As a largely rural society, most people in Nepal still depend upon agriculture as their major livelihood strategy. Therefore, it is important to improve the allocation efficiency of limited public expenditures to promote agricultural growth and poverty reduction. However, evaluating the returns of public investment is limited by methodological challenges. We use hedonic and panel data methods to examine the returns to different types of rural public investments including roads, irrigation and extension advice.

With the disintegration of the USSR a conflict arose between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan over the transboundary Syr Darya river. Upstream Kyrgyzstan controls the Toktogul reservoir which generates hydropower demanded mainly in winter for heating. Downstream Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan need irrigation water in summer, primarily to grow an export crop (cotton). Regional agreements obliging Kyrgyzstan to higher summer discharges in exchange for fossil fuel transfers from downstream riparians in winter have been unsuccessful, due to lack of trust between the parties.

In many countries, water supply is a service that is seriously underpriced, especially for residential consumers. This has led to a call for setting cost recovery policies to ensure that the tariffs charged for water supply cover the full cost of service provision. Identification of factors driving piped and non-piped water demand is a necessary prerequisite for predicting how consumers will react to such price increases.

In the wake of reforms to establish a free market in land-use rights, Vietnam experienced a pronounced rise in rural landlessness. To some observers this is a harmless by-product of a more efficient economy, while to others it signals the return of the pre-socialist class structure, with the rural landless at the bottom of the economic ladder. We study the issue empirically using four household surveys spanning 1993-2004. Although we find rising landlessness amongst the poor, the post-reform landlessness rate tends to be higher for the non-poor.

We present the results of a framed field experiment with Ethiopian farmers that use the mountain rain forest as a common pool resource. Harvesting honey causes damage to the forest, and open access leads to over-harvesting. We test different mechanisms for mitigating excessive harvesting: a collective tax with low and high tax rates, and a tax/subsidy system. We find that the high-tax scheme works best in inducing the desired level of harvesting, while the tax-subsidy scheme may trigger tacit collusion.

The dramatic transition from Communism to market economies across Asia and Europe started in the Chinese countryside in the 1970s. Since then more than a billion of people, many of them very poor, have been affected by radical reforms in agriculture. However, there are enormous differences in the reform strategies that countries have chosen. This paper presents a set of arguments to explain why countries have chosen different reform policies.

We estimated a normalized translog yield-response model using African farm-household survey data to compare the yield of smallholder maize production under integrated soil fertility management (ISFM) and chemical-based soil fertility management. Controlling for other factors, maize yield responses were higher under ISFM. Results suggest ISFM practices would significantly improve the profitability of smallholder maize production, especially under escalating fertilizer prices.

Taking water institutions as an illustrative context, this paper attempts a quantitative analysis of the structural and functional linkages within institutional structure and indicates their performance implications and strategic importance for promoting institutional reforms.

Inclusive business models have attracted renewed interest as part of wider debates about growing agricultural investment in developing countries. Report discusses joint ventures in South Africa’s agricultural sector. The South African experience features major specificities linked to the country’s history and recent land reform programme. Land reform beneficiaries entered into a range of joint ventures with commercial partners.

The 2007-2008 upsurge in agricultural
commodity prices gave rise to widespread concern about
investors causing a "global land rush". Large land
deals can provide opportunities for better access to
capital, transfer of technology, and advances in
productivity and employment generation. But they carry risks
of dispossession and loss of livelihoods, corruption,
deterioration in local food security, environmental damage,

This review of the on-budget expenditure
of the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation (MALR)
in Egypt describes the broad outline of the MARL's
expenditures and identifies key themes and issues. The
report examines how the context of the agricultural sector
has changed, and the adjustment challenge that such change
poses for the MALR. It explains how the MALR is thinking
about the future, describes the structures of the MALR, and

Agriculture has made major contributions
to China's economic growth and poverty reduction, but
the literature has rarely focused on the institutional
factors that might underpin such structural transformation
and productivity. This paper aims to fill that gap. Drawing
on an 8-year panel of 1,200 households in six key provinces,
it explores the impact of government land reallocations and
formal land-use certificates on agricultural productivity