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Women’s individual and joint property ownership
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 36

Women’s individual and joint property ownership

Increasingly, women’s property rights are seen as important for both equity and efficiency reasons. While there has been debate in the literature about women are better off with individual rights in contrast to rights jointly with their husband, little empirical work has analyzed this question. In this paper, the relationship of women’s individual and joint property ownership and the level of women’s input into household decisionmaking is explored with data from India, Mali, Malawi, and Tanzania. In the three African countries, women with individual landownership have greater input into household decisionmaking than women whose landownership is joint; both have more input than women who are not landowners. The relationship with other household decisions is more mixed, as is the relationship between housing and input into household decisionmaking. No similar relationship is found in Orissa, India.

Agriculture for development in Iraq? Estimating the impacts of achieving the agricultural targets of the national development plan 2013–2017 on economic growth, incomes, and gender equality
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 28

Agriculture for development in Iraq? Estimating the impacts of achieving the agricultural targets of the national development plan 2013–2017 on economic growth, incomes, and gender equality

This paper estimates the potential effects of achieving the agricultural goals set out in Iraq’s National Development Plan (NDP) 2013–2017 using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model. The findings suggest that raising agricultural productivity in accordance with the NDP may more than double average agricultural growth rates and add an average of 0.7 percent each year to economywide gross domestic product during the duration of the plan. As a consequence, the economy not only diversifies into agriculture, but agricultural growth also lifts growth in the food processing and service sectors. Achieving the yield targets for cereals (especially wheat) and for fruits and vegetables will...

An evaluation of the effectiveness of farmland protection policy in China
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 36

An evaluation of the effectiveness of farmland protection policy in China

Almost two decades have passed since China first enacted legislation to protect farmland from conversion to nonagricultural use. Yet hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land are still developed to urban area each year, raising the question of whether the legislation is effective in preserving farmland from development. This paper examines the effectiveness of the Basic Farmland Protection Regulation in protecting high-quality farmland from urban development in China in the first decade after it came into effect (1995?2005). The theoretical basis for this study is a spatial urban development model with a splitting equation. The empirical evaluation is conducted with georeference...

Impact of Ghana’s agricultural mechanization services center program
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 40

Impact of Ghana’s agricultural mechanization services center program

Use of mechanization in African agriculture has returned strongly to the development agenda, particularly following the recent high food prices crisis. Many developing country governments—including Ghana, the case study of this paper—have resumed support for agricultural mechanization, typically in the form of providing subsidies for tractor purchase and establishment of private-sector-run agricultural mechanization service centers (AMSECs). The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of Ghana’s AMSEC program on various outcomes, using data from household surveys that were conducted with 270 farmers, some of them located in areas with the AMSEC program (treatment) and others located in areas without the program (control).

The impact of cash and food transfers: Evidence from a randomized intervention in Niger
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 32

The impact of cash and food transfers: Evidence from a randomized intervention in Niger

There is little rigorous evidence on the comparative impacts of cash and food transfers on food security and food-related outcomes. We assess the relative impacts of receiving cash versus food transfers using a randomized design. Drawing on data collected in eastern Niger, we find that households randomized to receive a food basket experienced larger, positive impacts on measures of food consumption and diet quality than those receiving the cash transfer.

Market interdependence and volatility transmission among major crops
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 44

Market interdependence and volatility transmission among major crops

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of volatility between the corn, wheat, and soybean markets in the United States. Volatility interactions across markets, if they exist, may lower the effectiveness of diversification strategies to mitigate price risks and should be taken into account when analyzing the pricing behavior of different agricultural commodities. We follow a Multivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (MGARCH) approach to evaluate the level of interdependence and volatility transmission across these major crops on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

Migration, local off-farm employment, and agricultural production efficiency
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 24

Migration, local off-farm employment, and agricultural production efficiency

This paper studies the effect of local off-farm employment and migration on rural households’ technical efficiency of crop production using a five-year panel dataset from more than 2,000 households in five Chinese provinces. While there is not much debate about the positive contribution of migration and local off-farm employment to China’s economy, there is an increasing concern about the potential negative effects of moving labor away from agriculture on China’s future food security. This is a critical issue as maintaining self-sufficiency in grain production will be critical for China to feed its huge population in the future. Several papers have studied the impact of migration on produ...

Can smallholder fruit and vegetable production systems improve household food security and nutritional status of women?
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 40

Can smallholder fruit and vegetable production systems improve household food security and nutritional status of women?

This paper aims to empirically infer potential causal linkages between fruit and vegetable (F&V) production, individual F&V intake, household food security, and anemia levels for individual women caregivers of childbearing age. Using a unique and rich dataset recently collected from rural smallholder Ugandan households, we show that the use of a qualitative tool to measure household food insecurity is robust and applicable in other contexts. We also show, using robust econometric methods, that women living in F&V-producer households have a significantly higher intake of F&Vs than those living in nonproducer households. Furthermore, F&V-producer households are potentially more food secure, and women caregivers in producer households have significantly higher levels of hemoglobin, rendering the prevalence rates of anemia lower among F&V-producer households. We argue that these effects, modest as they are, could be further improved if there were deliberate efforts to promote the intensification of smallholder F&V production.

The impact of shocks on gender-differentiated asset dynamics in Bangladesh
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 40

The impact of shocks on gender-differentiated asset dynamics in Bangladesh

Assets are an important means of coping with adverse events in developing countries but the role of gendered ownership is not yet fully understood. This paper investigates changes in assets owned by the household head, his spouse, or jointly by both of them in response to shocks in rural agricultural households in Bangladesh with the help of detailed household survey panel data. Land is owned mostly by men, who are wealthier than their spouses with respect to almost all types of assets, but relative ownership varies by type of asset. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity across households and looking at changes within, rather than between, households, we find that weather shocks such as cyclones adversely affect the asset holdings of household heads in general, while predicted external events lead to assets of both spouses being drawn down. The results, furthermore, suggest that jointly owned assets are not sold in response to shocks, either due to these assets being actively protected or due to the difficulty of agreeing on this coping strategy, and that women’s asset holdings and associated coping strategies are shaped by their lower involvement in agriculture.

Importance of rice research and development in rice seed policies
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 44

Importance of rice research and development in rice seed policies

First, this paper shows that rice varietal development in Nigeria has been lagging behind that of other developing countries in Asia and Latin America, due partly to insufficient investment in domestic rice R&D. The paper then illustrates using a household model simulation that impacts of certain policies, such as the seed subsidy, may be greater (smaller) if they are applied to good (poor) varieties. The paper concludes by discussing key policy implications and future research needs.