Marc F. Bellemare Posts

Blogging has been light this week because I spent three days in Washington for the Brookings Institution’s first annual Africa Growth Forum, at which I was presenting my paper on the welfare impacts of contract farming. My slides are available here.

The conference was very interesting, as each session tried to include two presentations: one by an African researcher, and one by a non-African researcher. Most of the discussions following presentations focused on the policy implications of the research papers just presented, which was a nice change of pace from the discussions following presentations at most development conferences and development seminars.

My personal highlights of the conference (and it was one of those conferences where I had to make difficult choices as to which session to attend at any given time) were Nathan Nunn’s presentation of his paper showing how gender roles may have originated in whether an ethnic group used the plough, Stefan Dercon’s presentation of his work on insurance for funeral groups (iddir) in Ethiopia, and World Bank managing director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s remarks during dinner on Wednesday, in which she discussed how food price volatility was one of the most important issues facing development policy makers. I wonder whether she meant truly meant food price volatility, and not rising food prices, however.

I also had the pleasure of meeting several people at a tweetup of people with an interest in development policy organized by Owen Barder, where I had great conversations with several like-minded individuals.