Rice sector contributes significantly to secure households with regard to their food needs but also to the creation of employments and income generation. The sector development and its evolution over the years have been marked by various policies and approaches. These development stages of the...

This paper examines the extent to which garment industry in Swaziland has contributed to the economic empowerment of the Swazi people through creation of new jobs and improvement in their overall welfare. In Swaziland as elsewhere in many African countries, unemployment has been and is still a...

This paper analyses the effect of non-credit services of joint liability credit institutions on smallholder women beekeepers’ honey income. The non-credit services offered to the beekeepers are mainly enterprise development services (training on marketing, business, production and subsector...

Guided by the frame work of a household model under credit market failure, this paper aims at investigating the impact of access to credit on the adoption of hybrid maize among households that vary in their credit constraints. The data used in the study is from Malawi collected by the...

This study determines the factors that influenced contract choice, labour demand and examines the existence of labour hoarding practice in Western region of Kenya. Data from Egerton University’s Tegemeo Institute of Agricultural Policy and Development was used for the analysis.. A two step...

Commercial rice imports have accounted for approximately 61%, food aid in rice accounted for about 2%, and domestic rice accounted for some 37% per annum of rice consumption in Ghana over the four years between 2000 and 2003. Compared to the 1990s, these figures show a gradual decline in the...

In recent decades there has been a substantial increase in the scale of production and the use of production contracts in the hog sector. This paper explores empirically whether these two phenomena are related by examining whether the use of production contracts has allowed finish hog operations...

The paper examines empirical returns from holding thirty- and ninety-day call and put positions,and the forecasting performance of implied volatility in the live and feeder cattle optionsmarkets. In both markets, implied volatility is an upwardly biased and inefficient predictor ofrealized...

We used the well-being evaluation method, a technique for measuring individual utility, to study how people in the wildland urban interface of Colorado (USA) felt about their lives before and after two wildfire scenarios. Variables such as age, family size, fire frequency, and house value were...

This study uses a unique firm-level dataset to examine how falling trade costs from 1993-2001 affected entry, exit, productivity, and exporting in the Korean manufacturing sector. We verify many of the predictions of recent heterogeneous-firm models of international trade. For example, falling...