rural

The classic narrative of economic development -- poor countries are caught in poverty traps, out of which they need a Big Push involving increased aid and investment, leading to a takeoff in per capita income -- has been very influential in development economics since the 1950s. The idea of the takeoff does not garner much support in the data. Takeoffs are rare in the data, most plausibly limited to the Asian success stories. Even then, the takeoffs are not associated with aid and investment as the standard narrative would imply.

This paper ties together the macroeconomic and microeconomic evidence on the competitiveness of African manufacturing sectors. Africa’s difficult business
climate, and the tendency to overcome this by working in ethnic networks, slows new entry and may decrease the incentives of key parts of the business community for creating an aggressive pressure group for reform. This slows their impact and raises the possibility that countries settle into a low-productivity equilibrium.

According to the report, the urgent need today is for a system of technology flows which preserves the incentives for private sector innovation while at the same time meeting the needs of poor farmers in the developing world.

Using results from previous studies in Illinois and Wisconsin, the authors attempt to model the municipal decision of how to provide residents town services. In order to test the applicability of past work to smaller towns, they conducted a survey of the mostly rural state of New Hampshire in the summer of 2004. In addition, they construct decision-making models using logit, probit, and Poisson techniques which examine the influence of population, location and other exogenous factors on the decision to privatize.

This paper describes major external changes to the U.S. public agricultural research system over 1988-1999; describes the reactions of the public agricultural research system to the external changes, specifying the innovations that have occurred over the last decade; and draws conclusions about the present and future performance of the U.S. research system.

The report provides an assessment of the issue—identifying the sources of potential benefits, qualitatively estimating the magnitude of these benefits (it is too early for quantitative analysis), and identifying those who may or may not benefit from pharma crops and under what circumstances.

The present paper relies on community-level data from a survey conducted in two Romanian Counties, Dolj and Brasov, to analyse the main determinants of NFD in rural areas. The main findings are placed in a national context and policy proposals are advanced.

The aims of this study are to improve understanding of the dynamics of the rural non-farm economy in providing employment and income diversification opportunities in Armenia, Georgia and Romania. The study aims to focus on improving the well-being and livelihoods of the rural population, through developing their capacity to access resources and actively participate in non-farm rural enterprise and employment opportunities

This paper tests the hypothesis that two processes are apparent: demand-pull, where rural people respond to new opportunities; and distress-push, where the poorest are driven to seek non-farm employment as a survival strategy. The empirical work presented in this paper is primarily based on a large (nationwide) rural household survey and other field- related research representing a broad range of methodologies.

The authors find that an emissions charge on agricultural methane and nitrous oxide of $25 per tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent would be likely to reduce New Zealand’s net land-use related emissions for commitment period one in the order of 3%, with full accounting. Findings also indicate that areas with high emission costs tend to have high employment rates, but that they also have a disproportionately high number of unqualified people.