The agricultural sector has certain distinctive features over the business cycle: it is more volatile than and not positively correlated with the rest of the economy and its employment is counter-cyclical. Because of these features and even though the agricultural sector represents less than 2%...

A decomposition of aggregate labor productivity based on internationally comparable data from FAO and Penn World Tables reveals that high labor shares and low productivity in agriculture are mainly responsible for poor countries<92> current position in the world income distribution. Using a...</92>

Differences in employment volatility and the correlation of employment with output across countries are often cited as examples of the limitation of standard real business cycle (RBC) theory to reproduce the observed labor market facts. These observations have lead researchers to argue for the...

Despite sustained economic growth and rapid poverty reductions, income inequality remains stubbornly high in many low-income developing countries. This pattern is a concern as high levels of inequality can impair the sustainability of growth and macroeconomic stability, thereby also limiting...

This paper finds an important relationship between the international food trade and cross-country income and productivity differences. Poor countries have low labour productivity in agriculture relative to other sectors, yet predominantly consume domestically-produced food. To understand these...

There are substantial differences in business cycle fluctuations across countries. These differences are systematically related to the share of agriculture in the economy: Countries with a high share of employment in agriculture feature high fluctuations in aggregate output, low relative...

A decomposition of aggregate labor productivity based on internationally comparable data reveals that a high share of employment and low labor productivity in agriculture are mainly responsible for low aggregate productivity in poor countries. Using a two-sector general-equilibrium model, we...