This dissertation contains three essays at the interface of agricultural and development economics. The motivation for this lies in the fact that various studies have shown the agricultural sector to be the main income source for the majority of the global poor and it will hence have to play a...

In the middle of the nineties the rural population in Burkina Faso was seriously hit by rising food prices. Whereas cotton farmers were able to cope with this shock given the simultaneous boom in the cotton sector, food crop farmers had to withdraw children from school and to let them work more...

Most support programs targeted at small firms in low- and middle-income countries fail to generate transformative effects at a large scale due to poor targeting, too little flexibility, and the limited size of the support, among others. This paper assesses the short-term effects of a randomized...

Vision impairment is the most common disability worldwide and it is untreated in large parts of the developing world. We assess the willingness‐to‐pay (WTP) for eyeglasses among adults in a resource‐poor rural setting. We elicit the WTP using the Becker‐DeGroot‐Marschak (BDM) method....

Previous poverty assessments for Burkina Faso were due to the neglect of some important methodological issues misleading and led to the so-called ?Burkinab? Growth-Poverty-Paradox?, i.e. relatively sustained macro-economic growth, but almost constant poverty. We estimate that poverty...

Empirical evidence suggests that regional disparities in incomes are often very high, that these disparities do not necessarily disappear as economies grow and that these disparities are itself an important driver of growth. We use a novel approach based on multilevel modeling to decompose the...

Despite the recent and intense debate on how to define and measure pro-poor growth, there is one important issue which has so far not received sufficient attention: how applications of pro-poor growth measurements can appropriately take into account relative price changes, which, given the...

In the middle of the nineties the rural population in Burkina Faso was seriously hit by rising food prices. Whereas cotton farmers were able to cope with this shock given the simultaneous boom in the cotton sector, food crop farmers had to withdraw children from school and to let them work more...

Local beer breweries in Burkina Faso absorb a considerable amount of urban woodfuel demand. We assess the woodfuel savings caused by the adoption of improved brewing stoves by these micro-breweries and estimate the implied welfare effects through the woodfuel market on private households as well...