Suchergebnisse

Inter-temporal trends in agricultural productivity / Samuel Benin and Alejandro Nin Pratt -- Spatial patterns of agricultural productivity / Stanley Wood, Zhe Guo, and Ulrike Wood-Sichra -- Typology of agricultural productivity zones / Bingxin Yu and Zhe Guo -- Agricultural intensification and fertilizer use / Alejandro Nin Pratt -- Factors influencing effectiveness of productivity-enhancing interventions: an assessment of selected programs / Joseph Karugia, Stella Massawe, Paul Guthiga, Maurice Ogada, Manson Nwafor, Pius Chilonda, and Emmanuel Musaba -- Conclusions and implications for raising and sustaining high agricultural productivity in Africa / Samuel Benin

Using public expenditure and agricultural production data on Ghana from 1961 to 2012, this paper assesses the returns to public spending in the agricultural sector, taking into consideration expenditures on agriculture as a whole and then separately for expenditures in the cocoa versus the noncocoa subsectors. Different regression methods and related diagnostic tests are used to address potential endogeneity of agricultural expenditure, crosssubsector dependence of the production function error terms, and within-subsector serial correlation of the error terms. The estimated elasticities are then used to calculate the rate of return to expenditures in the sector as a whole and within the two subsectors. The elasticity of land productivity with respect to total agricultural expenditure is estimated at 0.33–0.34. For the noncocoa subsector, the estimated elasticity is 0.66–0.81. And in the cocoa subsector, it is 0.36–0.43. The returns to total agricultural expenditure are estimated at 82–84 percent for the aggregate analysis. For the disaggregated sectorial analysis, the returns to expenditure in the noncocoa subsector are estimated at 437–524 percent, whereas the returns to expenditure in the cocoa subsector are estimated at 11–14 percent. Implications are discussed for raising overall productivity of expenditure in the sector, as well as for further studies. ; IFPRI5 ; DSGD; ESAO ; Non-PR

This paper uses panel data on 46 African countries from 2001 to 2014 to estimate the impacts of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), an agriculture-led integrated framework of development priorities in Africa, on agricultural expenditure and productivity, income, and nutrition. A difference-in-difference treatment-effects model (based on when a CAADP compact is signed and the level of CAADP implementation reached) and different estimation methods and model specifications are used. The results show that CAADP has had a positive impact on agricultural value-added and land and labor productivity. The impact on agriculture expenditure is generally negative, suggesting that there is a substitution effect between the government's own funding and external sources of funding for the sector. The estimated impact on income and nutrition is generally insignificant. There are some puzzling results from the interaction between specific period of compact signing and level of implementation reached. Implications for maintaining the positive impacts, as well as for further research to understand the puzzling results, are discussed. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; ReSAKSS; D Transforming Agriculture; D.2 Public Investment priorities and Impacts ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

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). ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; Theme 6; Subtheme 6.2; GRP32 ; DSGD

This paper is part of four country case studies that take a detailed look at public expenditures in agriculture, and at how the data on expenditures are captured in government financial and budget accounts. The objective of these studies is to unpack the black box of public expenditure statistics reported in various cross-country datasets, and ultimately to enable the use of existing government accounts to identify levels and compositions of government agriculture expenditures, with better understanding of what these data are in fact accounting for. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; CRP2 ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

Collective action can play a significant role in sustainable management of common grazing lands through restricting access and regulating use. However, it is not clear why there are often violations of grazing restrictions in equilibrium. This paper first presents a theoretical framework of collective action in community management of grazing lands that explicitly models individual violations behaviour. Then data from the highlands of Amhara region of Ethiopia are used to test the model predictions to examine the impact of policy-relevant factors on collective establishment of grazing restrictions and violations of grazing restrictions. Econometric results show that collective action in community grazing land management is likely to be more beneficial and effective in communities with better market access or higher populations. Collective action, on the other hand, is less likely to be successful in communities with greater social, economic, or cultural heterogeneity or more affluent members. Factors related to greater livestock profitability, such as rainfall, or fixed costs of negotiating agreements, such as total land area of the community, have ambiguous effects, as they are associated with establishment of grazing restrictions as well as violating the restrictions.

Annual data on Kenya from 1950 to 2014 are used to analyze the determinants of the level and composition of government expenditures and estimate the agricultural-output returns to the different types of government expenditures. The paper analyzes expenditures for six functions (general administration, defense, education, health, agriculture, and other economic functions—transport, communications, etc.) as well as the capital-to-recurrent expenditure ratios within each of the six functions. Simultaneous equations modeling methods are employed, and different diagnostic tests are used to check for and address issues with stationarity, causality, and autocorrelation. Different model specifications are used to assess the sensitivity of the results to using different measures and combinations of the conceptual variables that are hypothesized to affect the composition of government expenditures and agricultural production. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; 4 Transforming Agricultural and Rural Economies; ReSAKSS ECA ; AFR