Pro-poor growth has been identified as one of the most promising pathways to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) or any subsequent set of goals aiming to reduce poverty worldwide. Related research has developed a multitude of instruments to measure pro-poor growth using absolute and...

A procedure is developed to examine the ex-post impacts of improved maize varieties on poverty in rural Ethiopia. Yield and cost effects of adoption are estimated econometrically under assumptions of both homogeneous and heterogeneous treatment effects. A backward derivation procedure is...

Biofortification, breeding staple food crops to be dense sources of essential micronutrients, is fast emerging as a strategy to fight micronutrient malnutrition. Large scale biofortification investments are being made in several developing countries, but until recently little rigorous evidence...

A non-neutral stochastic distance function model is used to examine whether output specialization has an impact on the economic performance of vegetable producers in Benin. Specialization is assumed to have an effect on the production frontier and on the distance to the production frontier...

The emphasis of education as a driving force for the growth of agricultural productivity can be dated back to the early 1960s. However, most empirical work failed to take into account of the fact that production technology changes with time and consequently obscure the true contribution of...

We study the effects of informal labor sharing arrangements and other social interactions on farmers' productivity in a developing country context, testing whether these types of social and work interactions lead to productivity gains through learning, synergy, or both. Using a rich panel data...

Global agriculture must significantly increase production to meet by mid-century the demands for food, feed, and fiber posed by the world’s enlarging population. An important requirement to meeting those demands is a lifting of agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) growth rates. The...

This paper examines potential of contract farming as a rural development tool by revealing its effect on productivity and income of small holders in tea production in north-western Vietnam. In the present research, three economic analyses are applied. First, the technical efficiency of tea...

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...