Farm-Level Pathways to Improved Nutritional Status: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

Global, national and local policies and programmes for agricultural development are recurrently justified based on their alleged role in improving food and nutrition security. However, strikingly little evidence is available to prove that a direct, household-level link between agricultural production and improved nutrition exists. The objective of this special issue is to systematically and empirically test, using data from Africa and South Asia, whether a relationship between household agricultural production and nutrition can be found. Overall, the studies in this special issue support the hypothesis that household agricultural production has direct and important linkages with dietary patterns and nutrition.     

Birds of a feather flock together: trust in government,political selection and electoral punishment

Public Choice - Although often at the heart of the public debate, the underlying determinants of political selection and voters’ punishment of corrupt politicians remain poorly investigated....     

Being poor,feeling poorer: Combining objective and subjective measures of welfare in Albania

Abstract

In this paper we investigate how combining objective and subjective measures of welfare can enrich traditional poverty profiles by exploring the relationship between these welfare measures, and examining what explains the differences between the two. One important finding of our analysis (using data for Albania) is that reconciling subjective and objective poverty profiles suggests the presence of sizable economies of scale. This result calls for increased attention to the proper estimation of a scale parameter for poverty analysis, as changes in assumptions on economies of size and adult equivalence scales are likely to produce significant changes in the analysis of poverty and its distribution across households and individuals.     

Searching for the source of technical inefficiency in Italian judicial districts: an empirical investigation

In this paper, we conducted a two-stage analysis of technical efficiency in Italian judicial districts by focusing on civil cases in 2006. Unlike most of the works that apply the Data Envelopment Analysis technique to study the justice sector, in the first stage, we employed the smoothed bootstrap procedure to generate unbiased technical efficiency estimates. In the second stage, we used a semi-parametric technique (Simar and Wilson in J Econom 136(1): 31–64, 2007) that produces a robust inference for an unknown serial correlation between efficiency scores. Our results show that technical efficiency is explained by demand factors and supports the conclusion that opportunistic behaviour from both claimants and lawyers negatively affects technical efficiency in Italian judicial districts.     

From Tragedy to Renaissance: Improving Agricultural Data for Better Policies

Abstract

Agricultural development is an essential engine of growth and poverty reduction, yet agricultural data suffer from poor quality and narrow sectoral focus. There are several reasons for this: (1) difficult-to-measure smallholder agriculture is prevalent in poor countries; (2) agricultural data are collected with little coordination across sectors; and (3) poor analysis undermines the demand for high-quality data. This article argues that initiatives like the Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics bode well for the future. Moving from Devarajan’s statistical tragedy’ to Kiregyera’s statistical ‘renaissance’ will take a continued long-term effort by individual countries and development partners.