Forced gifts: The burden of being a friend

2017-03-09 Political Science

Author : Bulte, Erwin
Release : 2017-03-09
Genre : Political Science
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Book Synopsis Forced gifts: The burden of being a friend by : Bulte, Erwin

Download or read book Forced gifts: The burden of being a friend written by Bulte, Erwin. This book was released on 2017-03-09. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many developing countries, gift expenses account for a substantial share of total household expenditures. As incomes rise, gift expenses are escalating in several developing countries. We develop a theoretical model to demonstrate how (unequal) income growth may trigger “gift competition” and drive up the financial burden associated with gift exchange. We use unique census-type panel data from rural China to test our model predictions and demonstrate that (1) the value of gifts responds to the average gift in the community, (2) the escalation of gift giving may have adverse welfare implications (especially for the poor), and (3) escalating gift expenses crowd out expenditures on other consumption items.

Farmers’ quality assessment of their crops and its impact on commercialization behavior: A field experiment in Ethiopia

2017-03-24 Political Science

Author : Abate, Gashaw T.
Release : 2017-03-24
Genre : Political Science
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Book Synopsis Farmers’ quality assessment of their crops and its impact on commercialization behavior: A field experiment in Ethiopia by : Abate, Gashaw T.

Download or read book Farmers’ quality assessment of their crops and its impact on commercialization behavior: A field experiment in Ethiopia written by Abate, Gashaw T.. This book was released on 2017-03-24. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adoption of quality-enhancing technologies is often driven largely by farmers’ expected returns from these technologies. Without proper grades, standards, and certification systems, however, farmers may remain uncertain about the actual financial return associated with their quality-enhancing investments. This report summarizes the outcomes of a short video-based randomized training intervention on wheat quality measurement and collective marketing among 15,000 wheat farmers in Ethiopia. Our results suggest that the intervention led to significant changes in farmers’ commercialization behaviors—namely, it prompted farmers to adopt behaviors geared toward assessing their wheat’s quality using easily implementable test-weight measures, assessing the accuracy of the equipment used by buyers in their kebeles (scales, in particular), and contacting more than one buyer before concluding a sale. The training also led to improvements in share of output sold, price received, and collective marketing, albeit with important limitations. First, farmers who measured their wheat quality received a higher price, but only if their wheat was of higher quality. Second, farmers who found that their wheat was of higher quality were more reluctant to aggregate their wheat (that is, sell their products through local cooperatives) than those who found that their wheat was of lower quality. Lastly, the training intervention led to better use of fertilizer in the following season. Our discovery that a short training intervention can significantly change farmers’ marketing and production behavior should encourage the development of further interventions aimed at enhancing farmers’ adoption of improved technologies and commercialization.

Agricultural diversification in Nepal: Status, determinants, and its impact on rural poverty

2017-04-28 Political Science

Author : Thapa, Ganesh
Release : 2017-04-28
Genre : Political Science
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Book Synopsis Agricultural diversification in Nepal: Status, determinants, and its impact on rural poverty by : Thapa, Ganesh

Download or read book Agricultural diversification in Nepal: Status, determinants, and its impact on rural poverty written by Thapa, Ganesh. This book was released on 2017-04-28. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As in many parts of the developing world, the share of high value crops in agricultural gross domestic product (AgGDP) has increased substantially in Nepal. We contribute to the literature on trends in agricultural development in the poorest countries by answering the research question on “Does transition from traditional to high-value agriculture reduce rural poverty in poor developing countries”? We also identified the drivers leading to this transition. The study uses survey data from three rounds of the nationally representative Nepal Living Standard Surveys: NLSS I (1994/1995), NLSS II (2004/2005) and NLSS III (2010/2011). Multi-level model was used to study the determinants of agricultural diversification. To estimate the causal impact of agricultural diversification on welfare measures, propensity score matching and instrumental variable techniques were used. Results indicate that there has been a rightward shift in the distribution of the share (percent) of high-value crops between 1995 and 2004 and between 2004 and 2010, respectively. The area as well as the shared by major cereals (paddy, maize, and wheat) is declining over years. However, it is increasing for high-value crops (potato, vegetables, spices/condiments, and fruits). The percentage increase in share of the high-value crops was higher in or adjacent to urbanized districts between 1995 and 2010. The factors positively associated with the agricultural diversification are female-headed households, caste, mother's education, net-buyer status, urban region, remittance, farm size, kitchen garden, improved seeds, telephone and refrigerator. We found positive impact of agricultural diversification towards high-value crops on rural poverty and monthly per capita consumption expenditure. However, for cereal crops grower, we find the negative impact on poverty and monthly per capita consumption expenditure.

Misreporting month of birth: Implications for nutrition research

2017-03-09 Political Science

Author : Larsen, Anna Folke
Release : 2017-03-09
Genre : Political Science
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Book Synopsis Misreporting month of birth: Implications for nutrition research by : Larsen, Anna Folke

Download or read book Misreporting month of birth: Implications for nutrition research written by Larsen, Anna Folke. This book was released on 2017-03-09. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Height-for-age z-scores (HAZs) and stunting status (HAZ<−2) are widely used to measure child nutrition and population health. However, accurate measurement of age is nontrivial in populations with low levels of literacy and numeracy, limited use of formal birth records, and weak cultural norms surrounding birthdays and calendar use. In this paper we use Demographic and Health Surveys data from 62 countries over the period 1990–2014 to describe two statistical artifacts indicative of misreporting of age. The first artifact consists of lower HAZs for children reported to be born earlier in each calendar year (resulting in implausibly large HAZ gaps between January- and December-born children), which is consistent with some degree of randomness in month of birth reporting. The second artifact consists of lower HAZs for children with a reported age just below a round age (and hence implausibly large HAZ gaps between children with reported ages just below and just above round ages), which is consistent with survey respondents rounding ages down more than they round ages up. Using simulations, we show how these forms of misreporting child age can replicate observed patterns in the data, and that they have small impacts on estimated rates of stunting but important implications for research that relies on birth timing to identify exposure to various risks, particularly seasonal shocks. Moreover, the misreporting we identify differs from conventional age-heaping concerns, implying that the metrics described above could constitute useful markers of measurement error in nutrition surveys. Future research should also investigate ways to reduce these errors.

Can agricultural aspirations influence preferences for new technologies?

2017-05-03 Political Science

Author : Bell, Andrew R.
Release : 2017-05-03
Genre : Political Science
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Book Synopsis Can agricultural aspirations influence preferences for new technologies? by : Bell, Andrew R.

Download or read book Can agricultural aspirations influence preferences for new technologies? written by Bell, Andrew R.. This book was released on 2017-05-03. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the face of increasing environmental stresses, there is a critical need to improve water-use efficiency in many arid and semiarid agroclimatic zones. Drip irrigation is a high-efficiency irrigation technology that can improve water-use efficiency in currently irrigated areas and transform areas that are not otherwise irrigable in practice. Although adoption of drip irrigation is growing rapidly in India, adoption is low in neighboring Pakistan. The authors of this paper undertook a discrete choice experiment framed around the hypothetical subsidized purchase of a drip irrigation system in four districts of Punjab, Pakistan. The nonrepresentative sample of adopters and nonadopters in the study districts identified a clear increase in the valuation of drip systems in the first several years following adoption. This finding suggests that farmers may be unaware of the opportunities for the use of drip irrigation on their farms or the benefits that may accrue from such use. In addition, farmers’ aspirations for cropping systems under drip were better predictors of the valuation of drip systems than were current cropping patterns, implying that a different agricultural landscape might reasonably emerge under improved adoption of drip. Aspirations differed across the different agroecological zones and water regimes captured by this study. Aspirations to substitute wheat crops for fruits and vegetables were associated with a higher appreciation of the subsidy level, whereas aspirations to expand wheat were associated with a higher appreciation of the area covered by the drip initiative; together, these findings imply a degree of control over the extent of wheat production in the landscape via careful design of the drip subsidy program. Although the penetration of drip irrigation is not yet sufficient to draw inferences from a representative sample, these results suggest a number of ways in which drip irrigation may transform Pakistan’s agricultural landscape

Popular eBooks

Forced gifts: The burden of being a friend

Farmers’ quality assessment of their crops and its impact on commercialization behavior: A field experiment in Ethiopia

Agricultural diversification in Nepal: Status, determinants, and its impact on rural poverty

Misreporting month of birth: Implications for nutrition research

Can agricultural aspirations influence preferences for new technologies?

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