Agriculture contributes substantially to output and employment in South Asian countries. Therefore, any change, like trade liberalization, that impacts on the agriculture sector has widespread ramifications in terms of employment, nutrition, livelihood and food security. Implementation of various provisions of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture causes serious concern with regard to the performanc...

In the mind of the general public, the rural sector is equal to agriculture and for a great majority of policymakers, rural development continues to mean agricultural development. Not surprisingly, it is a sector traditionally covered at the governmental level by the ministries of agriculture, and at the international development level by agencies with an agricultural development mandate such a...

1. The public sector dominates Lesotho‘s agricultural sector. The public sector provides strategic direction for agriculture; chooses appropriate technologies; provides almost all of the capital used in the sector and assumes most of the risk associated with sector performance. The public sector treats farming per se as one among many ―Marginal Livelihood Strategies‖ available to poor farmers r...

Using dynamic panel models with data for 62 developing countries, this paper examines whether growth in agriculture elicits growth in manufacturing. For identification, I use population-weighted, average temperature as an instrument for growth in agriculture. I identify large short-run effects: An increase in growth in agriculture by one percentage point is estimated to raise contemporaneous gr...

A common and longstanding assumption in the economic growth literature has been that total factor productivity growth is lower in the agriculture sector than in the rest of the economy. Using a stochastic production frontier finite mixture model, labor productivity change is decomposed into catch-up, technological change and factor accumulation effects and stochastic shocks. This decomposition ...

Major debates on the industrialization of agrarian economies view labor mobility—sectoral and spatial, from agriculture to industry and from villages and small towns to cities—as central to understanding the pace and nature of industrialization. Many see labor mobility as the result of the commercialization and capitalization of agriculture, which leads to an increasing number of peasants who a...

Encouraging agricultural and forestry carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas mitigation is a necessary tool to meet U.S. emissions targets at minimum cost, but implementation challenges have relegated the agriculture and forestry sector to a marginal role in national and international cap-and-trade and energy policies, including those currently being discussed by U.S. legislators. However, the...

Agriculture accounts for a very high proportion of total employment in the LDCs. In extreme cases more than 90 per cent of employment is accounted for by the agricultural sector, the ratio being generally very high for the LDCs in SSA. Together with the very low value added per worker in agriculture, this strongly indicates that a high proportion of the individuals counted as being employed in ...

Globalization and growing competition have accelerated the need for knowledge intensive work performance in all the sectors of economy. In the agriculture sector constant application of latest ideas and better work technologies is essential to enhance productivity in the interest of economic well being of farmers and for ensuring food security. The current models of agriculture knowledge transf...

Using these four benchmarks, one can determine which governments are achieving or have achieved a specific target. Governments that demonstrate a consistent upward trend to‐ ward the target are more serious than those who display a stag‐ nant or divergent trend away from the target. The objective of this brief is to analyze available data on public agriculture expenditure in Africa—with a parti...