The paper develops a framework for the design and analysis of pluralistic agricultural advisory services and reviews research methods from different disciplines that can be used when applying the framework.

"From a theoretical perspective crop yields should tend to converge over time and space as: growth in yield potential exhibits diminishing returns; an increasing share of farmers shift to using high yielding varieties (HYVs); barriers to the

"This paper describes the dramatic cassava transformation that has taken place in Nigeria and Ghana over the past 50 years.

The objective of this paper is to review trends in government expenditures in the developing world, to analyze the causes of change, and to develop an analytical framework for determining the differential impacts of various government expenditures

"The study attempts to measure the total benefits from rice varietal improvement research in China and India using variety adoption and performance data over the last two decades.

Since 1996, a growing coalition of stakeholders from the private sector, government and donor communities has promoted a new package of agronomic practices for smallholders in Zambia.

Using a similar analytical approach to a study in China, this paper analyzes the impact of agricultural research on urban poverty reduction in India. State level data from 1970 to 1995 were used in the empirical analysis.

In developing countries, identifying the most effective community-level governance structure is a key issue and, increasingly, empirical evaluation of the effects of democratization on the provision of local public goods is needed.

This paper develops a framework to measure the impact of agricultural research on urban poverty.

There have been competing arguments about the effect of public infrastructure on productivity in the literature.

Public investment, together with institutional and policy reforms, has contributed substantially to rapid economic growth in rural China since the late 1970s. This rapid growth has also led to dramatic reductions in rural poverty.

This study develops an analytical framework to account for sources of rapid economic growth in China. The traditional Solow approach includes only two sources, i.e. increased use of inputs and technical change.

Developing countries allocate scarce government funds to investments in rural areas to achieve the twin goals of agricultural growth and poverty alleviation.

A Generalized Maximum Entropy (GME) approach is adapted to empirically estimate crop-specific production technologies in Chinese agriculture.

This paper develops a frontier shadow cost function approach to estimate empirically the effects of technological change, technical and allocative efficiency improvement in Chinese agriculture during the reform period (1980-93).

Poverty in rural India has declined substantially in recent decades.

Developing countries have to allocate limited government resources for rural areas among different investment activities and regions to achieve the twin goals of productivity growth and poverty alleviation.

For more than two decades, the United States has been an important player in a global partnership for agricultural research through its investments in the work of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a network of

Recent attempts to quantify the sources of growth in Chinese agriculture have attributed an exceptionally large share of this growth to the contemporary institutional and market reforms within China.