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Category: Impact Evaluation

Index Insurance in Africa

From a post on the New York Times‘ Opinionator blog:

“The insecurity of farming sabotages yields even when the weather is good.  Because of the risk, many farmers are unwilling to bet all their money on a crop, so they sow only a portion of their land.   Or they use poor quality seeds because they do not want to increase their risks by spending more.  Risk makes it very difficult for farmers to get credit to buy needed seeds, fertilizer, herbicides or insecticides, so their yields are stunted.  These are people who can ill afford to get less than the maximum from their plots.

Weather insurance for small farmers has always faced numerous barriers.  But throughout east Africa today there are projects finding creative and innovative ways to overcome them.”

This is quite à propos, as I am going to Washington, DC this weekend for the Index Insurance Innovation Initiative (I4) technical workshop, which will convene the I4 grant recipients to discuss the technical details of index insurance implementation and evaluation.

(HT: Chris Paul.)

 

Did Goldman Sachs Cause the Food Crisis?

No, says my colleague Michael Roberts at North Carolina State University.

Last week, Tom over at A View from the Cave asked me over Twitter what I thought of an article in Foreign Policy that claimed that Goldman Sachs had caused the food crisis. I did not have a chance to respond immediately because I had a coauthor in town, so I saved the article for later. Michael’s post this morning reminded me that I had forgotten to address Tom’s question.

Confusing Busyness with Productivity

Last week, Jean-Marie Baland (who was my colleague while I was on research leave at the University of Namur last year, and who is himself on leave at Harvard this year) was visiting Duke. One of the two talks Jean-Marie gave was about “The Distributional Implications of Group Lending,” in which him and his coauthors show that in most cases, group lending is more beneficial to the middle class than it is to the poor.