Search results

The poor performance of public agricultural extension systems in developing countries engendered interest in pluralistic concepts of extension involving a variety of service providers. Within the reform agenda, modalities relying on private‐sector providers were perceived as a path to improvement. This paper aims to assess the potential and limitations of such modalities.

The paper discusses the conceptual underpinnings of these extension approaches, highlights theoretical and practical challenges inherent in their design, and provides an assessment of several performance‐based case studies described in the formal and informal literature.

Many of the modalities reviewed entail partnerships between the public sector, farmers' organizations or communities, and private‐sector providers. The paper concludes that while private‐sector participation can overcome some of the deficiencies of public extension systems, there are also challenges that have been faced, including misuse of public funds, insufficient accountability to farmers, inequitable provision of service, inadequate quality, and limited coverage of the wide range of farmers' needs.

The review suggests that private‐sector involvement in extension is no panacea. Extension systems need not be uniform, and will require different providers for different clienteles, with public providers and funding focusing more on smaller‐scale and less commercial farmers. The public sector may need to provide some regulatory oversight of private‐sector extension activities, particularly when public funding is involved.

The paper draws conclusions from a diverse range of experiences, some of which are recent, and provides comparative insights. It may be of interest to development scholars and practitioners.

The current study is an extension of the PF model research program that began after the Great Depression in the early 1930s. The purpose of the study is to introduce political dimensions to the PF defense-growth model and to assess the impact of political and conflict variables on EG. The study theorizes that excluding political factors from the PF defense-growth model hampers any realistic explanation of the problems of EG; that the influences of economic and military variables and their externalities effects vary across different political contexts; that political factors are at least as important as economic factors in determining the outcome of EG; that intrastate and interstate conflicts have differential effects on EG (both types of conflicts have negative effects on EG; however, intrastate conflicts have more damaging effects on growth than do interstate conflicts); and that the impact of conflicts on EG differs across regions.

Free trade reform promotes and consolidates businesses’ orientation to international markets. Using a sample of twenty Latin American countries, this study finds support for the hypothesis that higher revealed trade openness implies faster economic growth. However, at low output growth levels, increased revealed trade openness does not translate to faster output growth. Why more trade does not necessarily imply faster growth at all levels of revealed trade openness growth remains a conundrum. Failure to derive faster economic growth may compromise the prospects for sustainable trade reforms and thus the consolidation of new business ventures as engines for further growth.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and identify the indicators of institutional barriers hindering the technology transfer training (TTT) process behind the technology adoption lag affecting the agricultural output in India through development of a scale.

Quantitative technique has been followed for data collection through a close-ended questionnaire scored on the seven-point Likert scale. The sample size was considered as 161; target respondents were farmers and farmer-centric individuals. Data were analyzed using an exploratory factor analysis technique.

Factor analysis revealed that there are three significant factors related to TTT process, namely, comprehension, customization and generalization, which are liable for institutional barriers in technology adoption by farmers.

The main limitation is biasness from both respondents’ end and interviewer’s end might exist during survey due to differences in perception.

The key beneficiaries from this research are the small and marginal farming community in India. They can enhance their productivity through an appropriate training process. Corporates will show interest in investment through the mechanism of corporate social responsibility.

Under this study, the factors of the institutional barriers from the farmers’ perspective are being introduced as a new research contribution, especially for the resource crunch area of Jangalmahal and other similar places in India.

Recently, the Indian Congress asked a distinguished committee of experts to analyze and make policy recommendations about India's Cooperative Financial Institutions (CFIs), which included organizations such as credit unions and cooperative banks. One committee member, Mohan R. Narayan, a leading economist at a prestigious Indian university, was enthusiastic about the job; it was an opportunity to help millions of rural poor and to have a positive effect on the country. Some poor farmers, deeply in debts to money-lenders, had been reported to resort to committing suicide when they faced with draught or other catastrophes and saw little reason to continue living. Well-functioning CFIs would certainly help restore hope and boost income for the rural poor. But he knew the system had a long history of overregulation, financial laxity, and corruption. Creating an actionable and clear strategy would be no easy task. The case, written at the invitation of the World Bank to study the challenges of building inclusive financial system in emerging countries, invites students to discuss 1) The roles and responsibilities of financial institutions in poverty-reduction and economic development, 2) the benefits and risks of using public versus private institutions to aid development, and more specifically, 3) the economics of credit cooperatives—in particular how they function in an emerging market setting.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the institutional evolution of China's farmland property rights deformity with its internal logic, analyze its property rights deformity and the invasions of these rights under the family operation background, and puts forward fundamental suggestions for reforming farmland property rights in China.

The concept of “public domain” raised by Barzel in 1989 is used and extended to analyze China's farmland system.

There exist five sorts of public domain and two apparent characteristics of property rights deformity: the unclear final controlling rights for some valuable attributes of goods of the “public domain”; and the “public domain” deliberately created by the government. The public domain caused by technical factors and owner's real capability are herein excluded.

China's past and present farmland system is a result of the government's compulsory system arrangements instead of market evolution. The expansion of public domains III and V has directly shrunk peasants' residual property rights. The concept of “public domain” is developed to reveal the essence of China's farmland property rights deformity.