India experienced sustained economic growth for more than two decades following the economic liberalization in 1991. While economic growth reduced poverty significantly, it was associated with an increase in inequality. Does this increase in inequality reflect deep-seat...

The rice yield and real agricultural wage in Bangladesh increased by 3.8 percent and 2.1 percent per annum respectively from 2000 to 2010. Over the same period, the share of hired labor in agriculture decreased from 19.4 percent to 15.5 percent. A focus of this paper is...

Using two surveys from Bangladesh, this paper provides evidence on the effects of microfinance competition on village moneylender interest rates and households' dependence on informal credit. The views among practitioners diverge sharply: proponents claim that competiti...

This paper uses a novel dataset on United States food import refusals to show that reputation is an important factor in the enforcement of sanitary and phytosanitary measures. The strongest reputation effect comes from a country's own history of compliance in relation t...

As the use of payments for environmental services (PES) programs for conservation has grown in developing countries, the use of stated preference methods, particularly contingent valuation (CV) surveys, to estimate the maximum amount that users of environmental services...

This paper analyzes characteristics of nonfarm enterprises, their employment growth patterns, and constraints in doing business in rural Tanzania. Using unique survey data, the authors describe a low-return sector struggling to compete in a difficult business environmen...

The scope and complexity of international trading arrangements in the Middle East, as well as their spotty historical record of success, underscores the urgent need for an adequate understanding of the relative costs and benefits of participation in preferential trading...

In this paper a set of criteria is proposed for the evaluation of the potential contribution of modelling tools to strengthening the multifunctionality of agriculture. The four main areas of evaluation are (1) policy relevance, (2) the temporal resolution and scope, (3)...