This report is a brief survey of WTO agreements and their implications for the West African economies (including Chad). The study reviews the positions of West African countries on various WTO issues and compares these positions with positions expressed by major trade partners, particularly the...

Ce rapport est une vue d’ensemble sommaire des accords commerciaux de l’ OMC et de leurs implications pour les pays de l’ Afrique de l’ Ouest (ainsi que le Tchad). L’étude décrit les positions adoptées par les pays de l’ Afrique de l’ Ouest sur divers enjeux des négociations...

Since the colonial era, the expansion of the Senegalese economy was greatly sustained by the agricultural sector in which more than three-fourths of the total population were involved. A 2.3 percent average annual growth of total production during the sixties matched the speed at which the...

This paper examines the environment within which West African countries are designing their regional self-reliance food security strategy following the Uruguay Round Agreements on Agriculture (URAA). The self-reliance strategy combines regionally-coordinated domestic food production with food...

Introduction The purposes of this paper are: (1) to introduce the social capital paradigm; (2) to present evidence that social capital has an important role in poverty reduction; and (3) to suggest several policy prescriptions for building and using social capital to reduce poverty. The social...

This paper outlines proposed research, using concepts of New Institutional Economics, to identify the factors constraining the emergence of a market for domestically produced improved seed potatoes in Mali. It uses the Principal –Agent model to outline how to investigate the feasibility of...

Off-farm earnings account for a substantial and growing share of household income among smallholder farmers in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, but evidence concerning the effects of these earnings on investment in food production remains sparse. Conceptually, some factors may push farm families to...

In the coming decades, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) could see a major humanitarian crisis. If rapid population growth continues and agricultural productivity rises slowly or not at all,large increases in the working-age population and daunting problems of food supply, poverty,and underemployment...

This paper assesses the relationship between agricultural productivity and market participation and performance following an increase in market prices in Mozambique. We use panel data before and after the change in price regime to identify the relative importance of market access/participation...