With declining Irish potato production trends in Kenya this paper identifies and analyses factors that influence the economic efficiency of smallholder Irish potato producers in Kenya by drawing on data from random sample of 130 smallholder farmers from Nyandarua North district. A dual...

The impact of multinational firms on the domestic agricultural sector in developing countries is controversial, in particular in India. Relying on a unique set of household-level data from the state of Punjab, we study the biggest dairy company in the world (Nestlé) in India and compare its...

Soil quality has important implications for sustainable agricultural development and food self-sufficiency in many developing countries. A decrease in soil nutrient stocks, one of the components of soil quality, necessitates more inputs and greater management skills in order to compensate for...

Micronutrient malnutrition, particularly of iron, is widespread on the South Asian subcontinent and economic losses due to reduced productivity of afflicted population groups are believed to be substantial. This paper examines the impact of micronutrient intake on productivity of house-hold...

Recent global food crisis combined with a series of natural disasters had a significant impact on the availability and affordability of food in Bangladesh, threatening to reverse the progress made in poverty reduction and hunger elimination achieved in the past decade. In this paper, we examine...

We analyze the correlation between farm productivity and market participation using comparable household data from Tanzania, Vietnam and Guatemala. Each farm’s input use and output levels provide a within-sample measure of relative productivity, which we relate to that household’s level of...

Using plot level production data from a nation-wide survey in India, we study the impact of irrigation on crop productivity, land prices and cropping intensities. Our main identification strategy is based on a sufficient number of households cultivating multiple plots of different irrigation...

In the last decades the Brazilian agriculture had a strong growth. Our hypothesis is that most of that growth may be attributed to two general factors, which may conveniently be related to two types of shocks acting upon agriculture: demand-related and technological supply-related shocks. Demand...

Most rural regions are weak participants in the modern economy. As a result they are often seen as inherently incapable of sustained economic growth. Yet, OECD evidence shows that there are rural regions with relatively high rates of economic growth. Increasing the number of high performance...

Innovation is largely held to be unlikely in rural regions. This reflects the current emphasis on regional innovations systems that are driven by large expenditures on formal science based activity that results in patentable outcomes. From this metric the observation about rural innovation is...