Bøger i Development Economics & Policy serien

Boosting food production in Africa requires investments in vocational training, agricultural research, digitization, mechanization, sustainable land use and small-scale irrigation. Access to capital and markets must be improved, political stability ensured, farmers' associations supported and development assistance expanded.

In India, the diets of rural populations are often monotonous and unhealthy. The author analyzes how agricultural diversity and market access can combat undernutrition and offers a novel examination of how economic preferences such as risk and altruism are shaping consumption choices and nutrition security, even in environments of food scarcity.

This book presents a study focusing on household biomass energy use and its impacts on livelihoods in rural China. It advances the literature by triangulating the existing econometric approaches to robustly analyze energy using behaviors at the micro level.

The book examines the role that the private sector can play in reducing poverty and marginality in Ethiopia. It analyzes number, location and purchasing behavior of the marginalized poor in Ethiopia as well as institutions governing agricultural input markets to identify obstacles for private sector investments that benefit the marginalized poor.

The book presents the nexus between industrial clustering, firm performance and employee welfare. The author presents the quantitative impacts of industrial clustering and an examination of the short-term impacts of cluster policy in Ethiopia. He evaluates the welfare and gender impacts of female employment in the flower industry cluster of Ethiopia.

The author examines the dynamics of participation in and welfare impact of integrated aquaculture-agriculture (IAA) value chain by using three-year panel data. Education and household size, access to extensions and market information, community-based organisations (CBO) membership are positively associated with IAA participation.

This study explores issues of biomass energy use in relation to household welfare and it assesses Ethiopia's future energy security with a focus on the energy sector model and institutional arrangements required for decentralized energy initiatives.

The book assesses the impacts of pesticide use reduction strategies in the context of Thai highland agriculture. It shows that it is possible to bring down levels of pesticide use without income trade-offs. Combining Integrated Pest Management (IPM) with pesticide taxes and bio-pesticide subsidies is the most cost-effective and practicable policy.

This study assesses income and poverty effects of vegetable commercialization in Kenya with a special focus on gender issues and evaluates the performance of institutional arrangements that link small producers to the high-value vegetable supply chains. It shows that the participation of smallholders in the vegetable markets is declining.

The New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) was implemented in 2003 in response to the poor state of health care in rural China. This study offers a contribution to improve the NCMS design, particularly as to regional policy development, reimbursement arrangements, the efficiency of public investment, and improvements of rural infrastructure.

This study addresses the issue of household food consumption, its relation to gender and to food policy in Indonesia. Using econometric analyses of the Indonesian Family Life Survey, the study reveals that food expenditure patterns, particularly those of the poor households, warrant food policy attention.

This thesis analyses the impact of institutional change in Vietnam's Northern Uplands. Using an original dataset collected in a mountain district in 2007/2008, it investigates empirically the functioning and impact of land and credit institutions and analyses determinants of the formation of social capital in an ethnically heterogeneous society.

Land degradation is increasingly considered as a global problem. In which way is it worth taking action against land degradation? Where and when should action take place, and what are costs related to certain actions? This book deals with these questions.

Education is essential for human resource development and sustainable socio-economic development of a society. The results of this study indicate that parental perceptions of secular and non-secular education have significant impact on the probability engagement of their children in secular schooling, religious schooling, and child labor.

This volume develops alternative methods that might improve the targeting efficiency of development programs in terms of the coverage of the poor and leakage to the non-poor. The research on which this volume is based received the 2012 Josef G. Knoll European Science Award of the Foundation Fiat Panis (Germany).