Country Development Strategy

This report has been defined in accordance with the initial terms of reference. I first tried to develop a vision of the long-term census and survey system through interviews held with diverse stakeholders. I thus identified the clients and their ...

Malnutrition rates among children 0 to 36 months and women of reproductive age in Nigeria are high and vary significantly across rural-urban locations, geopolitical zones, and agro-ecological zones, thereby constituting a significant public ...

Low fertilizer use is professed to be among the many reasons for low agricultural productivity in Nigeria. Fertilizer application, estimated at 13 kg/ha in 2009 by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, is far lower than the ...

This paper considers vulnerability reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) from a more aggregated macro viewpoint. We focus on risk related to agriculture, since vulnerability and agriculture are intimately linked in SSA due to the location of the ...

Ghana is an emerging success story in Africa and in a couple of years will become the first African country to achieve the first Millennium Development Goal of halving its national poverty rate. The government of Ghana has therefore extended its ...

In recent years access to safe and reliable water supplies has received increased government attention in Ethiopia. As a result, the national coverage rate for this service has gradually improved. Yet millions of people in rural areas still do ...

“This study focuses on public investments and policy reforms for leveraging growth spillovers at the African regional level. A conceptual framework that is built on the endogenous growth theory and the new economic geography is presented ...

Recent IFPRI research shows how coordinated investments in regional agricultural trade and productivity can leverage regional growth dynamics and improve Africa’s competitiveness in an increasingly globalized world. This brief looks at ...

Contrary to conventional economic theories, the relationship between income growth and the share of the population within the rural or agricultural sector is extremely diverse, even among regions starting from similar levels of development, such ...

Decentralized delivery of public services has been promoted as a means to enhance citizen voice and make service provision more responsive to users. Ethiopia has undertaken two rounds of decentralization, making first the regional states and then ...

Agriculture employs three-quarters of the population of Malawi. It makes up more than forty percent of the economy and sixty percent of all exports. Yet productivity in agriculture—measured as the amount of output for a given amount of inputs—is ...

Accelerating growth and poverty reduction, and the ultimate achievement of structural transformation, are the critical policy challenges in present day Ethiopia. This paper examines relevant growth options in terms of their impact on overall ...

While economic growth is generally acknowledged as a necessary precondition for reducing poverty, relatively little is known about how growth and nutrition are related. Therefore, questions persist regarding how to leverage economic policies so ...

We analyze the evolution of Sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA’s) agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) over the past 45 years, looking for evidence of recent changes in growth patterns using an improved nonparametric Malmquist index. Our TFP ...

The Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources (FMAWR) is updating Nigeria’s agricultural development strategy document to make it meet the requirement of evidence-based strategy formulation. In line with this goal, the FMAWR in ...

This paper examines the importance of achieving high agricultural growth as a means of accelerating Ethiopia’s economic transformation. The conclusions are that a high rate of agricultural growth has farreaching positive implications for ...

This paper has been prepared in support of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) roundtable in Ghana. The study also takes a fresh perspective on the role of agriculture for development in light of the global food ...

Agricultural Economist at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) since 2005. His research topics are development, economic growth and growth linkages and poverty, agricultural productivity and trade. He has also worked in ...

We analyze the evolution of Sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) over the past 40 years, looking for evidence of recent changes in growth patterns using a nonparametric Malmquist index. Our TFP estimates show a ...

Reducing malnutrition, including undernutrition (insufficient calorie intake) and micronutrient deficiencies (insufficient intake of vitamins and minerals) is a high priority for Malawi and many developing country governments, closely linked to ...

Agriculture in Ghana accounts for about 40 percent of national economy, three quarters of export earnings, and employs 60 percent of the labor force. Agriculture is the backbone of the economy (McKay and Aryeetey, 2004) and the sector has served ...

Despite many efforts to ease Nigerian farmers’ access to quality and affordable fertilizer, it remains a key challenge for Nigerian agricultural policymakers As a result, the Nigerian government is experimenting with implementing a fertilizer ...

Effective poverty reduction programs require careful measurement of poverty status. Several studies have shown conceptually that assets reflecting productive capacity form a more robust basis for identifying the poor than do flow variables such ...

Recent trends in agricultural growth and food security in Eastern and Central Africa (ECA) have been discouraging. With very low labor productivity, yields, and growth rates, agriculture is unable to keep up with population growth or achieve the ...

The Ugandan coffee industry is facing some serious challenges, including low international prices in the international coffee market, aging coffee trees and declining productivity, and, more recently, the appearance of coffee-wilt disease, which ...

Biofuels provide a new opportunity to enhance economic development in Tanzania. Drawing on detailed cost estimates, we develop a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to estimate the impact of different biofuel production scenarios on ...

This paper deals with the human resource development and institutional capacity strengthening in Nigeria as they relate to policy analysis and research capacity in addressing the problems of poverty and food security. The findings of the paper ...

The Ethiopian government has been promoting a package-driven extension that combines credit, fertilizers, improved seeds, and better management practices. This approach has reached almost all farming communities, representing about 2 percent of ...

The Federal Government of Nigeria, through the FMAWR, envisions improving its food security by facilitating equitable access, availability and affordability of quality foods to all Nigerian. This vision has become more important as global food ...

In the past several years, labor shortages in China have become an issue. However, there is heated debate as to whether China has passed the Lewis turning point and moved from a period of unlimited supply to a new era of labor shortage. Most ...

The implications of China’s growth for the development prospects of Sub-Saharan Africa have been the subject of recent attention. Interest in this topic is motivated by the increasing presence of China in the region and the growing ...

This paper uses both a global and local perspective to assess the impacts of climate change on the Yemeni economy, agriculture, and household income and food security. The major impact channels of climate change are through changing world food ...

Using data from microenterprises of the handloom sector in four regions of Ethiopia, the paper shows that clustering, through specialization and division of labor, can lower entry barriers by reducing the initial capital required to start a ...

The Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) is an African Union/New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) initiative to accelerate growth and reduce poverty and hunger in Africa. CAADP’s primary goal is ...

An economywide, multimarket model is constructed for Ghana and the effects of agricultural soil erosion on crop yields are explicitly modeled at the subnational regional level for eight main staple crops. The model is used to evaluate the ...

A dynamic computable general equilibrium model is developed to assess the impact of the recent global recession and the Chinese government’s stimulus package on China’s economic growth. The model is first used to capture the actual ...

Ethiopia’s crop agriculture is complex, involving substantial variation in crops grown across the country’s different regions and ecologies. Five major cereals (teff, wheat, maize, sorghum and barley) are the core of Ethiopia’s agriculture and ...

Uganda introduced the decentralization policy in 1997 under the Local Government Act of 1997 that has since undergone four amendments. The policy inherently decentralized service delivery institutions and their governance in order to improve ...

Using a large household survey data, this study examines the impact of government involvement in agricultural service provision on the use of modern inputs by farmers in Nigeria. The empirical methodology used in this study is based on the ...

Despite recent studies on improved seed varieties estimating the adoption rates of maize in 1998 at 40 percent (Manyong et al. 2000) and rice at 60 percent (Larsson 2005), true adoption rates appear to be unknown. This knowledge gap exists due to ...

After a brief tour of the Mazubi Farms, the retreat began with a welcome by Ms. Valerie Rhoe, Program Coordinator, IFPRI. The welcome address highlighted the importance of updating the FMAWR agriculture strategy based on evidence. Dr. Shashi ...

This paper analyzes the role of social cohesion in economic and institutional development and, broadly, the creation of welfare in Latin America. The paper defines the concept of social cohesion with reference to the notions of social capital and ...

The Digital Food Security Atlas (DFSA) for Yemen expands the conventional concept of an atlas by allowing users to create their own maps in an interactive way. This innovative tool allows policymakers, analysts, researchers, and the interested ...

Decentralization is expected to lead to greater efficiency in the allocation of public resources, as subnational governments are said to have better information than central government about the needs for and requirements of public services in ...

The vast majority of empirical literature on “flying geese” examines industrial relocation across national boundaries, in particular in Asia. However, few studies have empirically tested whether this kind of “flying geese” pattern of industrial ...

Malawi suffers frequent droughts and floods. In an economy that is heavily dependent on the agricultural sector, it is crucial to understand the implications of these extreme climate events. Not only are rural livelihoods affected due to the ...

The paper develops a metric of structural transformation that can account for the production of new varieties of goods embodying advancements in technological know-how and design. Our measure captures the dynamics of an economy’s ...

The extent to which growth reduces poverty has been disputed for years, as has the controversy surrounding trade-offs between policies that seek growth and those that address equity. Structural models linking economic growth and the distribution ...

Ethiopia enjoyed remarkable economic growth from 2004/05 to 2008/09, in large part due to increases in foreign transfers and capital inflows combined with expanded domestic credit to fund major increases in private and public investments in ...

Cosponsored by IFPRI and the University of Ghana Many African countries are currently undergoing a major transformation in economic structure and location of economic activity, from rural agriculture-based economies to more diversified economies ...

Few observers would have predicted the dramatic changes over the past few months in the Arab world. Arab governments appeared to be in tight control, and many Arab economies were growing around or above the world average over the past few years. ...

The top-down public agricultural extension system in China and its early commercialization reforms during the 1990s have left millions of farmers without access to extension services. A pilot inclusive agricultural extension system was introduced ...

This paper examines European Union (E.U.) demand for chilled fish fillets assuming product heterogeneity due to country of origin and assesses the structural adjustment in demand as indicated by the increase in imports from Sri Lanka since the ...

Much of Nigeria’s recent economic growth can be attributed to its non-oil economy—primarily agriculture. But the recent agricultural growth has been driven mainly by expansion in areas planted while productivity has remained flat or declining. ...

Since registering a disappointing growth of 1.2 percent in 2002, Nigeria’s economic performance has rebounded, averaging growth at 7.3 percent between then and 2007. However, the pressing challenge for the nation lies in maintaining and ...

Nigeria is still characterized by high reliance on food imports. Malnutrition is widespread in the entire country and rural areas are especially vulnerable to chronic food shortages, malnutrition, unbalanced nutrition, erratic food supply, poor ...

Agriculture is the major sector upon which the majority of Nigeria’s rural poor depend on for their livelihood. Over 70 percent of the active labor force is employed in agriculture (World Bank 2007). The federal government of Nigeria (FGN) has ...

Precise agricultural statistics are essential for planning and evaluation of agricultural investments to improve the productivity and profitability of smallholder farming systems. However, accurately estimating crop yields is never easy and is ...

The opportunities and constraints facing Ethiopian agriculture are strongly influenced by conditions which vary across geographical space. These conditions include basic agricultural production potentials, access to input and output markets, and ...

Traditional authorities are powerful leaders alongside the state in Ghana. The chieftaincy has been resilient to “modernization”—maintaining land rights, allegiance from citizens, and influence in rural communities. Nonetheless, there are few ...

Agriculture plays a dominant role in nearly all the countries of East and Central Africa, and many face similar agroecological, climatic, and development challenges. As a result, significant scale economies can be made through the regionalization ...

The traditional literature emphasizes the causal role of finance in promoting industrial growth. China’s rapid industrialization over the past several decades, which has occurred in the absence of well-functioning financial markets, seems ...

Yemen has been facing severe development challenges in recent years, but rapidly depleting oil and water resources combined with large population increases and a lack of job-creating growth are making a difficult situation even more complicated. ...

How households adjust their consumption in response to changes in prices and income is crucial determinant of the effects of various shocks to market prices and commodity supplies. These adjustments in demand are particularly significant in ...

Ministers, international partners, and other stakeholders are meeting December 18th in Sana’a, Yemen to officially launch the Yemen National Food Security Strategy (NFSS). The strategy, for which IFPRI provided key analysis and technical advice, ...

Both availability and access issues underpin Ethiopia’s food security challenges. The country is mostly dependent on drought-exposed, rain fed agriculture, and high transaction costs inhibit trade in staples. Most of the population lives in rural ...

Levels and composition of food consumption are major determinants of the nutritional wellbeing of individuals, which in turn, have important implications for health, productivity, and income. Analyzing food consumption patterns in poor countries, ...

In spite of remarkable growth in Ethiopia’s agricultural production and overall real incomes (GDP/capita) from 2004/05 to 2008/09, prices of major cereals (teff, maize, wheat and sorghum) have fluctuated sharply in both nominal and real terms. ...

South Africa’s high involuntary unemployment and small informal sector are attributed to an underperforming formal sector and barriers to entry in the informal sector. This paper examines the economywide linkages between the formal and informal ...

This paper uses an asset-base framework to analyze the determinants of rural growth and sustainable poverty reduction for the three poorest countries in Central America: Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua…Using a combination of GIS mapping ...

More than one-third of Yemen’s population is food insecure. Food security means that there is enough food for everyone in the country and that the available food provides the right nutrients to ensure a healthy population. In order to guarantee ...

This paper estimates hedonic models of rental prices to investigate household preferences regarding water services in rural Guatemala. Estimated values for water services are compared across municipal, private, and community-managed water ...

We develop a detailed trade analysis to assess the potential welfare impacts of a free trade agreement (FTA) on the agricultural sector of southern African countries and to determine opportunities and challenges faced by the region as a ...

In Uganda, agricultural extension has been hotly debated since the implementation of the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) program in 2001. Conceived as a demand-driven approach and largely publicly funded with services provided by ...

Yemen is an oil-exporting and food-importing country on the Arabian Peninsula with persistently high levels of poverty. The impacts of the food, fuel, and financial global crises are likely to further complicate preexisting conditions of internal ...

Rural-urban linkages (RUL) and rural-urban migration are key components in rural transformation – an important step toward industrial growth. Post-Keynesian development theory has recognized the central role of intersectoral linkage between ...

Decentralization reforms have been the overwhelming response to failures in the targeting of public resources by the central state in developing countries. The policy debate on decentralization typically revolves around several a priori ...

This paper is an exploratory study that looks at early stages of the decentralization and other reforms in the policymaking and planning processes in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The paper develops a conceptual framework and adopts an ...

An agricultural system consists of production, processing, storage, marketing, extension, research, and training. While production is a result of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship, its magnitude and efficiency from the farm to the ...

The institutional change in rural Kyrgyzstan during the transition period included farm reorganization, land reform, building markets, and community institutions. The land reform established private property rights to land, including the rights ...

Executive Summary The major objective of this study was to examine the relationship between the institutional environment of microfinance and access of rural women to microfinance. Focus group sessions were held with groups of rural women ...

This paper tests a series of prominent hypotheses regarding how institutions, geography, and trade interact to influence income per capita using a novel spatial econometric approach to control for both spillovers among neighboring countries and ...

Cereal price variability in Ethiopia has worsened in recent years, and some of the earlier liberalizations are being reversed due to the unacceptable economic and political costs of increased price variability. The challenge now is to achieve ...

This paper reviews the trends in government subsidies and investments in and for Indian agriculture; develops a conceptual framework and model to assess the impact of various subsidies and investments on agricultural growth and poverty reduction; ...

There have been intensive debates on the role of aid in promoting economic development in developing countries by using cross-country analyses. Cross-country regression assuming linear relationship between aid and growth and without taking into ...

James Garrett has been based in Maputo, Mozambique, since 2009 . There he leads and manages the Mozambican Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System. The program is a multi-institutional collaboration between IFPRI, IWMI, ICRISAT, and the ...

Karl joined IFPRI in June 2009 as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Development Strategy and Governance Division. He was initially based in the Washington D.C. office, after which he joined IFPRI’s Malawi Strategy Support Program in Lilongwe, ...

Ajaikaiye and Olusola (2003) observed that the knowledge system of any progressive society performs a pivotal function in its development. However, they note that “in spite of this recognition, the attention given to Nigeria’s knowledge system ...

Despite the economic transformation of Peru’s coastal economy, the country’s inland region remains poor and underdeveloped. We herein examine the economic linkages between the two regions using a multi-regional computable general equilibrium ...

The livestock is an important sub-sector within Ethiopia’s economy in terms of its contributions to both agricultural value-added and national GDP. Between 1995/96 and 2005/06, the livestock sub-sector’s share averaged 24 percent of agricultural ...

Using agricultural household survey data and claim records from insurers for the year 2009, this paper analyzes hog producers’ choice of means of loss prevention and identifies the relationships among biosecurity practices, vaccination, and hog ...

Over the last several years, the Ethiopian government has committed substantial resources for the expansion of public services and infrastructure in rural areas. To what extent do these investments and services reach different social and economic ...

With the recent discovery of crude oil reserves along the Albertine Rift, Uganda is set to establish itself as an oil producer in the coming decade. Total oil reserves are believed to be two billion barrels, with recoverable reserves estimated at ...

With an average growth rate of 5 percent and a reduction of poverty by one-half over the past two decades, Ghana is a recent success story and a rising star in African development. Yet the country remains dependent on relatively few external ...

How research can feed into the policy process in developing countries in general, and in Nigeria more specifically, is not very well understood. Yet, this understanding is a critical part of doing effective policy research. This has become ...

Small-scale private irrigation schemes (SPRI) have been the driving force behind the expansion of irrigated areas in Nigeria, despite government efforts to promote large-scale public irrigation schemes. SPRI allows adjustment of irrigation ...

Fiscal mimicking and yardstick competition among neighboring jurisdictions have been widely documented in developed countries with long histories of democracy. However, there is very little empirical evidence concerning these practices in ...

Olivier Ecker is an agricultural economist specializing in nutrition economics and food security issues. Olivier received his Ph.D. from the University of Hohenheim (Germany) in March 2009. More about Olivier Ecker in Google Scholar Before ...

Although the role of industrial policy in economic development is a frequent topic of debate in both the literature and the political arena, most such discussions focus on industrial policymaking at the national level. Using a case study of a ...

Knowledge of the characteristics and size of the agricultural input sector of a country is critical for policymakers to design appropriate interventions that not only foster growth in the sector, but also support the agricultural development ...

Paul A. Dorosh is the Division Director of the Development Strategy and Governance Division. He was the Deputy Division Director of IFPRI’s Development Strategy and Governance Division from June 2010 to April 2011. From August 2008 through June ...

It has been widely documented that the poor spend a significant proportion of their income on gifts even at the expense of basic consumption. We test three competing explanations of this phenomenon—peer effect, status concern, and risk ...

The 2007–08 global fuel crisis was a stark reminder of the fact that petroleum subsidies strain public finances, distort markets, and provide only a blunt tool for improving food security and fighting poverty. As a consequence, several ...

Although the Nigerian economy depends significantly on the oil sector, agriculture remains its mainstay. Agriculture contributed 42 percent of Nigeria’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2008 (National Bureau of Statistics). Agriculture is the ...

A primary motivation for this study is to identify a key set of policy options for improving fertilizer markets in West Africa (among Economic Community of West African States member countries) in ways that ultimately will help improve the ...

Despite the promise of many new farm technologies, technology adoption rates in Ethiopia remain low. This paper studies the impact of social networks on technology adoption through social learning. In addition to geographic networks, intentional ...

This paper investigates price transmission for agricultural commodities between world markets and the Ugandan market in an attempt to determine the impact of world market prices on the Ugandan market. Based on the realization that price formation ...

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is assisting the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources (FMAWR) in facilitating the process of updating Nigeria’s agricultural strategy with inputs from academia, the private ...

“Using Tanzania as a test case, this study demonstrates how household survey data can be used to assess the impacts of public investments on growth and poverty. A two step procedure is used. First, household survey data are used to link ...

In spite of Nigeria’s abundant natural and human resource endowment, poverty remains pervasive, multifaceted, and chronic. Given the most recent data available, it is estimated that approximately 69 million (or 54.4 percent) Nigerians lived in ...

Fiscal federalism has been argued to intensify regional competition and promote economic growth. This paper is the first, to our knowledge, to empirically assess the patterns and extent of strategic tax competition between geographically ...

Most conflicts in the developing world take place in rural areas, displacing large numbers of civilians and disrupting their agricultural livelihoods. Rebuilding agriculture is an important strategy for post-conflict reconstruction. Agriculture ...

The development pattern in Ghana is characterised by a north-south divide in which the north lags far behind the south. This paper sets out to identify avenues for pro-poor growth in Ghana, focussing on agricultural opportunities, particularly in ...

The International Food Policy Research Institute has been undertaking policy research and capacity strengthening activities in Uganda since about 1998. A broad range of research reports, discussion papers, project reports, and other documents ...

Endowed with 80 million hectares of arable land (of which only 10 percent are used), diverse climatic conditions, and abundant water resources, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has the potential to become the breadbasket of the entire ...

The important role of credit in agricultural enterprise development and sustainability has prompted the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) to establish credit schemes such as the Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme (ACGS) and Agricultural ...

This paper analyzes how Cambodian farmers and the Cambodian government can respond to increasing rice prices. The study estimates rice production responses in Cambodia using the Cambodian Socio-Economic Surveys (CSES) conducted in 2004 and 2007. ...

Since 1985, the Chinese government has given high priority to building roads, particularly high-quality roads that connect industrial centers. This report evaluates the contribution roads have made to poverty reduction and economic growth in ...

This paper investigates the contribution of rural non-farm income to income inequality by examining the contribution of specific income sources (farm income from irrigated agriculture, farm income from rainfed agriculture and non-farm income) to ...

In much of rural Africa, high transaction costs limit farmers’ market participation and thus their potential for income growth. Transaction costs can affect not only whether a farmer sells product but also whether sales occur at the farm gate on ...

This paper discusses the application of the equilibrium displacement model (EDM) to estimate ex-ante the welfare effects of biological productivity growth for semi-subsistence crop and its impact on poverty reduction. The conventionally used EDM ...

Natural disasters have particularly devastating impacts on economic growth in developing countries because they impede the accumulation of capital. The resilience of labor markets is crucial especially for the poor who rely only on labor to ...

In this technical guide we describe the Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (SAKSS) concept developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute in response to the capacity gaps typically found in many African countries for ...

This paper examines the role of postsecondary agricultural education and training (AET) in Sub-Saharan Africa in the context of the region’s agricultural innovation systems. Specifically, the paper looks at how AET in Sub-Saharan Africa can ...

“This paper accomplishes two objectives. First, it provides simulation results from a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model that have helped focus the debate about the potential effects of agricultural trade liberalization on ...

There is a vigorous debate on liberalization of the heavily regulated agricultural markets in India. A crucial institutional characteristic is the role of state-regulated brokers in wholesale markets. Relying on data from a unique survey in ...

Achieving food security is high on the agenda of the Malawi government. Notably, Malawi’s Growth and Development Strategy (MGDS) recognizes that food security is a prerequisite for sustained economic growth and poverty reduction. However, a good ...

We use two rounds of surveys, taken in 2000 and 2008 in the Zhili Township children’s garment cluster in Zhejiang Province, to examine in depth the evolution of this industrial cluster. Firm size has grown on average in terms of output and ...

This study presents empirical findings on drinking water supply in Ethiopia from a set of qualitative and quantitive surveys on rural public services. Access to safe drinking water is very low: 32% of the surveyed households use safe drinking ...

In this paper we develop a dynamic CGE model to examine the impact of CAFTA on production, employment and poverty in El Salvador. We model four aspects of the agreement: tariff reductions, quotas, changes in the rules of origin for maquila and ...

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have become a popular tool to reduce poverty and inequality in the short run and to promote investments in human capital. CCTs are now present in almost all parts of the developing world, especially in Latin ...

While the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) remains a hotly debated issue in all five Central American countries that are part of the treaty, most discussions are based on preconceived opinions rather than grounded in research-based ...

In Bangladesh—one of the poorest countries in Asia, where rice accounts for almost 70 percent of consumers’ caloric intake—the share of the less expensive, low-quality coarse rice is shown to be rapidly decreasing in rice markets and the quality ...

Wenzhou used to be one of the poorest regions in eastern China. With limited arable land, poor road access to major cities, and little support from the upper level governments, this region seemed to lack all the conditions necessary for economic ...

Although Ethiopia‘s economy has grown rapidly over the past decade and urbanization is increasing, the country‘s economic and spatial transformation has only just begun. Ethiopia‘s share of agriculture in GDP in 2006 (48 percent) was the highest ...

On 23 April 2010, farmers, traders, processors, agribusiness, Ghanaian and international academics, donors, and officials met in Accra for an exchange of views on how to revive the strategic but ailing tomato sector. The dialogue was organized by ...

The short-run effects of the 2007/2008 global food crisis on semisubsistence farmers’ well-being in low-income countries depends on whether they are net sellers or net buyers of the affected commodities. Realizing that farmers face volatile ...

Ghana has long been regarded as one of the most successful countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. It recently attained middle-income status and will likely achieve the first Millennium Development Goal of cutting poverty in half before the target ...

Mozambique’s GDP grew by 8.2 percent per year from 1993-2007, albeit from a low starting point. Despite this growth, the structure of the economy has barely changed in the past 20 years. Industry and services trail far behind the farm sector as ...

Uganda is a predominantly rural society. About 85 percent of the population earns most of its income from agriculture and the sector is central to poverty reduction efforts. At 3.4 percent per year, the population growth rate is among ...

The purpose of this workshop is to present the findings and discuss the policy implications of a longitudinal study which IFPRI, CPRC and DATA conducted during the past thirty months. The study resurveyed 1,800 households first interviewed in ...

Strong economic growth in urban areas has not led to rapid urbanization in Ethiopia, possibly as a result of prevailing land tenure policies. We examine the economic implications of accelerated urbanization using a rural–urban economywide model ...

In comparison to other African countries, Ethiopia has a low urbanization rate. According to the World Bank World Development Report (WDR) 2009, Sub-Sahara Africa is 30% urbanized, whereas Ethiopia is only 10.9% urbanized. Urbanization rates ...

Wage or employment subsidies have been used in both developed and developing countries to raise employment levels. Various advisers to the South African government have endorsed wage subsidies as a policy measure to deal with this country’s ...

Agriculture is the backbone of Malawi’s economy: it accounts for about 34 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), over 90 percent of export earnings, and employment of 85 percent of the population through farming, processing, transportation, and ...

This study tests the null hypothesis that it is sufficient to interview only the household head to obtain accurate information on household income. The results show that using a husband’s estimate of his wife’s income does not produce ...

Xinshen Diao of China joined IFPRI as Research Fellow in 2000, became Senior Research Fellow in 2005, and currently is co-leader of "development strategy research" program (IFPRI research theme 6.2). Xinshen earned a B.A. and M.A. in business ...

The 2007–08 global fuel crisis was a stark reminder of the fact that petroleum subsidies strain public finances, distort markets, and provide only a blunt tool for improving food security and fighting poverty. As a consequence, several ...

More than one-third of Yemen’s population is food insecure. Food security means that there is enough food for everyone in the country and that the available food provides the right nutrients to ensure a healthy population. In order to guarantee ...

The National Food Security Strategy addresses food security at the national level (macrolevel food security) and at the household and individual levels (microlevel food security), emphasizing that improving food security is a cross-sector ...