Three Essays On Agriculture And African Development
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Three Essays On Agriculture And African Development
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Author : Paul A. Corral
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2016
Three Essays On Agriculture And African Development written by Paul A. Corral and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016 with Agriculture categories.
This is a 3 essay dissertation focusing on two African nations: Malawi and Nigeria. The first chapter focuses on returns to cash crops. At the household level, cash crop production is a potential source of greater incomes and consequently improved nutrition, yet many farmers do not switch from subsistence agriculture despite the potential gains. Using an innovative approach, this paper reignites the debate on the effects of cash cropping and behavioral patterns of farmers in this regard. The approach consists of the use of a model with essential heterogeneity and a semi-parametric technique proposed in the literature. This allows for an in-depth exploration of returns from planting cash crops versus only food crops in terms of both observable and unobservable household characteristics. Finally, farming outcomes are related to household nutrition and dietary diversity. The results obtained put into question the validity of programs advocating the adoption of cash crops in order to improve rural livelihoods. The second chapter studies the neighborhood effect in the household's income diversification choice. Many households in developing countries allocate their productive assets between various income generating activities in order to develop a portfolio of income from occupations with different degrees of risk, expected returns and relax liquidity constraints. Push and pull factors influencing the diversification decisions of households are widely discussed in the literature; however, no study to date has taken into account spatial interdependence of household decisions in spite of various channels of neighborhood effects such as information flow, learning from others, social networks and agglomeration economies. This paper fills in the gap by incorporating spatial dependence in the choice model of diversification. The chapter finds that neighborhood effects are significant in the decision to diversify. The third chapter focuses on the relationship between credit and agriculture in Nigeria. The study attempts to identify households which are liquidity constrained. The study finds that households who are constrained will benefit from increased input usage significantly more than unconstrained households. Nevertheless the study also finds that constrained households would do just as well if they were unconstrained and vice versa.
Three Essays On Intellectual Property Rights And Agricultural Change In Africa
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Author : Walter Alexander Schroeder
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2014
Three Essays On Intellectual Property Rights And Agricultural Change In Africa written by Walter Alexander Schroeder and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014 with Electronic dissertations categories.
This dissertation consists of three essays that lie at the intersection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) and agricultural development in Africa. In the first, I use a random-effects GLS model on panel data to quantify the relationship between IPRs and agricultural R&D spending in 38 African countries. In the second, I shift the focus to a particular form of agricultural biotechnology, namely genetically-modified (GM) crops. This essay comprises interviews with two major U.S.-based agricultural biotechnology companies, the aim of which is to determine how important IPRs have been in impeding the commercialization of GM crops across Africa. The third essay takes a step back from agriculture specifically and centers on a major institutional barrier to effective IP protection on the continent. As will be shown, the intangibility and non-scarcity of intellectual property necessitates a capable state for its protection, which is largely absent in Africa. Taken together, the conclusions of the first two essays suggest that weak intellectual property rights are not currently a major barrier to agricultural development on the continent. The third demonstrates that even if they were, there are serious institutional impediments to implementing effective IP protection in the African context.
Three Essays In Economic Development
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Author : Matthew James Warning
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 1997
Three Essays In Economic Development written by Matthew James Warning and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1997 with categories.
Science Ideology And Development
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Author : Archie Mafeje
language : en
Publisher: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies
Release Date : 1978
Science Ideology And Development written by Archie Mafeje and has been published by Scandinavian Institute of African Studies this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1978 with Business & Economics categories.
Africa Embattled
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Author : Olusegun Obasanjo
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 1988
Africa Embattled written by Olusegun Obasanjo and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1988 with Africa categories.
Three Essays On The Impact Of Agricultural Decisions In Africa
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Author : Thomas Taeksung Kim
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2022
Three Essays On The Impact Of Agricultural Decisions In Africa written by Thomas Taeksung Kim and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2022 with Agriculture categories.
I examine agricultural decisions in a developing country context, which cover the major part of life and industry in low-income countries. I question stylized facts about major agricultural activities, evaluate its economic benefit with more thorough econometric methodologies, and present new aspect of its effectiveness. The first paper discusses a possible ineffective farm output resulted from farm-level crop diversification. Using a farm-by-crop level dataset from four Southeastern African countries and exogenous variation from the temporal standard deviation of normalized differences in a vegetation index (NDVI), I find a possible non-positive contribution of farm-level crop diversification on crop output. Based on this observation, I introduce two motives for crop diversification as adding new crops in the crop portfolio: 1) farmers adopt new crops for which they have better crop-specific farmer ability, and 2) farmers adopt new crops with better response to agricultural shocks. Then, I check the model empirically and find that the newly added crops show insignificant response to the NDVI shocks but significantly worse crop-specific farmer ability, which implies the possible economic disadvantage of crop diversification. I further present supporting evidence of output drop due to crop diversification with a series of supplementary analyses. Lastly, I examine different newly adopted crop groups driving different diversification outcomes. Throughout the paper, I present empirical support for the possible output drop due to farm-level crop diversification. The risk of a large drop in crop-specific farmer ability calls for a careful approach of governments and agencies encouraging crop diversification as a risk coping strategy. In the second paper, I examine if living in a community with diverse food production is important for a diverse diet. This paper responds to the large literature suggesting a strong impact of farm-level food diversification on diet. I introduce a new source for diverse household diet, diverse food production at the community level. Using household fixed effects, a spatial autoregression model, and data from Ethiopia, I find a significantly positive association between community-level agricultural production diversity and household diet diversity, while the impact of farm-level crop production diversity is rather limited and reduces the diversity of purchased food consumption. I further examine the association by each food group and check if household consumption of each food group is affected by community- or farm-level production of the corresponding food group. I find a positive contribution of community and farm production on consuming the purchased and own-produced foods, respectively. I finally found that this impact of community production is strengthened by three channels that accelerate the local food circulation: presence of a community market; crop sales within a village; and gifting food behaviors. All the evidence points to the importance of community-level food production. With a loosely integrated market in Ethiopia, local agricultural production plays a significant role for household diet as much or more than farm-level crop diversification. The final paper examines the relationship between rural maize price and local maize yields in agriculture-centered developing countries. Most studies about staple price construction in the developing world focus on price transmission from outside countries or between major domestic markets. Instead, I focus on rural areas in four African countries and point to the significant role of local maize production in constructing the rural maize price. I first create various local maize yield measures by taking the median of all yields within different radii around each village. Then, I derive a trend of association between price and local yield as widening the radius of local yield. In addition, I examine if this estimated relationship varies with village characteristics: proportion of large size farmers; level of maize production; and distance to city, market, and road. I find a negative relationship between rural maize price and yields at the local level controlling for the village fixed effect and global maize price. This relationship becomes stronger in the villages with more smallholder farmers and poor accessibility to major market features. I detect an active rural maize market and find that the local production plays a significant role in constructing the maize price.
Three Essays In Economic Development
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Author : Paul Conal Winters
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 1996
Three Essays In Economic Development written by Paul Conal Winters and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1996 with Agriculture categories.
Essays On Agriculture And Demography In Developing Countries
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Author : Siyao Jessica Zhu
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2019
Essays On Agriculture And Demography In Developing Countries written by Siyao Jessica Zhu and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019 with categories.
This dissertation is composed of three essays that explore agriculture and demography issues in developing countries. The first two chapters investigate smallholders' agricultural technology adoption decisions in Mozambique and Tanzania, respectively. The third chapter examines the impacts of skewed sex ratios in Paraguay. All essays are motivated by the analysis of how individuals' behaviors and decisions are affected by various factors, such as personal characteristics, exogenous treatments and conflicts, and culture norms. To address these topics, both data collected through a field experiment and nationally representative surveys are used, while different methods are applied -- experiment, structural model, and reduced-form analysis. Despite the importance of agriculture sector and the availability of technologies that enhance yields, smallholders in Sub-Saharan Africa persistently use traditional farming methods and face low agricultural productivity. In the first chapter, which is coauthored with Florence Kondylis and Valerie Mueller, we investigate which channels can diffuse and boost adoption of productive farming practices. Specifically, we conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment in Mozambique to measure the impact of augmenting the contact farmer (CF) model with a direct CF training on the diffusion of a new technology. Moving forward with the information transmission and promotion channel research, I examine the rationale behind small-scale farmers' adoption decisions in my second chapter. There is a well-known technology adoption puzzle: Why do African farmers not adopt modern technologies that economists believe should provide higher returns on average, for example fertilizer, and at the same time why do African farmers adopt traditional technologies that economists consider unprofitable, for example intercropping? I build a structural model, estimate it with data from Tanzania, and offer an explanation to this puzzle. The third chapter, which is coauthored with Jennifer Alix-Garcia, Laura Schechter, and Felipe Valencia Caicedo, explores another central theme in the field of development economics, gender. Using the event of the War of the Triple Alliance, we examine both the short-term and the long-term impacts of a temporary variation in sex ratios on the economies, such as the marriage market and labor market performances.
Accounting For Disparity
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Author : Melanie Seama O'Gorman
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2007
Accounting For Disparity written by Melanie Seama O'Gorman and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2007 with categories.
This thesis consists of three essays which focus on accounting for the sources of economic inequality in various contexts. The first two essays focus on disparity of agricultural labour productivity across the developing countries, while the third analyzes racial earnings inequality. The main goal of these essays is to shed light on some of the mechanisms which have generated these types of inequality, in order to better design policies for ameliorating them. The first essay is empirical, while the second and third essays construct general equilibrium models so as to quantitatively assess the importance of proposed sources of inequality. The first essay finds that a large proportion of the variation of the level and growth of agricultural labour productivity across a sample of developing countries can be explained by variation in input use across countries. I demonstrate that our understanding of disparity of labour productivity in developing country agriculture can be significantly improved by accounting for variation in the adoption of high-yielding seed varieties and for correlation between input use and technological change across countries. The second essay analyzes the factors which have contributed to agricultural stagnation in Sub-Saharan Africa, despite productivity improvements in agriculture in other developing regions. I construct a quantitative model which can match average Sub-Saharan African trends of agricultural labour productivity, crop yields and input use from 1965 to 2000. The model points to key factors which have constrained agricultural productivity growth over this period, and to the need for diverse yet concerted policies to arrest this stagnation. The third essay presents a quantitative model which sheds light on racial earnings inequality in the U.S., South Africa and Brazil. This model indicates that a large proportion of the racial wage gap in these three countries can be attributed to differential human capital accumulation by race. Most notably, distortions created by the explicit, racially-biased education system which existed in South Africa during Apartheid can explain roughly three quarters of the racial wage gap in South Africa in the early 1990's.
Essays On The Political Economy Of Rural Africa
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Author : Robert H. Bates
language : en
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Release Date : 1987-04-20
Essays On The Political Economy Of Rural Africa written by Robert H. Bates and has been published by Univ of California Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1987-04-20 with Business & Economics categories.
The essays in this volume represent a dialogue between theory and data. The theory is drawn from a branch of contemporary political economy which can also be labeled the collective-choice school. The data are drawn from Africa. The book extends the methods of reasoning developed in collective choice from their original base-the advanced industrial democracies-to new territory; the literature on rural Africa. Such as extension challenges the power of this form of political economy. It also enriches it, for the central questions which motivate the contemporary study of political economy are often addressed with unique clarity in the scholarship on rural Africa.