of the paper i specifically exclude papers of what i think of as the is inflation neutral with

the ghost of financing gap testing the growth model used in the international financial institutions abstract the harrod domar growth model supposedly died long ago still today economists in the international financial institutions ifis apply the harrod domar model to calculate short run investment requirements for a target growth rate they then calculate a financing gap between the required investment and available resources and often fill the financing gap with foreign aid the financing gap model has two simple predictions 1 aid will go into investment one for one and 2 there will be a fixed linear relationship between growth and investment in the short run the data soundly reject these two predictions of the financing gap model

impact of conservation agriculture technology on household welfare in zambia this article examines the determinants and impact of conservation agriculture ca technology adoption on farm household welfare in zambia to account for selection bias from both observable and unobservable factors an endogenous switching regression model is employed to estimate the impact of the technology on continuous outcomes like farm output throughput accounting ratio tar poverty gap and severity of poverty a recursive bivariate probit model is however used for the estimation of impact of adoption on a binary outcome like poverty headcount the empirical findings demonstrate that the adoption of ca technology increases maize output and farm tar and reduces household poverty moreover the results reveal that farmers years of schooling social networks access to credit extension services and machinery as well as soil quality positively influence adoption of ca technology

impacts of food crop improvement research evidence from sub saharan africa abstract the paper reviews and summarizes evidences of impacts of crop improvement research of major food crops in africa it provides evidence of increased availability of improved varieties of major food crops to farmers in africa increased food production in regions where adoption has occurred and positive returns to research investment indicating that agricultural research in africa has had productivity increasing impacts on its agriculture however research impacts vary considerably across countries and regions within a country as a result of agroclimatic factors and policy environment which affects the supply of seeds and other inputs and the continuity and stability of research investments the paper points to a number of important issues both internal and external to the agricultural research system organization that need to be addressed if agricultural research is to provide a stimulus for modernizing african agriculture given the small size of food crop production area in many african countries it is important for research systems to take full advantage of research spill ins from regional and international research organizations there is a great potential to increase the efficiency of research systems by improving the coordination among members of national research systems and continuing improvements in collaborations between narss and regional and international organizations

ex ante agricultural research evaluation with site specific technology generation the case of sorghum in kenya abstract agricultural commodity research has very site specific productivity impacts crucial determinants of the magnitude and distribution of research benefits include agroecological conditions for technology generation and adoption as well as commodity market structure this paper presents a process for ex ante research evaluation which accounts for these factors with a dynamic spatial multi market model simulation results based on sorghum research in kenya demonstrate that potential research benefits can vary dramatically across program research target zones in kenya however population induced demand growth not technological development will have the greatest influence on future sorghum markets

the interruption of productivity growth in the united states cessation or near cessation of productivity growth in the united states started in i974 and has continued until now the change from the previous steady advance was abrupt and its timing unmistakable although retardation earlier in the postwar period can be identified it was small readily explained and not particularly worrisome this paper will therefore focus on comparisons of changes from i973 to i98i with changes from i948 to i973

agricultural technology crop income and poverty alleviation in uganda summary this paper evaluates the ex post impact of adopting improved groundnut varieties on crop income and poverty in rural uganda the study utilizes cross sectional data of 927 households collected in 2006 from seven districts in uganda using propensity score matching methods we find that adopting improved groundnut varieties technology significantly increases crop income and reduces poverty the positive and significant impact on crop income is consistent with the perceived role of new agricultural technologies in reducing rural poverty through increased farm household income this study supports broader investment in agriculture research to address vital development challenges reaching the poor with better technologies however requires policy support for improving extension efforts access to seeds and market outlets that simulate adoption

soil and water conservation technology adoption and labour allocation evidence from ethiopia abstract soil and water conservation swc technologies are viewed as part of a solution to increase the resilience of the agriculture sector to climate change research has shown that swc technologies are effective at controlling erosion and increasing yields but are labour intensive however the quantification of their labour impacts remains an important research gap in this paper i estimate the labour impacts of adopting swc technologies in ethiopia using an endogenous switching regression model esrm i find that adopting swc technologies increases plot level adult labour by 35 impacts on child labour depend on the number of adults in the household specifically estimated impacts range from 29 for the full sample to 78 for the sub sample of households with fewer than three adults i also find some evidence of negative self selection in the case of child labour which suggests that adopters have a comparative advantage since they are able to adopt the technology with smaller impacts on child labour as a result of unobservable characteristics the estimated labour impacts also provide a plausible explanation for why farmers may not adopt swc technologies despite their economic profitability ultimately the paper argues that understanding the heterogeneity and magnitude of the labour impacts is an important part of understanding potential trade offs of adopting swc technologies given the estimated labour impacts policies that relax the household s labour constraints could be an effective mechanism to spur the adoption of labour intensive environmentally agricultural practices while minimizing potential negative effects

agricultural technology adoption and poverty reduction a propensity score matching analysis for rural bangladesh this study aims at shedding some light on the potential impact of agricultural technology adoption on poverty alleviation strategies it does so through an empirical investigation of the relationship between technological change of the green revolution type and wellbeing of smallholder farm households in two rural bangladeshi regions as technology adoption is not randomly assigned but there is self selection into treatment the paper tackles a methodological issue in assessing the causal effect of technology on farm household wellbeing through the non parametric p score matching analysis it pursues a targeted evaluation of whether adopting a modern seed technology causes resource poor farmers to improve their income and decrease the propensity to fall below the poverty line it finds a robust and positive effect of agricultural technology adoption on farm household wellbeing suggesting that there is a large scope for enhancing the role of agricultural technology in directly contributing to poverty alleviation 2006 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

the impact of improved maize varieties on poverty in mexico a propensity score matching approach summary this study examines the adoption of improved maize germplasm in oaxaca and chiapas in mexico it employs a propensity score matching approach to analyze the impact of the adoption of improved maize varieties on household income and poverty reduction using cross sectional data of 325 farmers from the two regions the findings reveal a robust positive and significant impact of improved maize variety adoption on farm household welfare measured by per capita expenditure and poverty reduction specifically the empirical results suggest that adoption of improved maize varieties helped raise household per capita expenditure by an average of 136 173 mexican pesos thereby reducing their probability of falling below the poverty line by roughly 19 31

the poverty impacts of improved cowpea varieties in nigeria a counterfactual analysis adoption of improved agricultural technologies has long been recognized as critical for reducing poverty through increased productivity incomes and asset accumulation using a nationally representative survey data from a sample of over 1500 households in nigeria this paper evaluates the impacts of adoption of improved cowpea varieties on income and asset poverty reduction using an endogenous switching regression model the results showed that adoption of improved cowpea varieties increased per capita household income and asset ownership by 17 and 24 percentage points respectively the results based on the observed and counterfactual income and asset distributions further showed that adoption reduced both income poverty and asset poverty by 5 percentage points the paper concludes with a discussion of the policy options for increasing adoption and impacts of improved cowpea varieties in nigeria

education and innovation adoption in agriculture evidence from hybrid rice in china this paper uses the diffusion of f1 hybrid rice as a case for examining the effects of education on the adoption of new technology in china a simple behavioral model that treats the adoption of hybrid rice as a portfolio selection problem is presented the implications of the model are tested with farm level data collected from a sample of 500 households in hunan province the results from a dichotomous probit model and a two limit tobit model are consistent with the hypothesis that education has a positive impact on the adoption of new technology

the impact of agricultural extension and roads on poverty and consumption growth in fifteen ethiopian villages this article investigates whether public investments that led to improvements in road quality and increased access to agricultural extension services led to faster consumption growth and lower rates of poverty in rural ethiopia estimating an instrumental variables model using generalized methods of moments and controlling for household fixed effects we find evidence of positive impacts with meaningful magnitudes receiving at least one extension visit reduces headcount poverty by 9 8 percentage points and increases consumption growth by 7 1 percentage points access to all weather roads reduces poverty by 6 9 percentage points and increases consumption growth by 16 3 percentage points these results are robust to changes in model specification and estimation methods

welfare effects of maize technologies in marginal and high potential regions of kenya this paper describes the findings of a study that used a multi market model to assess the potential impact of improved maize technologies on the welfare of various types of rural and urban households in kenya the modelling results indicate that technologies developed for high potential regions are likely to have more profound aggregate impacts on maize production and lead to greater reductions in import demand if prices are controlled or maize prices if maize prices are flexible technology adoption in high potential regions is likely to have substantially greater positive impacts on aggregate real incomes but inferior income distributional outcomes compared to technology adoption in marginal regions

theories of institutions and economic reform in africa abstract the paper presents and critically examines the theories of institutions that can be used as a guide to economic reform in africa three approaches to institutions are initially discussed the model of structural adjustment new institutional economics and the old institutionalist tradition five institutions related to the development of markets in africa are examined from the three perspectives the institutions include property rights including their role in agriculture money and financial institutions prices and markets firms and industrial organization and markets and states the main conclusion of the paper is that structural adjustment due to its neoclassical roots is basically ainstitutional and therefore ill equipped to promote the development of markets in africa while new institutionalism provides interesting insights it is also limited by its neoclassical economic foundations thus if african governments desire to promote market reform they would be best advised to consult the old institutionalist literature particularly the very interesting recent work of proponents of this tradition

stabilization the political economy of overkill abstract this paper considers whether national and international aspects of the imf s stabilization programmes during the 1970s and early 1980s have resulted in a process of overkill or in other words a process of economic retrenchment which went much further than was strictly necessary in terms of what could have been regarded as reasonable objectives in the international context the author describes how the attack on inflation has become an end in itself at the expense of other stated objectives of the imf thus creating a distortion of its priorities the paper discusses errors of diagnosis which have led to this disorientation and explains why deflationary policies should not be regarded as a panacea the paper then considers the nead for equity and efficiency in the distribution of the political and economic costs of adjustment the next section of this paper discusses the assumptions underlying the imf s treatment of fund members and to what extent even handedness in the application of stabilization measures may result in inequality of burden sharing among borrowers problems related to monetarist theories and the consequent policies are examined followed by a consideration of the dangers involved in devising straightforward performance criteria in the form of precise monetary targets that can readily be monitored by the imf this means of evaluating the national adjustment policies success is seen to be unsatisfactory viz the frequency of stand by arrangement breakdowns and mistakes in forecasting the paper concludes that the concept of unilateral adjustment is not an acceptable basis for imf supervision of the international monetary system in addition care should be taken to avoid overkill in determining the degree and character of adjustment needed in stabilization programmes one possible solution to the extra burden imposed on the ldcs might be a liberalization of the compensatory financing facility with the objective of applying the same kind of regime to imports as to exports

agricultural technology adoption and household welfare measurement and evidence abstract previous studies on the adoption and impacts of improved crop varieties have relied on self reported adoption status of the surveyed households however in the presence of weak variety maintenance and poorly functioning seed certification system measurement errors in self reported adoption status can be considerable this paper investigates how such measurement errors can lead to biased welfare estimates using dna fingerprinting based varietal identification as a benchmark we find that misclassification in self reported adoption status is considerable with significant false negative and positive response rates we empirically show that such measurement errors lead to welfare estimates that are biased towards zero and substantially understate the poverty reduction effects of adoption while the empirical evidence suggests attenuation bias our theoretical exposition and simulations demonstrate that upward bias and sign reversal effects are also possible the results point to the need for improved monitoring of the diffusion process of improved varieties through innovative adoption data collection approaches to generate robust evidence for prioritizing and justifying investments in agricultural research and extension

shadow wages and peasant family labour supply an econometric application to the peruvian sierra a striking feature of developing economies is the large proportion of the work force that is self employed lack of widespread labor market participation in the agricultural sector can pose a major obstacle to the empirical implementation of economic models of the peasant household whether because wage data are simply not available or because the assumptions required to make use of wage data stretch the bounds of credulity this paper develops a methodology for estimating a structural labor supply model for primarily self employed peasant households which holds under a general agricultural technology and set of labor market conditions the unique feature of the approach is that the opportunity cost of time or shadow wage of household workers is explicitly estimated from an agricultural production function and is subsequently used to identify a set of structural labor supply parameters recent household survey data from rural peru is employed to estimate and perform various diagnostic tests on the model the empirical findings lend support to the hypothesis that peasant households allocate their members time as if to maximize a family utility function and moreover demonstrate the tractability of the shadow wage methodology and its usefulness in estimating more elaborate time allocation models

relative prices and money a vector autoregression on brazilian data recent data on brazilian agricultural prices industrial prices and money supply are analyzed in a vector autoregression the empirical findings show strong one way granger type causality from money supply to agricultural prices while feedback is observed between industrial prices and money supply under the usual monetarist ordering of contemporaneous innovation covariance agricultural prices do not adjust faster than industrial prices to a shock in the money supply

the impact of agricultural research on productivity and poverty in sub saharan africa while it is widely recognized that agricultural research is a key driver of broad based technological change in agriculture that benefits the poor in many different ways little is known about its aggregate impacts on productivity growth and poverty reduction in sub saharan africa ssa using a polynomial distributed lag structure for agricultural research within a simultaneous system of equations framework this paper first demonstrates that agricultural research contributes significantly to productivity growth in ssa productivity growth is again shown to raise per capita incomes with income increases finally having significant poverty reducing effects with an aggregate rate of return of 55 the payoffs to agricultural research are also impressive agricultural research currently reduces the number of poor by 2 3 million or 0 8 annually while the actual impacts are not large enough to more than offset the poverty increasing effects of population growth and environmental degradation the potential impacts of agricultural research are far greater apart from low research investments ssa faces several constraints outside the research system that hinder realization of potential research benefits the results show that doubling research investments in ssa would reduce poverty by 9 annually however this would not be realized without more efficient extension credit and input supply systems

effects of exchange rate changes on u s agriculture a dynamic analysis an econometric model of the wheat corn and soybean markets is used to examine the dynamic effects of exchange rate fluctuation on u s commodity markets exports and agricultural prices are found to be sensitive to movements in the exchange rate while domestic factors such as disappearance and inventories are less sensitive but still responsive dramatic short run adjustments in prices and exports are followed by less dramatic but significant longer run adjustments thus the hypothesis of elastic response to the exchange rate seems particularly relevant for the short run

agricultural technology adoption and child nutrition enhancement improved maize varieties in rural ethiopia adoption of improved crop varieties can lead to multiple benefits to farm households including increased productivity incomes and food consumption however possible impacts of adoption on child nutrition outcomes are rarely explored in the literature this article helps bridge this gap through an impact assessment of the adoption of improved maize varieties imvs on child nutrition outcomes using a recent household survey from rural ethiopia the conceptual linkage between imv adoption and child nutrition is first established using an agricultural household model instrumental variable estimation suggests the overall impacts of adoption on child height for age and weight for age z scores to be positive and significant quantile instrumental variable regressions further reveal that such impacts are largest among children with poorest nutrition outcomes finally by combining a decomposition procedure with system of equations estimation it is found that the increase in own produced maize consumption is the major channel through which imv adoption affects child nutrition

the monetarist experiment in chile a critical survey abstract chile constitutes the most outstanding case of implementation of an extreme market economy model during nine years between 1973 and 1982 a model was implemented that for its pureness deepness and extension induced a drastic transformation of the chilean economy the main features of the model are examined focusing on the anti inflationary policy the reform of the financial system and the external opening then the global results concerning output income distribution and saving investment are studied the paper shows that the balance of the results was clearly negative during the 1973 1981 period output stagnated the concentration of wealth was spectacular and saving and investment rates fell significantly the characteristics themselves of the model and the weakening of the productive apparatus that they originated additionally explain that the international recession was multiplied during 1982 within the domestic economy the paper concludes with an attempt to interpret the main causes of the failure of this experiment

adjustment with growth abstract this paper describes and examines simple versions of the analytical approaches employed by the international monetary fund and the world bank in designing adjustment programs that support their lending activities in the case of the bank this means essentially a variant of the two gap growth model and for the fund a model derived from the monetary approach to the balance of payments an attempt is also made to merge the fund and bank approaches within a consistent framework to demonstrate their complementarity

adoption and welfare impacts of multiple agricultural technologies evidence from eastern zambia using plot level panel data and multinomial endogenous switching regression this article analyzes the adoption and welfare impacts of multiple agricultural technologies in eastern zambia we adapt a multinomial endogenous switching treatment effect regression framework to correct for selection bias and endogeneity originating from both observed and unobserved heterogeneity results indicate that joint adoption of multiple agricultural technologies had greater impacts on crop yields household incomes and poverty than the adoption of individual components of the technology package our findings suggest that efforts aimed at raising household incomes and reducing poverty should focus on promoting the adoption of multiple agricultural technologies through provision of improved support services such as extension and input supply

inventories and sticky prices more on the microfoundations of macroeconomics the role of inventories in making prices sticky is studied by analyzing a dynamic linear quadratic model of a monopoly firm facing stochastic demand but able to store its finished goods in inventory it is shown that in contrast to the usual presumption firms that exhibit the smallest output responses to demand fluctuations may also exhibit the smallest price fluctuations specifically firms which have very flexible inventory storage facilities or are subjected to very transitory demand shocks will rely on inventories as buffers and will change neither production nor price very much on the other hand firms which have very inflexible storage facilities or whose demand shocks are quite permanent will display large swings in both price and output the standard assumption about inventory carrying costs that has been used in the literature that they are linear is shown to imply that production is impervious to fluctuations in demand it is also established that prices may respond more strongly to positive demand shocks than to negative ones if it is impossible to hold negative inventories i e to have unfilled orders the model offers an explanation for stickiness in relative prices however under certain circumstances it may help explain the persistence of inflation this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

smallholder market participation under transactions costs maize supply and fertilizer demand in kenya abstract this paper assessed the effects of transactions costs relative to price and non price factors on smallholder marketed surplus and input use in kenya a selectivity model was used that accounts for the effects of transactions costs assets technology and support services in promoting input use and generating a marketable surplus output supply and input demand responses to changes in transactions costs and price and non price factors were estimated and decomposed into market entry and intensity the results showed that while transactions costs indeed have significant negative effects on market participation institutional innovations such as group marketing are also emerging to mitigate the costs of accessing markets output price has no effect on output market entry and only provides incentives for increased supply by sellers on the other hand both price and non price factors have significant influence on adoption and intensity of input use overall the findings suggest that policy options are available other than price policies to promote input use and marketed surplus the paper concludes with implications for policy to induce greater input output market participation among smallholders in africa

agricultural technology productivity and poverty in madagascar summary this paper uses a unique spatially explicit dataset to study the link between agricultural performance and rural poverty in madagascar we show that controlling for geographical and physical characteristics communes that have higher rates of adoption of improved agricultural technologies and consequently higher crop yields enjoy lower food prices higher real wages for unskilled workers and better welfare indicators the empirical evidence strongly favors support for improved agricultural production as an important part of any strategy to reduce the high poverty and food insecurity rates currently prevalent in rural madagascar