Suchergebnisse

AbstractAgricultural (index) insurance for smallholders in developing countries has gained traction in academic and policy circles. The expectation is that the uptake of insurance will protect smallholders from production shocks and incentivize them to modernize production. We develop a simple theoretical model to demonstrate that the welfare effects of insurance are fundamentally ambiguous—even in the absence of transaction costs or basis risk. The second-best nature of the institutional context within which smallholders operate implies that the uptake of insurance may accentuate pre-existing inefficiencies. This idea is worked out in detail for the case of livestock herding on common grazing lands. Our theoretical model predicts that insurance invites overstocking of communal lands, and lowers the profitability of herding when common pastures are degraded.

Abstract
A puzzling piece of empirical evidence suggests that resource-abundant countries tend to grow slower than their resource-poor counterparts. We attempt to explain this phenomenon by developing a lobbying game in which rent seeking firms interact with corrupt governments. The presence or absence of political competition, as well as the potential costs of political transitions, turn out to be key elements in generating the 'resource curse.' These variables define the degree of freedom that incumbent governments have in pursuing development policies that maximize surplus in the lobbying game, but put the economy off its optimal path.

AbstractThe presence of monitoring institutions affects quality and effort of leaders. We investigate the effect of intensified monitoring on the ability and effort of leaders for a sample of forest user groups in Ethiopia, and find experimental and non-experimental evidence of an important trade-off: monitoring increases leaders' effort but lowers their quality in terms of education and experience. This effort–ability trade-off only occurs in the presence of alternative income opportunities (affecting the opportunity cost of time) and only among a subsample of leaders with low prosocial motivation. For our context, we document that the net effect of monitoring on economic outcomes is positive.

Efforts to promote the development and agricultural value chains area common element of strategies to stimulate economic growth in low-income countries. Since the world food price crisis in 2007-2008, developing country governments, international donor agencies, and development practitioners have placed additional focus on trying to make agricultural value chains work better for the poor. As value chains evolve to serve new markets, they tend to become less inclusive. For example, if a value chain for high quality rice arises within an economy, it is inherently easier for those who sell rice to retailers to source that high quality rice from larger farms with the ability to control quality than from dozens of smallholder farms. As a result, the normal path of value chain evolution can be biased against smallholders; hence it is important to understand what types of interventions can make value chains more inclusive while also making them more efficient. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; CRP2 ; MTID; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)