Skip to content

AJAE Virtual Special Issue on Development Economics

Last updated on January 24, 2016

The American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE), the top journal in the field of agricultural and applied economics, has a new virtual special issue (VSI) out on development economics. The introduction to the VSI begins as follows:

In his 1979 Nobel Prize Lecture, development economist Theodore W. Schultz observed: “Most of the people in the world are poor, so if we knew the economics of being poor, we would know much of the economics that really matters. Most of the world’s poor people earn their living from agriculture, so if we knew the economics of agriculture, we would know much of the economics of being poor.” The subsequent years have seen rapid urbanization in many countries, but the insight that agriculture is crucial to the economic lives of many of the world’s poor remains important to policy-makers and researchers alike. As a testament to the enduring validity of Schultz’s statement, agriculture has experienced a resurgence among development economists in the past decade.

This virtual issue of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics showcases ten recent articles that have pushed the frontiers of empirical development economics.

Among others, the VSI includes papers by Jean-François Maystadt and Olivier Ecker on extreme weather and civil war, by Jesse Tack and Jenny Aker on mobile phones and trader behavior, by Hope Michelson on supermarkets and smallholder farmers, by Klaus Deininger and Songqing Jin on sharecropping and investment behavior, by Erwin Bulte et al. on double blind randomized controlled trials, and by yours truly on food prices and social unrest. It is quite an honor to be in such distinguished company and to have one of the papers I have had the most fun writing be selected for this VSI.

ht: Paul Kelleher.