The Impact of Farmers' Health and Nutritional Status on Their Productivity and Efficiency: Evidence from Ethiopia

Aggregate estimates of food expenditure are consistent with such a possibility, implying income/expenditure elasticities close to one. However, the high degree of aggregation at which such estimates are made means that the considerable increase in price per nutrient as income increases is ignored, and the nutrient elasticities are therefore overstated. Estimates for a rural south Indian sample indicate that this bias is considerable and that the true nutrient elasticities with respect to income may be close to zero.

Development strategies increasingly emphasize agricultural development, employment, and equity; it is therefore important to examine the role of education in light of these new emphases. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the conclusions of a number of studies of the effect of a farmer's educational level and exposure to extension services on his productivity. Eighteen studies conducted in low-income countries provided 37 sets of farm data that allow a statistical estimation of the effect of education. The overall conclusion of this paper is that farm productivity increases as a result of a farmer's completing at least 4 additional years of elementary education rather than none. Also, the effects of education were much more likely to be positive in modernizing agricultural environments than in traditional ones.

We assume that the undernourishment or starvation continued in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) because there the misery persisted. Poverty reduction is the only way to the end hunger in Africa. Also, for an agricultural country in SSA the best way to solve the problem of poverty is through agricultural development. Our analysis is based upon a sample of nine countries in SSA, so called SSA – 9. SSA has around 47,5 percent of rural population in extreme poverty while between 1990 and 2005 when food prices were stable and low, extreme rural poverty in SSA involved around 64.6 percent of population. Thus, we have built up a model trying to answer to the question of how the agricultural gears in SSA – 9 were moving between 1990 and 2005 and assess how the agricultural growth could reduce rural poverty. We used a system of recursive rather than simultaneous equations: a recursive model is a special case of an equation system where the endogenous variables are determined one at a time in sequence. The most important result is that the main tools that had a strong relation with poverty reduction in SSA – 9 were legislation on property rights (PR), access to the credit system, Human capital and infrastructure.

Green Revolution, Human Capital, and Off‐Farm Employment: Changing Sources of Income among Farm Households in Central Luzon, 1966–1994

The continuous increase in the rate of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa can be linked to the inadequate management and use of international financial assistance such as foreign aid. Using a cross-country data, this paper examines the relationship between foreign aid and poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The result obtained indicates that foreign aid has no significant influence on poverty reduction in SSA, because of the countries’ weak economic management evidenced by high levels of corruption, bad governance, and political and economic instability. To improve the performance of foreign aid directed at poverty reduction, the paper suggests the implementation of measures directed at good governance, macroeconomic and political stability.Incentives in Nigeria’s food manufacturing industries and their impact on output and prices

The first Sustainable Development Goal targets ending poverty in all its forms everywhere by 2030. And one of the most remarkable achievements during the MDG era was the significant decline in the share of the extremely poor in the global population, leading to the global attainment of cutting the extreme poverty rate to half its 1990 level by 2015. However, Sub-Saharan Africa remained the only developing region where the MDG 1 target was not achieved. Based on the updated poverty line of $1.90 a day, poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa significantly lags other developing regions. Understanding the key drivers and ways of tackling poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa becomes one of the pressing development challenges of our time. Our empirical estimates for the period, 1980 to 2013, show that the key factors significantly feeding poverty incidence and poverty depth in the region include high income inequality, oil-dependence, institutionalized democracy, high prevalence of HIV among the female youth, and increased civil war episodes. On the other hand, the key drivers significantly reducing poverty in the region are higher levels of economic development (income per capita), higher general government final consumption expenditure, higher official development assistance and aid received, urbanization, and access to improved water source. The policy implications are discussed.

A salient theme in D. Gale Johnson’s work is the importance of agricultural development for general prosperity and for economic diversification (e.g., Johnson 2000). Johnson has also noted that most of the world’s poor are engaged in farming, so that a key focus of development policy is to raise the incomes of farmers. From a global perspective, increasing the productivity of agriculture, given the fixity of land, is necessary for both poverty reduction and the development of the nonagricultural sector. At the level of the world, agricultural productivity gains, poverty reduction, and the growth of the nonfarm sector are complements. However, the question remains whether these observations imply that every poor country should focus its public resources on agricultural development in order to raise the incomes of people now engaged in farming and whether such a policy is necessary for obtaining economic diversity. In this article, we use the experience of India over the past 30 years to address the issue of whether agricultural technical change actually leads to economic diversification and income growth within the rural sector in the context of an open-economy country in which there are cross-area trade and capital flows. We focus in particular on the rural sector because this is the sector in which linkages between agricultural and nonagricultural sectors are thought to be the strongest. We exploit the fact that India has maintained a policy of openness with respect to agricultural technology over this period, permitting and actively supporting agricultural development, and has moved to a reformed regime in which goods are traded and capital is more mobile in the 1990s. Evidence on the relationship between agricultural growth and nonfarm

Structural Adjustment and Economic Efficiency of Rice Farmers in Northern Ghana

A THEORY of human capital is in the process of formulation. The primary question is "What is the contribution of changes in the quality of people to economic growth?" The academic economists first raised the question after their research showed that production in developed economies had been increasing much faster than could be explained by inputs of physical capital and additions to the labor force. But the wide interest which the question has aroused indicates much more than academic curiosity. It reflects the desires and aspirations of people throughout the world-people anxious to add weight to their demands for action against disease and illiteracy by showing that such action is not only humanitarian, but will make a major contribution to economic growth as well. Though research on the return to investment in people is barely getting started, even the most tentative conclusions have been widely quoted. Preliminary indications that the rate of return on investment in people is high have been seized upon in a growing number of countries as justification for in-

PurposeThis paper examines the relationship between foreign aid, institutional democracy and poverty. The paper explores the direct effect of foreign aid on poverty and quantifies the facilitating role of democracy in harnessing foreign aid for poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).Design/methodology/approachThe paper attempts to address the endogenous relationship between foreign aid and poverty by employing the two-stage least squares instrumental variable (2SLS-IV) estimator by using GDP per capita of the top five Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries sending foreign aid to SSA countries scaled by the inverse of the land area of the SSA countries to stimulate an exogenous variation in foreign aid and its components. The initial level of democracy is interacted with the senders’ GDP per capita to also instrument for the interaction terms of democracy, foreign aid and its components.FindingsThe results suggest that foreign aid reduces poverty and different components of foreign aid have different effects on poverty. In particular, multilateral source and grant type seem to be more significant in reducing poverty than bilateral source and loan type. The study further reveals that democratic attributes of free expression, institutional constraints on the executive, guarantee of civil liberties to citizens and political participation reinforce the poverty-reducing effects of aggregate foreign aid and its components after controlling for mean household income, GDP per capita and inequality.Research limitations/implicationsThe methodological concern related to modeling the effects of foreign aid on poverty is endogeneity bias. To estimate the relationship between foreign aid, democracy and poverty in SSA, this paper relies on a 2SLS-IV estimator with GDP per capita of the top five aid-sending OECD countries scaled by the inverse of land area of the SSA countries as an external instrument for foreign aid. The use of the five top OECD's Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) countries is due to the availability of foreign aid data for these countries. However, non-OECD-DAC countries such as China and South Africa may be important source of foreign aid to some SSA countries.Practical implicationsThe findings further suggest that the marginal effect of foreign aid in reducing poverty is increasing with the level of institutional democracy. In other words, foreign aid contributes more to poverty reduction in countries with democratic dispensation. This investigation has vital implications for future foreign aid policy, because it alerts policymakers that the effectiveness of foreign aid can be strengthened by considering the type and source of aid. Foreign aid and quality political institution may serve as an important mix toward the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals 2030 and the Africa Union Agenda 2063.Social implicationsAs the global economy faces economic and social challenges, SSA may not be able to depend heavily on foreign partners to finance the region's budget. There is the need for African governments to also come out with innovative ways to mobilize own resources to develop and confront some of the economic challenges to achieve the required reduction in poverty. This is a vision that every country in Africa must work toward. Africa must think of new ways of generating wealth internally for development so as to complement foreign aid flows and also build strong foundation for welfare improvement, self-reliance and sustainable development.Originality/valueThis existing literature does not consider how democracy enhances the foreign aid and poverty relationship. The existing literature does not explore how democracy enhances grants, loans, multilateral and bilateral aid effectiveness in reducing poverty. This paper provides the first-hand evidence of how institutional democracy enhances the poverty-reducing effects of foreign aid and its components. The paper uses exogenous variation in foreign aid to quantify the direct effect of foreign aid and its components on poverty.

The present study employs recent World Bank data to shed light, in a global context, on the transformation of changes in income and inequality into poverty reduction for a large number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The study begins by discussing SSA's progress on poverty. Next, it presents data on how various African countries have fared in terms of the incidence of poverty relative to other countries, with special emphasis on the period since the mid-1990s, when SSA generally experienced a growth resurgence. The paper then decomposes performance on poverty into changes in income and inequality for a sample of SSA countries that have the requisite data. The paper finds that recent progress on poverty has been considerable, in contrast to the earlier, 1980–early 1990s, period. Compared with the progress in a global sample of countries, however, progress has been mixed: nonetheless, although African countries lag behind the Brazil, India, China and Russia group of countries as a whole, many of them have outperformed India. Furthermore, while income growth is found to be the main engine for poverty reduction in SSA in general, the role of inequality is crucial in certain countries. Viewed in a global context, moreover, the low levels of income have inhibited the effectiveness of income and inequality improvements in reducing poverty in many African countries.

By all indicators, millions of men, women, and children live in abject poverty in several African countries (UNDP, Human development report. UNDP, New York, 2006; UNICEF/WHO, Global water supply and sanitation assessment 2000 report, Geneva, 2000; World Bank, World development report. World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006; Ravallion M, Poverty comparisons: a guide to concepts and methods. Living Standards Measurement Surveys. Working paper No. 88. World Bank, Washington, DC, 1992). The grinding poverty has contributed to a wave of migration by those who could afford to leave, hence the brain drain. The individual who decides to migrate is due to self-interest, career prospects, and desire to accomplish certain goals and material comfort. While motives for migration vary among migrants, the overwhelming attitude is to better one’s life in a foreign country and occasional to escape political persecution. This study examines the effect of the brain drain on attempts to reduce poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and why poverty still exists despite myriad attempts to eradicate it. The issue of remittance is critically examined as well. It is estimated that remittance to developing countries has reached $372 billion in 2011, a 12 % increase over 2010 (World Bank’s Migration and Development Brief, 2013). Because of the importance of human capital for development (Lucas RE Jr, The mechanics of economic development. J Monet Econ 20(2):3–9, 1988), the brain drain may adversely affect development and hence poverty reduction efforts in developing countries.

This research aims to investigate the correlation between financial inclusion (FI), economic growth (EG), and poverty reduction in several Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries throughout the period of 2014-2021. The research used the generalized method of moments (GMM) econometric methodologies. A financial inclusion (FI) composite index was constructed using principal component analysis (PCA) to include the many attributes of FI indicators. The findings indicate a positive and significant impact of financial inclusion on economic development and a reduction in poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. These results emphasize the crucial significance of legislators and governments giving priority to policies that enhance the availability, utility, and accessibility of financial goods and services. The outcome will include a reduction in poverty and an increase in equitable economic progress throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that a common basis for rapid growth in agricultural output and productivity lies in a remarkable adaptation of agricultural technology to the sharply contrasting factor proportions in the two countries. It is hypothesized that an important aspect of this adaptation was the ability to generate a continuous sequence of induced innovations in agricultural technology biased towards saving the limiting factors. In Japan these innovations were primarily biological and chemical. In the United States they were primarily mechanical.

Remittances, financial development and poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications for post-COVID-19 macroeconomic policies