Abstract Skyrocketing staple food prices in combination with falling incomes around the world raised serious concerns among policy makers, media and the public at large over the past few years. We rigorously explore the dietary and nutritional implications of such shocks in a before, during and...

What drives income diversification among rural households in developing countries? A large literature has examined whether household income diversification is a means of survival or a means of accumulation, which has so far remained inconclusive. This paper attempts to evaluate which explanation...

Abstract In 2005 China provided duty-free access to 190 items from 25 least developed sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Three years later duty-free access was extended to 454 items from 31 SSA LDCs. We find no evidence that China’s preferential market access program for the least developed...

Abstract Using 2008 LSMS data for Côte d’Ivoire, we study the welfare implications of the price increase of key imported staple food – rice – and consider the consumption smoothing effect of locally produced food and cash crop varieties. While middle-income households are found to be...

Affirmative action has been at the heart of public policies towards the socially disadvantaged in India. Compensatory discrimination policies which have been adopted for the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) since independence were recommended for Other Backward Classes (OBC) by...