Aid agencies often provide transfers in food rather than cash out of a paternalistic belief that food transfers will better improve household food security. However, evidence from Latin America shows that cash transfers often increase the share of food in consumption, counter to Engel’s Law....

We assess the impact of a large-scale social protection intervention, Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), over a 15-year period. We find that the PSNP had a positive impact on food security but inconsistent impacts on assets. There were positive impacts on fertilizer use,...

Studying the sources of growth in agricultural production, examining the extent of inefficiency, and identifying the sources of such inefficiency, is an important step forward to improve the livelihood of subsistence farm households in developing countries. A stochastic frontier analysis is used...

In Ethiopia, as in many other African countries, there is a pressing need to improve household food security. An emerging consensus suggests that this is most easily accomplished through two development strategies with two complementary dimensions: investments that facilitate income generation...

Ethiopia's Food Security Programme provides income transfers through public works in its Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) as well as targeted services provided through the Other Food Security Programme (OFSP) and, later, the Household Asset Building Programme (HABP) designed to improve...

This study evaluates a large social protection program in rural Ethiopia, the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP). The effectiveness of the PSNP is of interest because the program was implemented at scale in one of Africa’s poorest countries, which has limited physical and communications...