The distributional effects of trade policies involving food are always controversial, particularly in countries for which staple foods are net imports. Indonesia is the world’s largest importer of its staple food, rice, and this commodity simultaneously accounts, in its consumption, for a...

A bioeconomic model of reservoir aquaculture in northern Vietnam, called BRAVO, is presented. The biological model is based on a conventional von Bertalanffy growth function and the economic model is a net revenue function. The greatest source of costs for the operation are restocking costs (75...

The cacao industry has played an important role in terms of export earnings and employment opportunities in Indonesia since 1980s. It is the main source of income for more than one million smallholder farmers in Indonesia, who are considered poor. Most planted areas of cacao are in Eastern...

This paper shows the implications of credit and labor market imperfections on gender differences in agricultural labor productivity, especially highlighting how both imperfections negatively affect female productivity by discouraging off-farm income generating activities and restricting access...

Government spending should be regarded as a social and political phenomenon, not merely as a technical choice. We argue that there is an implicit contract between the organized elites and politicians which often leads to a pro-elite allocation of public resources. A natural and simple taxonomy...

Explicitly accounting for certain basic physical laws governing the “earth” sector dramatically enriches our ability to explain a high degree of diversity in observed patterns of economic growth. We provide a theoretical explanation of why some countries have been able to sustain a more or...

This paper explores the conditions for sustainable development through two models of economic growth that elucidates two extremes; an open economy with constant prices, and a closed economy with endogenous prices. Sustainable development is easier to achieve in the case of the former than the...

Newly available evidence confirms that expansion of aggregate food supplies within developing countries themselves is strongly associated with reduced undernourishment. It is not sufficient to rely solely on aggregate economic growth or reductions in poverty incidence to deliver improved food...