Reducing urban-rural gaps in child health and nutrition is one of the most difficult challenges faced by many countries. This paper evaluates the impact of the Nutrition Improvement Program (NIP), a large-scale school meal program in rural China, on the health and nutritional status of...

India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is the largest public works employment project in the world. Its most direct poverty reduction pathway is through boosting employment and income for the poor. How effectively this direct transfer mechanism reduces...

This paper explores the evolution of real agricultural wages, machinery use, and the relationship between farm size and productivity in Vietnam during its dramatic structural transformation over the course of the 1990s and 2000s. Using six rounds of nationally representative household survey...

Despite the reportedly rapid growth of mechanization, as well as its unique history in economic and social systems, information on the patterns of agricultural mechanization growth in Vietnam has been limited. Through an extensive review of existing literature and several rounds of nationally...

In Tajikistan, the poorest country in the Central Asia region and one of the poorest in the world, food consumption patterns remain inadequate for a significant share of the population. Undernutrition and child stunting, among other outcomes, remain prevalent. At the same time, overnutrition and...

Despite the rise of targeted input subsidy programs in Africa over the last decade, several questions remain as to whether low and variable soil fertility, frequent drought, and high fertilizer prices render fertilizer unprofitable for large subpopulations of African farmers. To examine these...

Much policy and research attention has focused on the relationship between agriculture and nutrition. We extend this analysis to the context of Nepal's decade-long civil conflict. Understanding how conflict or similar stress mitigates the agriculture-nutrition linkage is essential to developing...

Asian countries have witnessed a sharp increase in real wage as a result of rapid economic growth and structural transformation in recent years. Using a country level panel data from 1980 to 2010, this paper examines the effects of real wage increase on Asian agriculture that traditionally used...

To understand whether and how inverse relationship between farm size and productivity changes when labor market performance improves, we use large national farm panel from India covering a quarter-century (1982, 1999, 2008) to show that the inverse relationship weakened significantly over time,...

Despite the growth of agrifood markets, and gradual structural transformation, smallholders persist in Asia. Such patterns are at odds with the views that market growth should encourage more specialization whereby smallholders' transition to either larger farmers or specialized non-farm...