Trade liberalization in the early 1990s in Bangladesh has enabled the private sector torespond with market-stabilizing inflows of rice and wheat following major productionshortfalls. At the same time, easing of restrictions on foreign investment, combined withsubstantial depreciation of the...

For the past two decades, Bangladesh has enjoyed steady growth in per capita incomes enabling a significant reduction in poverty. An increase in rice productivity, achieved through a combination of improved seeds, increased fertilizer use, and public and private investments in irrigation, played...

To meet its overall objective of ensuring food security for all households, the Government of Bangladesh undertakes several activities: it intervenes in markets to stabilize prices, targets food distribution to poor households and provides emergency relief after natural disasters. This paper...

In the late 1990s, government policy in Bangladesh shifted in favor of increasedpublic foodgrain stocks, setting official minimum stock targets of 1.0 to 1.2 million tons,as compared to operational targets of about 700 to 800 thousand metric tons in the early1990s. Because no mechanism for stock...

This study uses data from 1996/97 through 1998/99 to examine the relativeefficiency of production of crops in Bangladesh and their comparative advantage ininternational trade as measured by net economic profitability (the profitability usingeconomic, rather than financial costs and prices), and...

The paper explores the role social network capital might play in facilitating poor agents’ escape from poverty traps. We model endogenous network formation among households heterogeneously endowed with both traditional and social network capital who make investment and technology choices over...

Many governments try to stabilize commodity prices based on the widespread belief that households value price stability and that the poor especially benefit from food price stabilization. We derive an exact measure of multivariate price risk aversion and of associated household willingness to...

Supermarkets, specialized wholesalers, and processors and agro-exporters’ agricultural value chains have begun to transform the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low-income economies. We develop a conceptual framework through which to study contracting between...

Empirical studies across many developing countries routinely document a positive correlation between participation in rural nonfarm employment and households’ wealth or income. This paper explores whether nonfarm employment leads to higher consumption expenditure growth in Ethiopia. We find...

We study rural employment transitions in Ethiopia between farming and both low- and high-return nonfarm employment. We find that initial asset holdings and access to saving and credit are important factors for transition into high-return rural nonfarm employment and that households’...