Highland Ethiopia is one of the most densely populated regions of Africa and has long been associated with both Malthusian disasters and Boserupian agricultural intensification. This paper explores the race between these two countervailing forces, with the goal of informing two important policy...

South Asia has long been synonymous with persistent and unusually high rates of child undernutrition—the so-called Asian enigma. Yet contrary to this stereotype, Bangladesh has managed to sustain a rapid reduction in the rate of child undernutrition for at least two decades. In this paper...

"This paper assesses the impact of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Nets Programme (PSNP), the largest social protection program in Sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa. Using Propensity Score Matching techniques, we find that the program has little impact on participants on average, due in...

"This paper examines the impact of cooperatives on smallholder commercialization of cereals, using detailed household data from rural Ethiopia. We review the involvement of cooperatives, in terms of who participates and where they are located. We then use the strong government role in promoting...

Fatalism is considered pervasive, especially in many poor communities. In this paper, we explore whether fatalistic beliefs have implications for the attitudes and behavior of poor rural households toward investment in the future. To explore the idea of fatalism, we draw inspiration from...

The most recent (2010-211) drought in the arid and semiarid lowlands (ASAL) of the Horn of Africa has rendered over 13 million people in need of food, and caused a devastating famine in southern Somalia. The drought has also raised concerns that pastoralist livelihoods in this region are no...

There has been a rapid transformation of food supply chains in India over the past two decades. Modern retail sales are growing at 49 percent per year and quickly penetrating urban food markets and even rural markets. The food-processing sector is growing quickly while also concentrating and...

"Global retail chains are becoming increasingly dominant in the global food trade and their rise leads to dramatic impacts on agricultural supply chains and on small producers. However, the prospects and impacts of a food retail revolution in poor countries are not yet well understood. Here, we...

"Using original data collected about growers, traders, processors, markets, and village communities, we compare the situation in four states – Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Orissa. We examine the way that information about crop attributes is conveyed (or not) along the value...