Most households in rural Madagascar are engaged in agriculture and derive a large share of their income from the production of food or cash crops and from animal husbandry. However, agricultural yields can be extremely volatile due to weather conditions, pests, insects, rodents and other...

This paper reviews some of the microeconomic evidence concerning migration and remittances in Africa. After a brief survey of the literature, it draws some lessons from two surveys performed in the Senegal River valley in Mali and in Senegal. The paper makes two main points. First, migration...

Using data from labour force surveys conducted simultaneously in the capital cities of seven West African Economic and Monetary Union countries, we estimate a model of residential location choice in which expected earnings play a role. The model is first estimated in a reduced form. Estimates...

We build a micro-simulation model able to simulate over a 15 years' period the impact of AIDS on the distribution of income in Côte d'Ivoire. We focus on the labour supply effects of AIDS-induced mortality. We find that although the size of the economy in terms of total household income is...

The food crisis encountered in 2002 in Malawi was arguably one of the worst in the recent history of the country. The World Food Programme estimated that between 2.1 and 3.2 million people were threatened by starvation. Despite this assumed severity, not much research on the actual consequences...

Previous poverty assessments of Burkina Faso neglected some important methodological issues. They were therefore misleading and led to the so-called 'Burkinabè Growth--Poverty Paradox', i.e., increasing poverty despite sustained macro-economic growth and constant inequality. We estimate that...