Many fear China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) will impoverish its rural people by way of greater import competition in its agricultural markets. Anderson, Huang, and Ianchovichina explore that possibility bearing in mind that, even if producer prices of some (land-intensive)...

In Africa, most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the African context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale -- a premise supported by the often...

Agriculture has made major contributions to China's economic growth and poverty reduction, but the literature has rarely focused on the institutional factors that might underpin such structural transformation and productivity. This paper aims to fill that gap. Drawing on an 8-year panel of 1,200...

This paper uses farm panel data from Indonesia to examine dynamic patterns of land use, capital investments, and wages in agriculture. The empirical analysis shows that an increase in real wages has induced the substitution of labor by machines among relatively large farmers. Large farmers tend...

Using individual level employment data from Bangladesh, this paper presents empirical evidence on the relative importance of farm and urban linkages for rural nonfarm employment. The econometric results indicate that high return wage work and self-employment in nonfarm activities cluster around...

The authors analyze five rounds of National Sample Survey data covering 1983, 1987/8, 1993/4, 1999/0, and 2004/5 to explore the relationship between rural diversification and poverty. Poverty in rural India declined at a modest rate during this period. The authors provide region-level estimates...

This paper analyzes changes in agricultural production and economic welfare of farmers in rural Peru resulting from a large irrigation infrastructure rehabilitation project. The analysis uses a ten-year district panel and a spatial regression discontinuity approach to measure the causal effect...

It is a contentious issue whether large scale mining creates local employment, and the sector has been accused of hurting women?s labor supply and economic opportunities. This paper uses the rapid expansion of mining in Sub-Saharan Africa to analyze local structural shifts. It matches 109...

With farms cultivating tens or hundreds of thousands of hectares, Ukraine is often used to demonstrate the existence of economies of scale in modern grain production. Panel data analysis for all the country's farms with more than 200 hectares in 2001-2011 suggests that higher yields and profits...

This paper proposes a model to analyze the implications of colonial policies for gender inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa. The model emphasizes segmentation of production under complete specialization. It shows that the colonial production model, underpinned by occupational job segregation in the...