Reports responses to interviews conducted in three rural villages in Eastern India in January 2000 as well as replies to questions asked at a forest meeting in West Bengal of groups/persons interested in rural women and development. The questions were designed to provide information on...

This paper reports on and analyzes primary survey data obtained from a survey of household heads on the rural village of Nshakazhogwe, a typical rural village in northeast Botswana. It examines the associations between the incidence of poverty of household heads in this village and the values of...

Botswana’s average economic growth rate of about 8 per cent during 1985-2005 is one of highest in the world. A major contributor of this growth was mining which, in 2005/06, had a 41.4 per cent share of GDP. Various government welfare and empowerment programmes indicate that redistribution of...

Although middle income countries such as Botswana are credited with reliable data that are used in poverty measures, it is sometimes argued that the time lags between data generations or surveys are too wide. The Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) in Botswana takes place every 10...

In this poster a Bayesian estimation framework for a non-stationary Markov model is developed for situations where sample data with observed transition between classes (micro data) and aggregate population shares (macro data) are available. Posterior distributions on transition probabilities are...

Presumed portfolio benefits of commodities and the availability of index fund-type investment products increase attractiveness of commodity markets for financial traders. But resulting “index trading” strategies are suspected to inflate commodity prices above their fundamental value. We use...

This paper reviews and discusses the more recent literature and application of Positive Mathematical Programming in the context of agricultural supply models. Specifically, advances in the empirical foundation of parameter specifications as well as the economic rationalisation of PMP models...

The increased interest in Integrated Assessment (IA) of agricultural systems reflects the growing complexity of policy objectives and corresponding impacts related to this sector. The paper contemplates on the status of quantitative tools for IA in agriculture, drawing on recent European...

The addition of commodities to financial portfolios and resulting weight adjustments may create volatility linkages between commodity and financial markets, especially during financial crises. Also, biofuel mandates are suspected to integrate agricultural and energy markets. We calculate...

This paper gives an overview on current and prospective modelling challenges for agricultural partial equilibrium (PE) models focussing on EU policies. Starting from a certain policy context, the paper highlights the current capabilities and limitations of existing PE models and, if available,...