Development

Africa / Agriculture / Development / Economics / Food — 3 Comments
26
Feb 13

The System of Rice Intensification: A Miracle Solution?

(Note: This is a guest post from my friend, colleague, and coauthor Christine Moser, who is an associate professor of economics at Western Michigan University, and whose research agenda lies at the intersection of development economics and environmental economics.)

RiceMadagascar

Rice Cultivation in Ambositra, Madagascar (Source: WikiMedia Commons).

The system of rice intensification (SRI) was developed in the 1980s by a French priest working with farmers in Madagascar and has since been promoted in rice-producing countries around the world. SRI occasionally makes an appearance in the international press, such as in this recent article in The Guardian.

Proponents of SRI tout not just the yield gains derived from the technique, but the fact that SRI does not require purchased inputs such as chemical fertilizer or improved seeds, and therefore should be accessible to the poor. SRI can also greatly reduce water use, a huge advantage in some parts of the world. Continue reading →

Africa / Development / Economics — Comments Off
01
Feb 13

Pre-Colonial African Institutions and Contemporary African Development

A new article in Econometrica by Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou:

We investigate the role of deeply rooted pre-colonial ethnic institutions in shaping comparative regional development within African countries. We combine information on the spatial distribution of ethnicities before colonization with regional variation in contemporary economic performance, as proxied by satellite images of light density at night. We document a strong association between pre-colonial ethnic political centralization and regional development. This pattern is not driven by differences in local geographic features or by other observable ethnic-specific cultural and economic variables. The strong positive association between pre-colonial political complexity and contemporary development also holds within pairs of adjacent ethnic homelands with different legacies of pre-colonial political institutions.

 

Development / Economics / Food / Gender / Impact Evaluation / Policy / Poverty — 4 Comments
31
Jan 13

The Demand for Food of Poor Urban Households in Mexico

A cool new article in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy by Manuela Angelucci and Orazio Attanasio:

We use Oportunidades, a conditional cash transfer to women, to show that standard demand models do not represent the sample’s behavior: Oportunidades increases eligible households’ food budget shares, despite food being a necessity; demand for food and high-protein food changes over time only in treatment areas; the treatment effects on food and high-protein food consumption are larger than the prediction from the Engel curves at baseline; and the curves do not change in eligible households with high baseline bargaining power for the transfer recipient. Thus, handing transfers to women is a likely determinant of the observed nutritional changes.

Some of this might be a bit too technical for non-economists, so let’s take a closer look at their findings: Continue reading →

Development / Economics / Food / Policy — Comments Off
29
Jan 13

Hunger and Malnutrition: Data and Statistics

Last week, The Guardian‘s Poverty Matters blog had a great post linking to a number of hunger and malnutrition datasets.

There you can find a link that will allow you to download the entirety of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ food security indicators. Those are great data for anyone looking to write a term paper on food security, as the country-level annual data roughly span 1990 to 2012.

When I tweeted a link to the Guardian‘s post, Filip Spagnoli, a Brussels-based writer and philosopher, linked me to a post on his blog where he has a bunch of statistics on hunger.

Africa / Agriculture / Development / Economics — 8 Comments
16
Jan 13

Development = Industrialization?

But these indicators only give a partial picture of how well development is going — at least as the term has been understood over the last few centuries. From late 15th century England all the way up to the East Asian Tigers of recent renown, development has generally been taken as a synonym for “industrialization.” Rich countries figured out long ago, if economies are not moving out of dead-end activities that only provide diminishing returns over time (primary agriculture and extractive activities such as mining, logging, and fisheries), and into activities that provide increasing returns over time (manufacturing and services), then you can’t really say they are developing.

Continue reading →

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →