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Public expenditures (PE) are critical for key public sector functions that contribute to development and welfare improvements, including the provisions of necessary public goods and the mitigation of market failures. PE in social sectors, such as health, education, and social welfare, and in agriculture have been increasingly recognized as potentially important for income growth, poverty reduction, fostering increased private investment, improved nutritional outcomes, and greater economic resilience. Furthermore, the importance of the impact of subnational PE on these outcomes has also been recognized, as appropriately decentralized PE systems can potentially achieve greater effectiveness by...
Agricultural development has long been considered an important driver of overall economic development in developing countries such as Nigeria. Whether increasing public expenditures on agriculture (PEA) can directly improve broad dimensions of household well-being has continued to be debated. In addition, there has been growing interest in the economic flexibility of households to switch between nonfarm and farming activities. Such flexibility can potentially enhance the resilience of households to shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic in today’s rapidly changing socioeconomic environments. Direct evidence of the impact of PEA on broad development outcomes is also important in informing region...
Growing agriculture remains important for countries like Nigeria where, despite economic transformation at sectoral levels, a significant share of employment still originates from the agricultural sector. The question has continued to be debated of whether increasing Public Expenditures on Agriculture (PEA) is the way to grow agriculture. The needed evidence-base for this debate, while gradually growing, has remained insufficient in African countries, including Nigeria. This has been particularly the case as regards to evidence on the effects of PEA at household levels. This study attempted to partially fill this gap, using state and local government area (LGA)-level PEA figures and househol...
The Government’s policy measures such as travel restrictions, lockdowns, and restrictions on economic and social activities, aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19, had affected the livelihoods and food security of smallholders in Nigeria. Using data collected from sample households from four Nigerian states, this study investigated the effects of COVID-19 pandemic policies on the incomes, employment, and food security situation of smallholder farming households. Results show that 88 percent of the households reported that they lost about 50 percent of their income due to the pandemic. As a result, about 66 percent of respondents reported they reduced food consumption. Travel and movement...
This study estimates the effects of the shares of subnational public expenditure (PE) for agriculture, health, education, and social-welfare, as well as PE-size, on household-level outcomes, using nationally representative panel household data and district and state-level PE data for Nigeria. We find that greater shares of total PE allocated to agriculture, health, and social-welfare, conditional on PE-size, generally have positive effects on household consumption levels, poverty reduction, and non-farm business capital investments by households. A greater share of total PE for agriculture also positively benefits household dietary diversity across seasons. Moreover, household economic resilience, measured in terms of the economic flexibility a household has to shift between farming and non-farm activities, is more greatly enhanced through greater shares of total PE going towards agriculture than to health and social-welfare. These multi-dimensional benefits of greater PE for agriculture are particularly worthy of attention in countries, like Nigeria, which have historically allocated a low share of total PE to agriculture.
About 800 million people suffer from hunger, 2 billion from lack of micronutrients, and more than 2 billion from overweight and obesity. There is renewed interest in reshaping agricultural and food systems, at the global, regional and national levels, so that poor and vulnerable people have access to and are able to consume nutritious foods. This book examines direct and indirect effects of agriculture on nutrition, following the agricultural value chain to explore this complex relationship, from biodiversity and crop fortification, to program evaluation, to the impact of agricultural policies on consumers' choices and actions. It explores the role of various actors along the chain, includin...
The agricultural sector in Nigeria is characterized by low productivity that is driven in part by low use of modern agricultural technologies. Poor access to credit is seen by many observers to be one of the key barriers to adoption of these technologies. Literature suggests that credit constraints impede individuals from investing in productivity enhancing agricultural technologies and, thus, poor farmers are unable to engage in high-return agricultural activities. Much policy discourse and research literature associates agricultural credit constraints with supply-side factors, such as farmers not having access to credit sources or high costs of borrowing, and, thus, recommend that such supply-side constraints be addressed to improve smallholders’ access to credit. However, demand-side factors, such as borrower’s risk-averse behavior, financial illiteracy, collateral requirements, or perceived high transactions costs, can also play important roles in credit-rationing for smallholder farmers.
The agricultural sector in Nigeria is characterized by low productivity that is driven by low use of modern agricultural technologies, such as improved seed, chemical fertilizer, agrochemicals, and agricultural machinery. Poor access to credit is claimed to be one of the key barriers to adoption of these technologies. This study examines the nature of credit constraints among smallholder farmers – whether smallholders are credit constrained or not and the extent to which credit constraints emanate from supply-side or demand-side factors. Using multinomial probit and seeming unrelated simultaneous equations econometric models with data from the 2018/19 Living Standards Measurement Study-Int...
Building on the work of earlier studies that looked at trends in and returns to federal public expenditures on agriculture in Nigeria, this paper explores spending patterns at the sub-national state level over a nine-year period, as well as trends in agricultural and economic performance and indicators of household welfare. Our examination focuses on two groupings of states – the full 37 state units of Nigeria (the 36 states, plus the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja); and the seven states that are the focus in Nigeria of the Global Food Security Strategy (GFSS) of the United States Agency for International Development. Sub-national agricultural spending as a share of aggregate agricultura...