Market access plays an essential role in assuring better income and welfare levels for smallholder livestock producers, and thus contributes to poverty alleviation. This is even more so in the Ethiopian context where livestock play an essential role in the economy. Making use of the Heckman...

There is considerable interest in projections of future productivity growth in agriculture. Whether one is interested in the outlook for global commodity markets, future patterns of international trade, or the interactions between land use, deforestation and ecological diversity, the rate of...

Identifying ways to increase market participation by smallholder producers requires identifying variables that influence market access. This is usually achieved using probit estimation. An important phenomenon affecting entry decision-making is the entry decision of a 'similar' household, where...

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is the most important development challenge of the 21st century. Poverty is higher in most African countries than elsewhere in the developing world. According to the recently published Report of the Commission for Africa, economic growth in Africa is necessary for...

Blessed with abundant land and water resources, Nigeria’s agricultural sector has a high potential for growth, but this potential is not being realized. Productivity is low and basically stagnant. Farming systems, which are mostly small in scale, are still predominantly subsistence-based and...

Poverty is higher in most African countries than elsewhere in the developing world, and highest in the ruralareas. Accelerating growth in agriculture will therefore be critical to sustain growth and reduce poverty,but policy makers are unsure which sub-sector will yield the highest return for a...

Some small-holders are able to generate reliable and substantial income flows through small-scale dairy production for the local market; for others, a set of unique transactions costs hinders participation. Cooperative selling institutions are potential catalysts for mitigating these costs,...

In this paper, performance of a sample of 131 livestock traders in 38 rural Ethiopian highland markets was analysed in terms of their costs and margins, how these were influenced by their assets and trading practices, and the implications of the findings for policy were outlined. The paper is...

Limited data on the allocation of inputs to different activities has limited agricultural economists' attempts to measure sub-sector productivity growth in agriculture. However, recent developments have enabled us to estimate total factor productivity (TFP) growth for crops and livestock...

The Malmquist index has become extensively used in international comparisons of agricultural productivity since it does not require prices for its estimation, which are normally not available. However, the DEA approach used to estimate this index still uses implicit price information. This...