A growing literature documents the positive impact of community management on non-timber forest conservation, but not on the management of timber forests which require higher management intensity than do non-timber forests. We find in Nepal that better market access encourages felling of mature...

In Africa, most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the African context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale -- a premise supported by the often...

Improving the productivity of smallholder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa offers the best chance to reduce poverty among this generation of rural poor, by building on the limited resources farming households already possess. It is also the best and shortest path to meet rising food needs. Using...

This paper uses farm panel data from China to examine the dynamics of land transactions, machine investments, and the demand for machine services. Recently, China's agriculture has experienced a large expansion of machine rentals and machine services provided by specialized agents, which has...

While it is by now well known that the privatization of township- and village-run enterprises (TVREs) has been rapidly and widely taking place in China, it is much less known whether and to what extent privatization has improved resource allocation and productivity. As a first step toward the...