Modern agricultural technologies hold huge potential for increasing productivity and reducing poverty in developing countries. However, adoption levels of these technologies have remained disappointingly low in Africa. This paper analyzes the effect of access to credit on the likelihood of...

We survey efforts that track food security in Africa using phone surveys during the COVID-19 pandemic. Phone surveys are concentrated in a few countries mostly focusing on a narrow theme. Only a few allow heterogeneous analyses across socioeconomic, spatial, and intertemporal dimensions across...

Agricultural value chains, particularly in the developing world, have been going through drastic changes over the past decades. Differences in world market participation and access to value chain technologies might however have resulted in uneven experiences across countries. In this paper, we...

Based on unique primary surveys, we study dairy transformation processes in East Africa, specifically in Ethiopia and Uganda. Evidence on transformation and differential paths followed in doing so in these countries is often limited due to a lack of data. We note significant changes in the dairy...

This paper studies the political economy of relief aid allocation using empirical evidence from relief programs after a major cyclone (Gafilo) hit Madagascar in March 2004. Relief was provided by the Government of Madagascar as well as local and international aid agencies. Aid allocation was...

There is a vigorous debate on the liberalization of heavily regulated agricultural markets in India. A crucial institutional characteristic is the role of state regulated brokers in wholesale markets. Relying on data from a unique survey in Uttarakhand, a state in North-India, we find that...

Food quality has become an important detfirminant of success in global food trade and growers for international markets have to continuously adjust to buyers' requirements. It is however not clear to what extent there is a demand for food quality - and how much buyers are willing to pay for it -...

During the past decades the global food system changed dramatically with increased trade in high-value food products, increased exports from developing countries, increased consolidation and dominance of large multinational food companies, and increased proliferation of public and private food...

Local capture of public expenditures is an important problem for service delivery and poverty reduction in developing countries. Standard anticorruption institutions may not be effective, as these tend often to be corrupt themselves. This paper analyses the impact of monitoring and infirmation...

Global retail companies ('supfirmarkets' have an increasing influence on developing countries, through foreign investments and/or through the imposition of their private standards. The impact on developing countries and poverty is often assessed as negative. In this paper we show the opposite,...