This chapter describes the impact of national agricultural research systems on the unfolding of the Green Revolution in four regions: Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Although international institutions contributed much of the research that led to...

According to national accounts data, value added per worker is much higher in the nonagricultural sector than in agriculture in the typical country, particularly in developing countries. Taken at face value, this “agricultural productivity gap†suggests that labor is greatly...

This paper explores the extent to which migration-related capital flows can explain the variation in investment rates and current and capital account imbalances in OECD countries. We begin with a general equilibrium model of a small open economy in which migration is exogenous. Migrants must be...

The Lewis model has remained, for more than half a century, one of the dominant theories of development economics. This paper argues that the power of the model lies in the simplicity of its central insight: that poor countries contain enclaves of economic activity just as rich countries contain...

Recent studies argue that cross-country labor productivity differences are much larger in agriculture than in the aggregate. We reexamine the agricultural productivity data underlying this conclusion using new evidence from disaggregate sources. We find that for the world's staple...

According to national accounts data, value added per worker is much higher in the non-agricultural sector than in agriculture in the typical country, and particularly so in developing countries. Taken at face value, this "agricultural productivity gap" suggests that labor is greatly misallocated...

Agriculture is the largest sector in most sub-Saharan economies in terms of employment, and it plays an important role in supplying food and export earnings. Rural poverty rates remain high, and labor productivity is strikingly low. This article asks how these factors shape the role of...

Agriculture's share of economic activity is known to vary inversely with a country's level of development. This paper examines whether extensions of the neoclassical growth model can account for some important sectoral patterns observed in a current cross-section of countries and in the time...