Download or read book Institutional arrangements to make public spending responsive to the poor where have they worked written by Mogues, Tewodaj and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-04-06 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been some recognition in the development community that building technical capacity of public service providers and increasing resources is not enough to bring about development outcomes. Researchers and practitioners are increasingly appreciating that accounting for the stated needs of communities supports the process of pro-poor public resource allocation. We examine four institutional arrangements that explicitly endeavor to make public spending responsive to the needs of the poor by moving decision-making procedures closer to the population—participatory budgeting, community-driven development (CDD) programs, decentralization, and delegated targeting of transfers. Using the existing literature, we compare experiences across the four arrangements and countries. Regarding responsiveness to needs of the poor, evidence is cautiously optimistic for participatory budgeting, CDD, and decentralization. As for delegating the targeting of transfers to subnational authorities and communities, evidence suggests that the effect may be regressive. However, there are important mediating effects of public spending responsiveness under the various institutional arrangements. Local elite capture is a key factor dampening pro-poor spending where either exogenous circumstances such as prevailing inequality, or inadequate program design, enable capture to materialize. Politics is an important determinant of the success of these arrangements.

Download or read book Understanding compliance in programs promoting conservation agriculture written by Ward, Patrick S. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Land degradation and soil erosion have emerged as serious challenges to smallholder farmers throughout southern Africa. To combat these challenges, conservation agriculture (CA) is widely promoted as a sustainable package of agricultural practices. Despite the many potential benefits of CA, however, adoption remains low. Yet relatively little is known about the decision-making process in choosing to adopt CA. This article attempts to fill this important knowledge gap by studying CA adoption in southern Malawi. Unlike what is implicitly assumed when these packages of practices are introduced, farmers view adoption as a series of independent decisions rather than a single decision. Yet the adoption decisions are not wholly independent. We find strong evidence of interrelated decisions, particularly among mulching crop residues and practicing zero tillage, suggesting that mulching residues and intercropping or rotating with legumes introduces a multiplier effect on the adoption of zero tillage.

Download or read book Findings across agricultural public expenditure reviews in African countries written by Mink, Stephen D. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines whether the consensus reached by the late 2000s among African Union member countries and their external partners on the need to reverse the decades-long decline in spending for essential public goods and services in agriculture has begun to result inimproved levels and quality of national expenditure programs for the sector. It synthesizes evidence from 20 Agriculture Public Expenditure Reviews (Ag PERs) that have been carried out in countries in Africa South of the Saharan (Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Rwanda, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, and Zambia) with World Bank assistance during 2009–2015. This synthesis focuses on several measures: (1) the level of expenditures on agriculture, with particular reference to the explicit target by African heads of state in the 2003 Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security (reconfirmed in the Malabo Declaration) to allocate 10 percent of national budgets to the sector; (2) the composition and priorities of expenditures with respect to stated national strategies, evidence of impact, and sustainability; and (3) budget planning and implementation that aims to strengthen public financial management in general, and budget coherence, outputs, outcomes, and supporting mechanisms, such as procurement and audit, in particular. This paper uses Ag PERs to analyze budgetary trends across countries, identifies major expenditure issues, and synthesizes lessons regarding spending efficiency. The analysis results in evidence-based recommendations that address, inter alia, budget planning, budget execution, and monitoring for accountability; the creation of a reliable database; more effective intra-and intersectoral coordination; and the cost-effectiveness of different spending policies for meeting various objectives

Download or read book A model of reporting and controlling outbreaks by public health agencies written by Saak, Alexander E. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When an outbreak of an infectious disease is suspected, a local health agency may notify a state or federal agency and request additional resources to investigate and, if necessary, contain it. However, due to capacity constraints, state and federal health agencies may not be able to grant all such requests, which may give an incentive to local agencies to request help strategically. We study a model of detection and control of an infectious disease by local health agencies in the presence of imperfect information about the likelihood of an outbreak and limited diagnostic capacity. When diagnostic capacity is rationed based on reports of symptoms, the decision to report symptoms or not creates a trade-off. On the one hand, rigorous testing allows one to make an informed disease control decision. On the other hand, it also increases the probability that the disease will spread from an untested area where fewer precautionary measures are taken. Symptoms are overreported (respectively, reported truthfully, or underreported) when the cost of disease control is sufficiently small (respectively, in some intermediate range, or sufficiently large). If the disease incidence decreases or infectiousness increases, symptoms are reported less frequently. If the precision of private signals increases, the extent of overreporting of symptoms may increase. For different values of the parameters it can be socially optimal to subsidize or tax requests for additional investigations and confirmatory testing.

Download or read book Anchoring Bias in Recall Data written by Godlonton, Susan and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding the magnitude and source of measurement biases in self-reported data is critical to effective economic policy research. This paper examines the role of anchoring bias in self-reports of objective and subjective outcomes under recall. The research exploits a unique panel survey data set collected over a three-year period from four countries in Central America. It assesses whether respondents use their reported value of specific measures from the most recent survey period as a cognitive heuristic when recalling the value from a previous period, while controlling for the value they reported earlier. We find strong evidence of sizable anchoring bias in self-reported retrospective indicators for both objective measures (household and per capita income, wages, and hours spent on the household’s main activity) and subjective measures (reports of happiness, health, stress, and well-being). In general, we also observe a larger bias in response to negative changes for objective indicators and a larger bias in response to positive changes for subjective indicators.

Download or read book Can labor market imperfections explain changes in the inverse farm size productivity relationship written by Deininger, Klaus and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-06-24 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To understand whether and how inverse relationship between farm size and productivity changes when labor market performance improves, we use large national farm panel from India covering a quarter-century (1982, 1999, 2008) to show that the inverserelationship weakened significantly over time, despite an increase in the dispersion of farm sizes. A key reason was the substitution of capital for labor in response to nonagricultural labor demand. In addition, family labor wasmore efficient than hired labor in the 1982–1999 period, but not during the 1999–2008period.In line with labor market imperfections as a key factor, separability of labor supply and demand decisions cannot be rejected in the second period,except in villages with very low nonagricultural labor demand.

Download or read book Reaping Richer Returns written by Aparajita Goyal and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2017-03-10 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enhancing the productivity of agriculture is vital for Sub-Saharan Africa's economic future and is one of the most important tools to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity in the region. How governments elect to spend public resources has significant development impact in this regard. Choosing to catalyze a shift toward more effective, efficient, and climate-resilient public spending in agriculture can accelerate change and unleash growth. Not only does agricultural public spending in Sub-Saharan Africa lag behind other developing regions but its impact is vitiated by subsidy programs and transfers that tend to benefit elites to the detriment of poor people and the agricultural sector itself. Shortcomings in the budgeting processes also reduce spending effectiveness. In light of this scenario, addressing the quality of public spending and the efficiency of resource use becomes even more important than addressing only the level of spending. Improvements in the policy environment, better institutions, and investments in rural public goods positively affect agricultural productivity. These, combined with smarter use of public funds, have helped lay the foundations for agricultural productivity growth around the world, resulting in a wealth of important lessons from which African policy makers and development practitioners can draw. 'Reaping Richer Returns: Public Spending Priorities for African Agriculture Productivity Growth' will be of particular interest to policy makers, development practitioners, and academics. The rigorous analysis presented in this book provides options for reform with a view to boosting the productivity of African agriculture and eventually increasing development impact.

Download or read book Structural transformation and intertemporal evolution of real wages machine use and farm size productivity relationships in Vietnam written by Liu, Yanyan and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-04-20 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper explores the evolution of real agricultural wages, machinery use, and the relationship between farm size and productivity in Vietnam during its dramatic structural transformation over the course of the 1990s and 2000s. Using six rounds of nationally representative household survey data, we find strong evidence that the inverse relationship between rice productivity and planting area attenuated significantly over this period and that the attenuation was most pronounced in areas with higher real wages. This pattern is also associated with sharp increases in machinery use, indicating a scale-biased substitution effect between machinery and labor. The results suggest that rural-factor market failures are receding in importance, making land concentration less of a cause of concern for aggregate food production.

Download or read book Linking smallholder farmers to commercial markets written by Ebata, Ayako and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Access to modern commercialization channels is key for smallholder farmers to be able to move away from subsistence farming and overcome poverty. However, achieving that goal is challenging for smallholders given their lack of appropriate managerial practices, production technology and infrastructure. This paper examines the effect of receiving training in two different entrepreneurial practices designed to link farmers to commercial markets: one direct aimed at the individual and farmer-association level and another indirect focused at the community level. We exploit an extensive panel dataset of staple bean farmers in Nicaragua who participated in a program run by a nongovernmental organization between 2007–2012. We find that the two market-linkage training activities had opposite effects on the commercialization of beans, especially on the intensive margin or volume of sales. While receiving direct training on entrepreneurial practices is positively associated with sales in commercial markets, training on municipality engagement (ME) activities is negatively associated. The market-linkage activities mainly affected entrant farmers as opposed to those already participating in commercial markets. We further find varying effects of the ME activities by plot size and leadership position. Additional results show that training activities that appear to work for bean producers do not necessarily work for other crop producers, and vice versa.

Download or read book Public expenditure on food and agriculture in sub Saharan Africa written by Pernechele, V., Fontes, F., Baborska, R., Nkuingoua, J., Pan, X., Tuyishime, C. and published by Food & Agriculture Org.. This book was released on 2021-05-07 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monitoring and analysing food and agriculture policies and their effects is crucial to support decision makers in developing countries to shape better policies that drive agricultural and food systems transformation. This report is a technical analysis of government spending data on food and agriculture during 2004–2018 in 13 sub-Saharan African countries – Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal, Uganda and the United Republic of Tanzania. It analyses the level of public expenditure, including budget execution, source of funding and decentralized spending, as well as the composition of expenditure, including on producer or consumer support, research and development, infrastructure and more to reveal the trends and challenges that countries are facing. It also delves into the relationship between the composition of public expenditure and agricultural performance.As a way forward for future policymaking, the report offers a set of recommendations to strengthen policy monitoring systems and data generation for effective public investments in food and agriculture.The report is produced by the Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) programme at FAO in collaboration with MAFAP country partners.

Download or read book Varietal integrity damage abatement and productivity written by Ma, Xingliang and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-04-07 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bt cotton remains one of the most widely grown biotech crops among smallholder farmers. Numerous studies, including those previously conducted in Pakistan, attest to its yield and cost advantages. However, the effectiveness of Bt toxin, which depends on many technical constraints, is heterogeneous. Furthermore, in Pakistan, the diffusion of Bt cotton varieties occurred despite a weak regulatory system and without seed quality control; evidence demonstrates that varieties sold as Bt may not contain the genes or express them effectively. We use data collected from a sample that is statistically representative of the nation’s cotton growers to test the effects of Bt cotton use on productivity in a damage control framework. Unlike previous studies, we employ five measures of Bt identity: name, official approval status, farmer belief, laboratory tests of Bt presence in plant tissue, and biophysical assays measuring Bt effectiveness. Only farmers’ belief that a variety is Bt affects cotton productivity. Although all measures reduce damage from pests, the biophysical indicators have the largest effect, and official approval has the weakest. For applied economists, findings highlight the importance of getting the data right concerning Bt. For policy makers, they suggest the need, on ethical if not productivity grounds, to monitor variety integrity closer to point of sale.

Download or read book A systematic review of cross country data initiatives on agricultural public expenditures in developing countries written by Anson, Richard and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-07-08 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study reviews all of the relevant data and analytical initiatives or activities that focus on or include agricultural public expenditure (AgPE) in developing and transitioning countries. In addition to taking stock of such initiatives, we carry out a comparison of relevant features, describe differences and similarities, and identify possible avenues for greater collaboration and complementarity, including the use of selected empirical examples arising from the comparative review.

Download or read book Delegation of quality control in value chains written by Saak, Alexander E. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-04-21 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper studies the decision of a firm that sells an experience good to delegate quality control to an independent monitor. In an infinitely repeated game consumers’ trust provides incentives to (1) acquire information about whether the good is defective and (2) withhold the good from sale if it is defective. If third-party reports are observable to consumers, delegation of monitoring lessens the first and dispenses with the second moral hazard concern but also creates agency costs due to either limited liability or lack of commitment. In equilibrium the firm controls quality without an independent monitor only if trades are sufficiently frequent and consumer information about quality is sufficiently precise. This result holds under different assumptions about feasible contracts, collusion, verifiability of reports, joint inspections, and the number of firms that hire the third-party monitor. If third-party reports are not publicly observed, delegation can be optimal only if two or more firms hire the third-party monitor because then both moral hazard concerns are present under delegation.

Download or read book Can contract farming increase farmers income and enhance adoption of food safety practices written by Kumar, Anjani and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-04-20 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing inequality has become an important concern in many countries. One of the ways that inequality is perpetuated is through differential market access across regions. This research deals with one of the primary determinants of regional inequality manifested in terms of market access. Nepal is one country where hierarchical geography leads to regional inequality. Differential market access can cause as well as accentuate inequality among farmers. Coordination arrangements such as contract farming can improve outcomes for the farmers and integrators on the one hand, but on the other hand it can accentuate inequality if only some regions benefit from it. With this background, in this paper we study the case of contract farming for exports with farmers in remote hilly areas of Nepal. The prospect for contract farming in such areas with accessibility issues owing to underdeveloped markets and lack of amenities is ambiguous. On the one hand, contractors in these areas find it difficult to build links, particularly when final consumers have quality and safety requirements. On the other hand, remoteness can make the contracts more sustainable if the agroecology offers product-specific quality advantages and, more important, if there is a lack of side-selling opportunities. At the same time, concerns remain about buyers’ monopsonistic powers when remotely located small farmers do not have outside options. This study hence quantifies the benefits of contract farming on remotely located farmers’ income and compliance with food safety measures. Results show that contract farming is significantly more profitable (offering a 58 percent greater net income) than independent production, the main pathway being higher price realization, along with training on practices and provision of quality seeds.

Download or read book Qualitative methods for gender research in agricultural development written by Rubin, Deborah and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-05-27 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of mixed methods approaches to development-oriented research has brought new attention to qualitative research methods. This paper describes the use of qualitative approaches to illuminate gender relations in agricultural development research and project implementation. For gender research, qualitative methods can be particularly helpful in illuminating how men and women view their lives. Drawing on literature about social science methods and linking it to recent examples of qualitative methods employed in research and development projects, the paper argues for greater precision in key concepts of gender research, starting with sex and gender. From the many possible qualitative methods used in development work, the paper focuses on several common observational (both direct and participatory) and interview techniques, the latter including key informant and group interviews and focus group discussions. Researchers use various techniques to gather different types of information, for example, mapping techniques to understand men’s and women’s different types of knowledge about their environment and eliciting in-depth information on a single topic with key informants. In a brief discussion of the analysis of qualitative data, the paper notes that informant responses are not “the truth” but need to be assessed against other sources of data. Finally, there is a short discussion of how qualitative data have been used in comparative work. The paper concludes that the results of good qualitative research on gender relations can help identify the locally specific pathways needed to achieve gender-transformative development approaches.

Download or read book Resolving Land Disputes in East Asia written by Hualing Fu and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fresh comparative perspectives on land disputes in East Asia, with a focus on the transitional societies in China and Vietnam.

Download or read book Agricultural mechanization and agricultural transformation written by Diao, Xinshen and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A renewed focus on agriculture’s potential contribution to economic transformation in Africa has resulted in increased attention paid to agricultural mechanization. African agriculture still relies predominantly on human muscle power despite anecdotal evidence on urbanization and rising rural wages, in contrast to other developing regions that have experienced rapid increases in agricultural mechanization during the past few decades. Past state-led mechanization pushes in Africa often failed due to insufficient understanding of the nature of demand for mechanization technologies among farmers and insufficient knowledge of private-sector functions. This background paper reviews the factors likely to influence farmer demand for mechanization in Africa and details different existing and potential mechanization supply models. Although an empirical analysis of mechanization demand and the effectiveness of supply chains is beyond the scope of this paper, in part due to data limitations, this paper suggests that demand for mechanization may be emerging in some parts of Africa. It also suggests that private-sector-driven supply models are better positioned to meet this demand than direct government involvement and certain types of subsidized programs. The paper then identifies possible areas for government support to complement private-sector leadership in developing mechanization supply chains. Nevertheless, significant further research is required to better understand the changing nature of mechanization demand in Africa and the extent and effectiveness of different supply models in meeting it.