This paper uses detailed information on the latitude and longitude of conflict events in Sub-Saharan African countries to study the impact of external income shocks on the likelihood of violence. We consider a number of external demand shocks faced by the countries or the regions within...

This paper investigates the effects of ethnic violence on export-oriented firms and their workers. Following the disputed 2007 Kenyan presidential election, export volumes of flower firms affected by the ensuing violence dropped by 38 percent and worker absence exceeded 50 percent. Large firms...

The investment decisions of small-scale farmers in developing countries are conditioned by their financial environment. Binding credit market constraints and incomplete insurance can reduce investment in activities with high expected profits. We conducted several experiments in northern Ghana in...

In an experiment providing fertilizer grants to women rice farmers in Mali, we found that women who received fertilizer increased both the quantity of fertilizer they used on their plots and complementary inputs such as herbicides and hired labor. This highlights that farmers respond to an...

A seven-year randomized evaluation suggests education subsidies reduce adolescent girls’ dropout, pregnancy, and marriage but not sexually transmitted infection (STI). The government’s HIV curriculum, which stresses abstinence until marriage, does not reduce pregnancy or STI. Both programs...

A new round of WTO negotiations on agriculture, services and perhaps some other issues is expected to be launched in late 1999. To what extent should those negotiations include so-called "new trade agenda" items aimed at ensuring that domestic regulatory policies do not discriminate against...

Rapid industrialization in East Asia, particularly China, is raising questions about who will feed the region in the next century and how Asia will pay for its food imports. The paper addresses this question by first reviewing existing food sector projections and then taking an economy-wide...

Notwithstanding the tariffication component of the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture, import tariffs on farm products continue to provide an incomplete indication of the extent to which agricultural producer and consumer incentives are distorted in national markets. As well, in developing...

Rapid trade-led economic growth in emerging Asia has been shifting the global economic and industrial centres of gravity away from the north Atlantic, raising the importance of Asia in world trade but also altering the commodity composition of trade by Asia and other regions. What began with...