While government spending on pro-poor community asset creation and income-transfers could have compounding positive effects on poverty reduction, it is important to first study trends in the allocation of funds, particularly as they relate to the susceptibility of the program to political...

Do rural households in developing countries make market participation and volume decisions simultaneously or sequentially? This article develops a two-stage econometric method to test between these two competing hypotheses regarding household-level marketing behavior. The first stage models the...

Many governments have tried to stabilize commodity prices based on the widespread belief that households in developing countries – especially poorer ones – value price stability, defined here as the lack of fluctuations around a mean price level. We derive a measure of multivariate price...

From 2000 to 2014, per capita gross domestic product in Sub-Saharan Africa increased by almost 35 percent in real terms, doubling in some countries. Such progress happened while agricultural productivity growth remained low in the aggregate, despite some bright spots, and poverty reduction was...

This paper explores the concept of women’s nutritional empowerment and develops a framework for operationalizing it. The paper specifically focuses on the nutritional outcomes of women themselves, rather than on their children. The emphasis on nutritional empowerment addresses an important gap...