{"id":466,"date":"2011-01-21T17:52:53","date_gmt":"2011-01-21T22:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=466"},"modified":"2011-01-21T17:55:26","modified_gmt":"2011-01-21T22:55:26","slug":"brookings-africa-growth-forum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/466","title":{"rendered":"Brookings Africa Growth Forum"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Blogging has been light this week because I spent three days in Washington for the Brookings Institution&#8217;s first annual <a title=\"Africa Growth Initiative\" href=\"http:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/projects\/africa-growth.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">Africa Growth Forum<\/a>, at which I was presenting my paper on the welfare impacts of contract farming. My slides are available <a title=\"Brookings Africa Growth Forum Slides\" href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/BrookingsAGFPresentationJanuary2011.pdf\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s presentation of his <a title=\"On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough\" href=\"http:\/\/www.econ.brown.edu\/econ\/events\/plough_draft_July14_2010.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">paper<\/a> showing how gender roles may have originated in whether an ethnic group used the plough, Stefan Dercon&#8217;s presentation of his work on insurance for funeral groups (<em>iddir<\/em>) in Ethiopia, and World Bank managing director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala&#8217;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 <a title=\"Rising Food Prices vs. Food Price Volatility\" href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/2011\/01\/rising-food-prices-vs-food-price-volatility\/\" target=\"_blank\">rising food prices<\/a>, however.<\/p>\n<p>I also had the pleasure of meeting several people at a tweetup of people with an interest in development policy organized by <a title=\"Owen Barder\" href=\"http:\/\/www.owen.org\" target=\"_blank\">Owen Barder<\/a>, where I had great conversations with several like-minded individuals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Blogging has been light this week because I spent three days in Washington for the Brookings Institution&#8217;s first annual Africa Growth Forum, at which I&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/466\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Brookings Africa Growth Forum<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development","category-policy","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-7w","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":471,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466\/revisions\/471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}