Benefit incidence analysis is an extremely popular tool to assess the distribution of benefits from government expenditure in developing countries, particularly in the social sectors. The analysis describes the welfare impact of public spending on groups of people or households, typically along...

The expansion of supermarkets in developing countries may have far-reaching consequences for poverty and rural development. While previous studies have compared farm profits between participants and non-participants in supermarket channels, wider household welfare effects have hardly been...

Supermarkets and high-value exports are currently gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on farming efficiency have hardly been studied. Using a survey of Kenyan vegetable growers...

Most micro-level studies on the impact of agricultural technologies build on cross-section data, which can lead to unreliable impact estimates. Here, we use panel data covering two time periods to estimate the impact of tissue culture (TC) banana technology in the Kenyan small farm sector. TC...

Classical innovation adoption models implicitly assume homogenous information flow across farmers, which is often not realistic. As a result, selection bias in adoption parameters may occur. We focus on tissue culture (TC) banana technology that was introduced in Kenya more than 10 years ago. Up...

This article investigates determinants and impacts of cooperative organization, using the example of smallholder banana farmers in Kenya. Farmer groups are inclusive of the poor, although wealthier households are more likely to join. Employing propensity score matching, we find positive income...

This article proposes a simple and fast approach to build simultaneous confidence bands and perform specification tests for smooth curves in additive models. The method allows for handling of spatially heterogeneous functions and its derivatives as well as heteroscedasticity in the data. It is...

We analyze yield effects of tissue culture (TC) banana technology in the Kenyan small farm sector, using recent survey data and an endogenous switching regression approach. TC banana plantlets, which are free from pests and diseases, have been introduced in East Africa since the late-1990s....

Increasing agricultural productivity through the dissemination of improved cropping practices remains one of the biggest challenges of this century. A considerable amount of literature is dedicated to the adoption of improved cropping practices among smallholder farmers in developing countries....

Specialization and commercialization of agricultural production is seen as a key to lift small-scale farmers in developing countries out of poverty. While participation in high-value markets has been shown to be beneficial for farmers, especially the smallest and least endowed farmers are often...