We investigate the interactions between natural resource-based poverty traps and food security for smallholder farms in highland Kenya using a recently developed system dynamics bio-economic model. This approach permits examination of the complex interactions and feedback between farm-household...

Poverty traps and resource degradation in the rural tropics appear to have multiple and complex, but similar, causes. Market imperfections, imperfect learning, bounded rationality, spillovers, coordination failures and economically dysfunctional institutions all play a role, to varying degrees...

There is a large literature on the estimation of frontier production functions, much of it applied to low-income agriculture. However, much of this literature largely ignores nature's role in agricultural production. Because exogenous, natural production conditions (e.g., rainfall, soil quality,...