We measure if and to what extent livestock sales during food shortages affect the wealth value of livestock. For this purpose we exploit monthly market prices of meat and staple foods in Malawi, for up to 72 locations (towns, villages and markets), for the period from January 1991 to December...

Weather index insurance is considered a promising international climate policy instrument that can help households adapt better to climate change. This is especially true in developing countries where households often suffer severely from the consequences of extreme weather events. This report...

Farmer-to-consumer direct marketing provides an alternative marketing strategy for farmers, ensuring their income while also meeting consumers' increasing demand for local food. This study evaluates the challenging factors of this marketing channel from the farmers' viewpoint. A CAPI survey was...

"This book is a valuable and innovative piece of scholarship. It advances the broadening field of studies devoted to understanding how animal breeding has evolved after the advent of the science of genetics. Animal breeding is an ancient human occupation, but it has undergone profound changes...

While animal suffering and abuse have taken place throughout history, the alienation of humanity from nature caused by the development of capitalism - by the logic of capital and its system of generalized commodity production - accelerated and increased the depredations in scope and scale. The...

Sustainable feed formulation (defined here as nutritional and economic feed optimization) is substantial in feed chain production from crop farmers to livestock producers. Diet formulation employing a static linear programming (LP) approach, which is widely used in trading firms and feed...

Livestock has been hypothesized to be one of the major buffer stocks for consumption smoothing in rural areas of developing countries. It is therefore hard for poor farmers in the developing world to finance large investments. We test the latter by estimating a latent variable model of solar...

Productivity of rangelands in Kenya is affected by increasing crop farming especially in more fertile range areas. Among the key factors driving the encroachment of crops on rangelands are the changing opportunities brought about by markets. We hypothesize that the existing market inefficiencies...

Ziel der explorativen Untersuchung war es, mögliche Probleme in der Verfolgung von Verstößen gegen Tierschutzgesetze im Nutztierbereich zu identifizieren und Verbesserungsvorschläge zu sammeln. Der Ausgangspunkt für die Studie war die Aussage von Amtstierärzten, dass eindeutige Verstöße...

This study examines the impact of multiple shocks on assets by employing two waves of a panel data set of 360 rural households in three agro-ecological zones in Kenya. To control for unobserved heterogeneity, a "within" household fixed effects model was employed. One major finding is that...

This dissertation includes three empirical essays on development economics and one on the economics of education. The first essay (co-authored by Stephan Klasen) is a contribution to the debate surrounding the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the on-going debate about what international...

This paper investigates the impact of indemnity payments from index insurance on the asset recovery of households after a catastrophic weather disaster occurs. Our focus is on the Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) in Mongolia. We analyze the effect of IBLI indemnity payments after a...

Ziel der explorativen Untersuchung war es, mögliche Probleme in der Verfolgung von Verstößen gegen Tierschutzgesetze im Nutztierbereich zu identifizieren und Verbesserungsvorschläge zu sammeln. Der Ausgangspunkt für die Studie war die Aussage von Amtstierärzten, dass eindeutige Verstöße...

Die Nutztierhaltung in Deutschland hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten zu einem wirtschaftlich sehr erfolgreichen Sektor entwickelt. Es wurden große Fortschritte in Bezug auf die Ressourceneffizienz erzielt. Gleichzeitig gibt es erhebliche Defizite vor allem im Bereich Tierschutz, aber auch im...

The paper uses a detailed household survey to document precautionary wealth accumulation in Afghanistan, with wealth being significantly higher for households facing higher income uncertainty. Annual household expenditure on nondurable goods is also lower for these households. There is no...

Management is an important input into agricultural production, as it a determinant of the uptake and proper implementation of productive technologies and practices. While there is a large literature on evaluations of extension programs meant to improve management practices in agricultural...

Agriculture was the mainstay of the Nigerian economy prior to independence and immediately after. Agriculture however, has suffered persistent decline since the 1970s with the exchange rate policy being implicated in the misfortune of this sector. Earlier studies on the effect of exchange rate...

Livestock are an important component of rural livelihoods in developing countries, but data about this source of income and wealth are difficult to collect because of the nomadic and semi-nomadic nature of many pastoralist populations. Most household surveys exclude those without permanent...

Farmer and public roles in livestock disease management -- Economic determinants of farmer decision-making related to animal disease -- Insights from behavioural economics into farmer livestock disease management -- Issues of livestock disease management beyond the farm: Collective action, the...