This paper analyzes how electoral incentives affected the performance of a major decentralized conditional cash transfer program intended on reducing school dropout rates among children of poor households in Brazil. We show that while this federal program successfully reduced school dropout by 8...

Mutual insurance has been shown, theoretically and empirically, to be incomplete and limited by asymmetric information and lack of enforcement mechanisms. While some research has shown that networks based on kinship, neighbourhood and ethnicity may provide a locus of insurance and thus a way of...

The diffusion of a new agricultural technology requires farmers to learn about the existence and the benefits of the technology. What do they have to learn, how do they learn it, and from whom, is the subject of a large literature, both theoretical and empirical. The purpose of this brief is to...

The Green Revolution, consisting of using High Yielding Variety (HYV) seeds together with high fertilizer doses, has been widely adopted under irrigated conditions, but generally not in rainfed areas that are prone to stresses like drought and flooding. This puzzling lag in technology adoption...

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goal on poverty eradication requires focusing on agriculture and rural areas. Increasing technology adoption in staple food agriculture—the Green Revolution—will however not suffice. Key is to manage an agricultural and a rural transformation whereby...

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have proved to be effective in inducing chronic poor households to invest in the human capital of their children while helping reduce poverty. They have also protected child human capital from the shocks that affect these households. In this paper, we...

Assurance climatique indicielle pour les pays en développement : examen des faits et propositions visant à augmenter le taux de souscriptionL'assurance climatique indicielle constitue une innovation institutionnelle majeure susceptible de révolutionner l'accès à l'assurance formelle de...