Despite 40 percent of households relying on household enterprises (non-farm enterprises operated by a single individual or with the help of family members) as an income source, household enterprises are usually ignored in low-income Sub-Saharan-African development strategies. Yet analysis of...

Household enterprises -- usually one-person-operated tiny informal enterprises -- are a rapidly growing source of employment in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in lower-income countries. Household enterprises tend to operate with limited interest or support from governments. This is the case in...

To examine the relationship between patient satisfaction and doctor performance, the authors observed 2,271 interactions between 292 doctors and their patients in 98 clinics and hospitals in Paraguay and conducted an exit-survey with the same patients as they left the clinic. For a subsample of...

Lifelong learning is increasingly being recognized as a primary factor for knowledge diffusion and productivity growth. However, little economic evidence exists on the economic value of lifelong learning for the individual, especially in developing countries. This paper contributes to remedy...

While their application in the context of development aid is quite new, systematic reviews have been used and debated in other fields for various decades. Although evidence gathering and synthesis in the context of development aid inarguably faces challenges distinct from other fields, it is...

Summary The paper examines the revenue effects of certified organic contract farming for smallholders and of adoption of organic agricultural farming methods in a tropical African context. The comparison in both cases is with farming systems that are "organic by default." Survey data from a...

What determines how much foreign aid donors provide? Existing answers to this question point to a complex range of influences. However, the tasks of distinguishing between long- and short-run factors, as well as differences between donors, have not been adequately addressed. Taking advantage of...

This paper confirms recent evidence of a positive impact of aid on growth and widens the scope of evaluation to a range of outcomes including proximate sources of growth (e.g., physical and human capital), indicators of social welfare (e.g., poverty and infant mortality), and measures of...

Does foreign aid promote aggregate economic growth? In contrast to widespread perceptions, academic studies of this question have been rapidly converging towards a positive answer. We employ a simulation approach to (i) validate the coherence of recent em

Changes in the relative prices of commodities consumed in different shares across income groups are known to influence real measures of inequality. Using household budget survey and price data in Mozambique from 2002/03 and 2008/09, we show that accountin