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Forced Gifts The Burden Of Being A Friend
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Book Synopsis Forced gifts: The burden of being a friend by : Bulte, Erwin
Download or read book Forced gifts: The burden of being a friend written by Bulte, Erwin and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many developing countries, gift expenses account for a substantial share of total household expenditures. As incomes rise, gift expenses are escalating in several developing countries. We develop a theoretical model to demonstrate how (unequal) income growth may trigger “gift competition” and drive up the financial burden associated with gift exchange. We use unique census-type panel data from rural China to test our model predictions and demonstrate that (1) the value of gifts responds to the average gift in the community, (2) the escalation of gift giving may have adverse welfare implications (especially for the poor), and (3) escalating gift expenses crowd out expenditures on other consumption items.
Book Synopsis Changing gender roles in agriculture? Evidence from 20 years of data in Ghana by : Lambrecht, Isabel
Download or read book Changing gender roles in agriculture? Evidence from 20 years of data in Ghana written by Lambrecht, Isabel and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-17 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when donors and governments are increasing efforts to mainstream gender in agriculture, it is critical to revisit long-standing wisdom about gender inequalities in agriculture to be able to more efficiently design and evaluate policy interventions. Many stylized facts about women in agriculture have been repeated for decades. Did nothing really change? Is some of this conventional wisdom simply maintained over time, or has it always been inaccurate? We use longitudinal data from Ghana to assess some of the facts and to evaluate whether gender patterns have changed over time. We focus on five main themes: land, cropping patterns, market participation, agricultural inputs, and employment. We add to the literature by showing new facts and evidence from more than 20 years. Results are varied and highlight the difficulty of making general statements about gender in agriculture.
Book Synopsis Participation, learning, and equity in education: Can we have it all? by : Delavallade, Clara
Download or read book Participation, learning, and equity in education: Can we have it all? written by Delavallade, Clara and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals have set a triple educational objective: improving access to, quality of, and gender equity in education. This study is the first to document the effectiveness of policies targeting all these objectives simultaneously. We examine the impact of a multifaceted educational program—delivered to 230 randomly selected primary schools in rural India—on students’ participation and performance. We also study the heterogeneity of this impact across gender and initial school performance, and its sustainability over two years. Although the program specifically targeted outof-school girls for enrollment, the learning component of the program targeted boys and girls equally. We find that the program reduced gender gaps in school retention and improved learning during the first year of implementation. However, targeting different educational goals (access, quality, and equity) did not yield sustained effects on school attendance or learning, nor did it bridge gender inequalities in school performance over the two-year period.
Book Synopsis Misreporting month of birth: Implications for nutrition research by : Larsen, Anna Folke
Download or read book Misreporting month of birth: Implications for nutrition research written by Larsen, Anna Folke and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Height-for-age z-scores (HAZs) and stunting status (HAZ<−2) are widely used to measure child nutrition and population health. However, accurate measurement of age is nontrivial in populations with low levels of literacy and numeracy, limited use of formal birth records, and weak cultural norms surrounding birthdays and calendar use. In this paper we use Demographic and Health Surveys data from 62 countries over the period 1990–2014 to describe two statistical artifacts indicative of misreporting of age. The first artifact consists of lower HAZs for children reported to be born earlier in each calendar year (resulting in implausibly large HAZ gaps between January- and December-born children), which is consistent with some degree of randomness in month of birth reporting. The second artifact consists of lower HAZs for children with a reported age just below a round age (and hence implausibly large HAZ gaps between children with reported ages just below and just above round ages), which is consistent with survey respondents rounding ages down more than they round ages up. Using simulations, we show how these forms of misreporting child age can replicate observed patterns in the data, and that they have small impacts on estimated rates of stunting but important implications for research that relies on birth timing to identify exposure to various risks, particularly seasonal shocks. Moreover, the misreporting we identify differs from conventional age-heaping concerns, implying that the metrics described above could constitute useful markers of measurement error in nutrition surveys. Future research should also investigate ways to reduce these errors.
Book Synopsis He says, she says: Exploring patterns of spousal agreement in Bangladesh by : Ambler, Kate
Download or read book He says, she says: Exploring patterns of spousal agreement in Bangladesh written by Ambler, Kate and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Participation in household decisions and control over assets are often used as indicators of bargaining power. Yet spouses do not necessarily provide the same answers to questions about these topics. We examine differences in spouses’ answers to questions regarding who participates in decisions about household activities, who owns assets, and who decides to purchase assets. Disagreement is substantial and systematic, with women more likely to report joint ownership or decision making and men more likely to report sole male ownership or decision making. Analysis of correlations between agreement and women’s well-being finds that agreement on joint decision making/ownership is generally positively associated with beneficial outcomes for women compared with agreement on sole male decision making/ownership. Cases of disagreement where women recognize their involvement but men do not are also positively associated with good outcomes for women, but often to a lesser extent than when men agree that women are involved.
Book Synopsis The “Discouraged Worker Effect” in public works programs: Evidence from the MGNREGA in India by : Narayanan, Sudha
Download or read book The “Discouraged Worker Effect” in public works programs: Evidence from the MGNREGA in India written by Narayanan, Sudha and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigates the consequences of poor implementation in public workfare programs, focusing on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in India. Using nationally representative data, we test empirically for a discouraged worker effect arising from either of two mechanisms: administrative rationing of jobs among those who seek work and delays in wage payments. We find strong evidence at the household and district levels that administrative rationing discourages subsequent demand for work. Delayed wage payments seem to matter significantly during rainfall shocks. We find further that rationing is strongly associated with indicators of implementation ability such as staff capacity. Politics appears to play only a limited role. The findings suggest that assessments of the relevance of public programs over their lifecycle need to factor in implementation quality.
Book Synopsis Farmers’ quality assessment of their crops and its impact on commercialization behavior: A field experiment in Ethiopia by : Abate, Gashaw T.
Download or read book Farmers’ quality assessment of their crops and its impact on commercialization behavior: A field experiment in Ethiopia written by Abate, Gashaw T. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-24 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adoption of quality-enhancing technologies is often driven largely by farmers’ expected returns from these technologies. Without proper grades, standards, and certification systems, however, farmers may remain uncertain about the actual financial return associated with their quality-enhancing investments. This report summarizes the outcomes of a short video-based randomized training intervention on wheat quality measurement and collective marketing among 15,000 wheat farmers in Ethiopia. Our results suggest that the intervention led to significant changes in farmers’ commercialization behaviors—namely, it prompted farmers to adopt behaviors geared toward assessing their wheat’s quality using easily implementable test-weight measures, assessing the accuracy of the equipment used by buyers in their kebeles (scales, in particular), and contacting more than one buyer before concluding a sale. The training also led to improvements in share of output sold, price received, and collective marketing, albeit with important limitations. First, farmers who measured their wheat quality received a higher price, but only if their wheat was of higher quality. Second, farmers who found that their wheat was of higher quality were more reluctant to aggregate their wheat (that is, sell their products through local cooperatives) than those who found that their wheat was of lower quality. Lastly, the training intervention led to better use of fertilizer in the following season. Our discovery that a short training intervention can significantly change farmers’ marketing and production behavior should encourage the development of further interventions aimed at enhancing farmers’ adoption of improved technologies and commercialization.
Book Synopsis Limitations of contract farming as a pro-poor strategy: The case of maize outgrower schemes in upper West Ghana by : Ragasa, Catherine
Download or read book Limitations of contract farming as a pro-poor strategy: The case of maize outgrower schemes in upper West Ghana written by Ragasa, Catherine and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus in this paper is on two relatively large maize-based contract farming (CF) schemes with fixed input packages (Masara and Akate) and a number of smaller and more flexible CF schemes in a remote region in Ghana (Upper West). Results show that these schemes led to improved technology adoption and yield increases. In addition, a subset of maize farmers with high yield improvements due to CF participation had high gross margins. However, on average, yields were not high enough to compensate for higher input requirements and cost of capital. On average, households harvest 29–30 bags (100 kg each), or 2.9–3.0 metric tons, of maize per hectare, and the required repayment for fertilizer, seed, herbicide, and materials provided under the average CF scheme is 21–25 bags (50 kg each) per acre, or 2.6–3.0 tons per hectare, which leaves almost none for home consumption or for sale. Despite higher yields, the costs to produce 1 ton of maize under CF schemes remain high on average—higher than on maize farms without CF schemes, more than twice that of several countries in Africa, and more than seven times higher than that of major maize-exporting countries (the United States, Brazil, and Argentina). Sustainability of these CF schemes will depend on, from the firms’ perspective, minimizing the costs to run and monitor them, and from the farmers’ perspective, developing and promoting much-improved varieties and technologies that may lead to a jump in yields and gross margins to compensate for the high cost of credit.
Book Synopsis Smog in our brains: Gender differences in the impact of exposure to air pollution on cognitive performance in China by : Chen, Xi
Download or read book Smog in our brains: Gender differences in the impact of exposure to air pollution on cognitive performance in China written by Chen, Xi and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-11 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there is a large body of literature on the negative health effects of air pollution, there is much less written about its effects on cognitive performance for the whole population. This paper studies the effects of contemporaneous and cumulative exposure to air pollution on cognitive performance based on a nationally representative survey in China. By merging a longitudinal sample at the individual level with local air-quality data according to the exact dates and counties of interviews, we find that contemporaneous and cumulative exposure to air pollution impedes both verbal and math scores of survey subjects. Interestingly, the negative effect is stronger for men than for women. Specifically, the gender difference is more salient among the old and less educated in both verbal and math tests.
Book Synopsis Measuring postharvest losses at the farm level in Malawi by : Ambler, Kate
Download or read book Measuring postharvest losses at the farm level in Malawi written by Ambler, Kate and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-04-14 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reducing food loss and waste are important policy objectives prominently featured in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. To optimally design interventions targeted at reducing losses, it is important to know where losses are concentrated between the farm and fork. This paper measures farmlevel postharvest losses for three main crops—maize, soy, and groundnuts—among 1,200 households in Malawi. Farmers answered a detailed questionnaire designed to learn about losses during harvest and transport, processing, and storage and which measures both total losses and reductions in crop quality. The findings indicate that fewer than half of households report suffering losses conditional on growing each crop. In addition, conditional on losses occurring, the loss averages between 5 and 12 percent of the farmer’s total harvest. Compared to nationally representative data that measure losses using a single survey question, this study documents a far greater percentage of farmers experiencing losses, though the unconditional proportion lost is similar. We find that losses are concentrated in harvest and processing activities for groundnuts and maize; for soy, they are highest during processing. Existing interventions have primarily targeted storage activities; however, these results suggest that targeting other activities may be worthwhile.
Book Synopsis Gender research in the CGIAR research program on policies, institutions, and markets in 2018 and 2019 by : Vos, Andrea
Download or read book Gender research in the CGIAR research program on policies, institutions, and markets in 2018 and 2019 written by Vos, Andrea and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 67 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report analyses PIM’s 391 peer-reviewed 2018 and 20191 publications. We highlight key gender findings and discuss the challenges faced by researchers in doing gender analysis, with a view to documenting lessons learned and improving practices. It is hoped that the gaps and strengths identified in this report will be useful inputs for future research under PIM and One CGIAR.
Book Synopsis Can agricultural aspirations influence preferences for new technologies? by : Bell, Andrew R.
Download or read book Can agricultural aspirations influence preferences for new technologies? written by Bell, Andrew R. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-05-03 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the face of increasing environmental stresses, there is a critical need to improve water-use efficiency in many arid and semiarid agroclimatic zones. Drip irrigation is a high-efficiency irrigation technology that can improve water-use efficiency in currently irrigated areas and transform areas that are not otherwise irrigable in practice. Although adoption of drip irrigation is growing rapidly in India, adoption is low in neighboring Pakistan. The authors of this paper undertook a discrete choice experiment framed around the hypothetical subsidized purchase of a drip irrigation system in four districts of Punjab, Pakistan. The nonrepresentative sample of adopters and nonadopters in the study districts identified a clear increase in the valuation of drip systems in the first several years following adoption. This finding suggests that farmers may be unaware of the opportunities for the use of drip irrigation on their farms or the benefits that may accrue from such use. In addition, farmers’ aspirations for cropping systems under drip were better predictors of the valuation of drip systems than were current cropping patterns, implying that a different agricultural landscape might reasonably emerge under improved adoption of drip. Aspirations differed across the different agroecological zones and water regimes captured by this study. Aspirations to substitute wheat crops for fruits and vegetables were associated with a higher appreciation of the subsidy level, whereas aspirations to expand wheat were associated with a higher appreciation of the area covered by the drip initiative; together, these findings imply a degree of control over the extent of wheat production in the landscape via careful design of the drip subsidy program. Although the penetration of drip irrigation is not yet sufficient to draw inferences from a representative sample, these results suggest a number of ways in which drip irrigation may transform Pakistan’s agricultural landscape
Book Synopsis Nutrition transition and the structure of global food demand by : Gouel, Christophe
Download or read book Nutrition transition and the structure of global food demand written by Gouel, Christophe and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Estimating future demand for food is a critical aspect of global food security analyses. The process linking dietary changes to wealth is known as the nutrition transition and presents well-identified features that help to predict consumption changes in poor countries. This study proposes to represent the nutrition transition with a nonhomothetic, flexible-in-income, demand system, known as the Modified Implicitly Directly Additive Demand System (MAIDADS). The resulting model is transparent and estimated statistically based on cross-sectional information from FAOSTAT the statistical database of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. It captures the main features of the nutrition transition: rise in demand for calories associated with income growth; diversification of diets away from starchy staples; and a large increase in caloric demand for animal-based products, fats, and sweeteners. The estimated model is used to project food demand between 2010 and 2050 based on a set of plausible futures (trend projections and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways scenarios). The main results of these projections are as follows: (1) global food demand will increase by 46 percent, less than half the growth in the previous four decades; (2) this growth will be attributable mainly to lower-middle-income and low-income countries; (3) the structure of global food demand will change over the period, with a 95 percent increase in demand for animal-based calories and a much smaller 18 percent increase in demand for starchy staples; and (4) the analysis of a range of population and income projections reveals important uncertainties depending on the scenario, the projected increases in demand for animal-based and vegetal-based calories range from 78 to 109 percent and from 20 to 42 percent, respectively.
Book Synopsis Improving the targeting of fertilizer subsidy programs in Africa south of the Sahara: Perspectives from the Ghanaian experience by : Houssou, Nazaire
Download or read book Improving the targeting of fertilizer subsidy programs in Africa south of the Sahara: Perspectives from the Ghanaian experience written by Houssou, Nazaire and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-17 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper assesses whether fertilizer subsidy programs can be better targeted to resource-poor farmers using the case of Ghana and proxy means test approaches. Past fertilizer subsidy programs in the country have not been particularly targeted to the poor, even as targeting poor and smallholder farmers has become key in the program implementation guidelines. As a result, many poor farmers have not benefited from past programs. Our results show that targeting approaches based on proxy means tests that use the correlates of poverty to select beneficiary farmers can potentially improve the poverty outreach and costeffectiveness of Ghana’s fertilizer subsidy programs. Therefore, we propose that the proxy means test approach should be considered for implementing Ghana’s fertilizer subsidy programs, first in a pilot project involving a few communities, and later, if found successful, in a full-scale program.
Book Synopsis Insuring against droughts: Evidence on agricultural intensification and index insurance demand from a randomized evaluation in rural Bangladesh by : Hill, Ruth Vargas
Download or read book Insuring against droughts: Evidence on agricultural intensification and index insurance demand from a randomized evaluation in rural Bangladesh written by Hill, Ruth Vargas and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely acknowledged that unmitigated risks provide a disincentive for otherwise optimal investments in modern farm inputs. Index insurance provides a means for managing risk without the burdens of asymmetric information and high transaction costs that plague traditional indemnity-based crop insurance programs. Yet many index insurance programs that have been piloted around the world have met with rather limited success, so the potential for insurance to foster more intensive agricultural production has yet to be realized. This study assesses both the demand for and the effectiveness of an innovative index insurance product designed to help smallholder farmers in Bangladesh manage risk to crop yields and the increased production costs associated with drought. Villages were randomized into either an insurance treatment or a comparison group, and discounts and rebates were randomly allocated across treatment villages to encourage insurance take-up and to allow for the estimation of the price elasticity of insurance demand. Among those offered insurance, we find insurance demand to be moderately price elastic, with discounts significantly more successful in stimulating demand than rebates. Farmers who are highly risk averse or sensitive to basis risk prefer a rebate to a discount, suggesting that the rebate may partially offset some of the implicit costs associated with insurance contract nonperformance. Having insurance yields both ex ante risk management effects and ex post income effects on agricultural input use. The risk management effects lead to increased expenditures on inputs during the aman rice-growing season, including expenditures for risky inputs such as fertilizers, as well as those for irrigation and pesticides. The income effects lead to increased seed expenditures during the boro rice-growing season, which may signal insured farmers’ higher rates of seed replacement, which broadens their access to technological improvements embodied in newer seeds as well as enhancing the genetic purity of cultivated seeds.
Book Synopsis Agricultural diversification in Nepal: Status, determinants, and its impact on rural poverty by : Thapa, Ganesh
Download or read book Agricultural diversification in Nepal: Status, determinants, and its impact on rural poverty written by Thapa, Ganesh and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As in many parts of the developing world, the share of high value crops in agricultural gross domestic product (AgGDP) has increased substantially in Nepal. We contribute to the literature on trends in agricultural development in the poorest countries by answering the research question on “Does transition from traditional to high-value agriculture reduce rural poverty in poor developing countries”? We also identified the drivers leading to this transition. The study uses survey data from three rounds of the nationally representative Nepal Living Standard Surveys: NLSS I (1994/1995), NLSS II (2004/2005) and NLSS III (2010/2011). Multi-level model was used to study the determinants of agricultural diversification. To estimate the causal impact of agricultural diversification on welfare measures, propensity score matching and instrumental variable techniques were used. Results indicate that there has been a rightward shift in the distribution of the share (percent) of high-value crops between 1995 and 2004 and between 2004 and 2010, respectively. The area as well as the shared by major cereals (paddy, maize, and wheat) is declining over years. However, it is increasing for high-value crops (potato, vegetables, spices/condiments, and fruits). The percentage increase in share of the high-value crops was higher in or adjacent to urbanized districts between 1995 and 2010. The factors positively associated with the agricultural diversification are female-headed households, caste, mother's education, net-buyer status, urban region, remittance, farm size, kitchen garden, improved seeds, telephone and refrigerator. We found positive impact of agricultural diversification towards high-value crops on rural poverty and monthly per capita consumption expenditure. However, for cereal crops grower, we find the negative impact on poverty and monthly per capita consumption expenditure.
Book Synopsis Existing data to measure African trade by : Mitaritonna, Cristina
Download or read book Existing data to measure African trade written by Mitaritonna, Cristina and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-10 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One finds a broad consensus in the literature regarding the lack of good information on trade in Africa, particularly intraregional trade. This paper attempts to identify gaps and remedies in measuring and tracking trade in Africa. We review the major international and regional databases that track trade in Africa, identifying the gaps therein. We also review the studies that have attempted to track informal trade between African countries, and we look at the major ongoing initiatives to track such informal trade. It appears that both international and regional databases suffer from a lack of reporting or from faulty reporting of African trade statistics. Informal trade flows pose an ongoing problem when measuring intraregional trade, although actual border-monitoring initiatives ongoing in selected countries constitute an interesting option for their quantification. When no direct monitoring method is available, estimating gravity equations represents an alternative with which to measure the potential trade between two partner countries, giving us an estimate of missing trade. A final avenue consists of estimating unregistered trade via national accounts data by comparing consumption, production, and declared trade.
