Agriculture in poor countries has low productivity, high employment, and negligible trade flows relative to other sectors. These facts motivate a multi-sector, open-economy view of international productivity differences. With a quantitative multi-country model featuring nonhomothetic...

Poor countries have low labour productivity in agriculture relative to other sectors, yet predominantly consume domestically produced food. The existing literature on cross-country agricultural and aggregate productivity differences abstracts from open economy considerations – leaving open the...

This paper finds an important relationship between the international food trade and cross-country income and productivity differences. Poor countries have low labour productivity in agriculture relative to other sectors, yet predominantly consume domestically-produced food. To understand these...