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Agriculture and the rural economy in Pakistan: Issues, outlooks, and policy priorities: Synopsis
While policy makers, media, and the international community focus their attention on Pakistan’s ongoing security challenges, the potential of the rural economy, and particularly the agricultural sector, to improve Pakistanis’ well-being is being neglected. Agriculture is crucial to Pakistan’s economy. Almost half of the country’s labor force works in the agricultural sector, which produces food and inputs for industry (such as cotton for textiles) and accounts for over a third of Pakistan’s total export earnings. Equally important are nonfarm economic activities in rural areas, such as retail sales in small village shops, transportation services, and education and health services in local schools and clinics. Rural nonfarm activities account for between 40 and 57 percent of total rural household income. Their large share of income means that the agricultural sector and the rural nonfarm economy have vital roles to play in promoting growth and reducing poverty in Pakistan.
Womens individual and joint property ownership
Increasingly, womens property rights are seen as important for both equity and efficiency reasons. While there has been debate in the literature about women are better off with individual rights in contrast to rights jointly with their husband, little empirical work has analyzed this question. In this paper, the relationship of womens individual and joint property ownership and the level of womens input into household decisionmaking is explored with data from India, Mali, Malawi, and Tanzania. In the three African countries, women with individual landownership have greater input into household decisionmaking than women whose landownership is joint; both have more input than women who are not landowners. The relationship with other household decisions is more mixed, as is the relationship between housing and input into household decisionmaking. No similar relationship is found in Orissa, India.
Agriculture for development in Iraq? Estimating the impacts of achieving the agricultural targets of the national development plan 20132017 on economic growth, incomes, and gender equality
This paper estimates the potential effects of achieving the agricultural goals set out in Iraqs National Development Plan (NDP) 20132017 using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model. The findings suggest that raising agricultural productivity in accordance with the NDP may more than double average agricultural growth rates and add an average of 0.7 percent each year to economywide gross domestic product during the duration of the plan. As a consequence, the economy not only diversifies into agriculture, but agricultural growth also lifts growth in the food processing and service sectors. Achieving the yield targets for cereals (especially wheat) and for fruits and vegetables will...
Accelerating technical change through video-mediated agricultural extension: Evidence from Ethiopia
Despite a rapidly growing enthusiasm around applications of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to smallholder agriculture in developing countries, there are still many questions on the effectiveness of ICT-based approaches. This study assesses the effects of videomediated agricultural extension service provision on farmers’ knowledge and adoption of improved agricultural technologies and practices in Ethiopia. The study focuses on a program piloted by the Government of Ethiopia and Digital Green and poses three questions. First, to what extent does video-mediated extension lead to increased uptake of improved agricultural technologies and practices by smallholder farmers? S...
Examining the sense and science behind Ghanas current blanket fertilizer recommendation
This paper was written to help bolster the case and present visual evidence demonstrating why it is important to seriously consider spatial soil fertility variability in Ghana and to promote area-specific fertilizer recommendations. Using geostatistical analysis of soil samples collected from farmer plots in three districts (Tamale Municipality, Savelugu-Nanton, and West Mamprusi in northern Ghana), the paper analyzes spatial variations in soil fertility. The results clearly show that there are variations in soil pH, organic matter content, and available phosphorous even at the community level, supporting the need for Ghana to seriously consider location-specific fertilizer recommendations.
Assessing the economic benefits of sustainable land management practices in Bhutan
This study was conducted with the objective of determining the returns to sustainable land management (SLM) at the national level in Bhutan. The study first uses satellite data on land change (Landsat) to examine land use change in 19902010 and its impact on sediment loading in hydroelectric power plants. The study then uses the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model to analyze the impact of land use change and land management on sediment loading. The results from the land use change and SWAT analyses are used to assess the economic benefits of SLM.
Women’s empowerment, agricultural extension, and digitalization: Disentangling information and role-model effects in rural Uganda
Women often have less access to agricultural information than men, constraining their participation in decision-making on crops, technologies, and practices. In the design of agricultural extension programs, women may be viewed as insignificant actors in agricultural production. Moreover, even if their role is recognized, valuable information on production does not flow freely within the household from men to women. Among groups of maize-farming households in eastern Uganda, we explore the impacts on women’s empowerment from the use of gender-responsive information and communication technologies to provide extension services, specifically videos that feature women as information providers. The research tests the relative impact of the videos, contrasting their informational effects versus their role model effects, on women’s knowledge, their agency, and their achievements in farming. The results show that targeting women with information increases their achievements in farming. However, the results for the role-model effects are mixed.
The impact of shocks on gender-differentiated asset dynamics in Bangladesh
Assets are an important means of coping with adverse events in developing countries but the role of gendered ownership is not yet fully understood. This paper investigates changes in assets owned by the household head, his spouse, or jointly by both of them in response to shocks in rural agricultural households in Bangladesh with the help of detailed household survey panel data. Land is owned mostly by men, who are wealthier than their spouses with respect to almost all types of assets, but relative ownership varies by type of asset. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity across households and looking at changes within, rather than between, households, we find that weather shocks such as cyclones adversely affect the asset holdings of household heads in general, while predicted external events lead to assets of both spouses being drawn down. The results, furthermore, suggest that jointly owned assets are not sold in response to shocks, either due to these assets being actively protected or due to the difficulty of agreeing on this coping strategy, and that womens asset holdings and associated coping strategies are shaped by their lower involvement in agriculture.
Rising Wages in Bangladesh
Using data from multiple sources, we show that in Bangladesh, the increase in real wages, particularly female wages, has accelerated since the late 2000s, suggesting that the Lewis turning point (the point at which the labor market starts to shift in favor of workers) has arrived in Bangladesh. Rising wages are likely a result of a combination of more ample job opportunities in the nonfarm sector, especially in the manufacturing sector for females, and a greater amount of remittances, primarily from male workers overseas. Since human capital is the most important asset for the poor, the escalation in real wages has boosted the poors earnings, thereby reducing their likelihood of being poor.
