In view of the market failures and the state failures inherent in providing agricultural extension, community-based approaches, which involve farmers‘ groups, have gained increasing importance in recent years as a third way to provide this service. The paper discusses the conceptual...

The authors analyze the considerations that lead policymakers to undertake extension investments as a key public responsibility, as well as the complex set of factors and intra-agency incentives that explain why different extension systems'performance vary. The authors provide a conceptual...

Formerly a rich-county preoccupation, dealing more explicitly with environmental concerns around agriculture is becoming a mainstream concern for developing countries. Concerns arise with all the major resources underpinning farming, such as land and water which are selectively reviewed here but...

Over the past dozen years, policymakers have largely abandoned long-standing popular approaches for addressing risk in agriculture without fully resolving the question of how best to manage the negative consequences of volatile agricultural markets. The article reviews the transition from past...

In this chapter we analyze the considerations that lead policy makers to undertake extension investments as a key public responsibility, as well as the complex set of factors and intra-agency incentives that explain why different extension systems' performance varies. Accordingly, the chapter...

Simple functions of random variables, such as sums, products, quotients and powers, arise in many applications in stochastic economics. It is sometimes convenient to determine the moments of such functions. Cases where this has been or can be done analytically are reviewed, and comments offered...

A small case study of published data on response of dryland wheat to nitrogen fertilizer reveals that replication over space apparently substitutes rather poorly for replication over time, in estimating variance of yield conditional on level of fertilizer.

A model is developed from decision theory for evaluating probabilistic information, especially for decision makers who are risk averse. The value of information to such a decision maker is disaggregated into mean and variance effects. It is shown that the degree of risk aversion of the decision...