In times of highly volatile commodity markets, governments often try to protect their populations from rapidly-rising food prices, which can be particularly harsh for the poor. A potential solution for food-deficit countries is to hold strategic reserves, which can be called on when...

When food prices spike in countries with large numbers of poor people, public intervention is essential to alleviate hunger and malnutrition. For governments, this is also a case of political survival. Government actions often take the form of direct interventions in the market to stabilize food...

In poor countries, most governments implement policies aiming to stabilize the prices of staple foods, which often include storage and trade measures insulating their domestic market from the world market. It is of crucial importance to understand the precise motivations and efficiency of those...

Commodities are often stored during periods in which storage returns a negative price. Further, during periods of"backwardation,"the expected revenue from holding inventories will be negative. Since the 1930s, the negative price of storage has been attributed to an offsetting"convenience...

In this analysis of capital's role in agricultural production, a new construction of data on capital allowed the authors to advance the cross-country study of production functions. The model reveals the relative importance of capital, a finding quite robust to modifications of the model and the...

Liberalization in commodity markets has brought profound changes in the way price risks are allocated and managed in commodity subsectors. Price risks are increasingly allocated to private traders and farmers rather than absorbed by the government. The success of market reform depends on the...

Labor is the single most important factor in determining national income. As economies grow, agricultural labor declines as a share of total labor and converges to a level of 2 or 3 percent. Off-farm migration facilitates the development of nonagriculture, but historically the process spans...

Poor households in rural areas are particularly vulnerable to risks that reduce incomes and increase expenditures. Most past research has focused on risk-coping strategies for the rural poor, specially on micro-level and household actions. These are risks that can been shared within a community...

The Clean Development Mechanism, a provision of The Kyoto Protocol, allows countries that have pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to gain credit toward their treaty obligations by investing in projects located in developing (host) countries. Such projects are expected to benefit...

In this paper, the authors document a new database on sectoral investment and capital, providing details about sources of investment data and the method used to convert those data series into capital stock series. They also provide a copy of the computer program used to implement the method. The...