This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

Accurate targeting is key for the success of any development policy. While a number of factors might explain low targeting efficiency such as governance failure, political interference or lack of political will, this paper focuses on improving indicator-based models that identify poor households...

The paper analyses the 1996 EU food aid reform and addresses the question of its impact on improving EU food aid allocation in terms of reaching those countries which are most vulnerable to food insecurity. Using a two-stage regression model the analysis finds that EU food aid in kind is...

Agricultural productivity growth is widely seen as an essential instrument of poverty reduction, food security and broader economic growth. Paradoxically, however, the agricultural sector is often neglected by African governments in what is often termed ‘urban bias’. This paper explores what...

India is the second largest producer of silk and also the largest consumer of silk in the world having a strong tradition bound domestic market. In this paper, growth functions were estimated for India’s aggregate production and trade parameters using annual data from 1984/85 to 2006/07. To...

This study develops and uses a programming model for farm-level resource use and output supply response to estimate the effects of agricultural land tax in South Africa: A case study of Free State, a region of extremely large commercial farms that gained their size and economic heft during the...

This paper examines changes in the allocation of public funds between production related public goods (PRPGs) and labour augmenting public goods (LAPGs) once elected village leaders replaced an appointment system. We derive a two-period theoretical model in which the interest of appointed...

This paper deals with the estimation of a random coefficient model. The virtue of this approach is that it considers firm heterogeneity, which conventional SFA models do not. When the model is applied to Polish farms, the results indicate that the conventional random and fixed effect models...