Alain de Janvry

University of California, Berkeley | UCB

Information frictions limit the adoption of new agricultural technologies in developing countries. Efforts to improve learning involve spreading information from government agents to farmers. We show that when compared to this government approach, informing private input suppliers in India about a new seed variety increases farmer-level adoption by...

Subjective performance evaluation could induce influence activities: employees might devote too much effort to pleasing their evaluator, relative to working toward the goals of the organization itself. We conduct a randomized field experiment among Chinese local civil servants to study the existence and implications of influence activities. We find...

Why has Sub-Saharan Africa agriculture mostly not performed up to expectations for growth and poverty reduction? We address this puzzle by developing a conceptual framework expliciting how agriculture can be used for development, stressing the roles of modernization, agricultural transformation, and rural transformation. We review three successive...

For many poor countries and for a majority of poor people in the world, agriculture broadly defined can be one of the most effective instruments for development. Yet using agriculture for development, while widely advocated in the development profession and effectively practiced by a number of countries, remains too often well below potential. At t...

The persistence of rural poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa is a major challenge for meeting the Sustainable Development Goal on poverty eradication. Using detailed data for Malawi, we investigate the association between seasonality in labor calendars and low consumption. We find that (1) seasonality in rural labor calendars runs deep, accounting for 2/...

Third party quality certification can be used to reduce transaction frictions caused by asymmetric information in value chains. Such certification may help to secure the competitiveness of smallholder farmers in domestic markets for staple crops in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the face of rising competition with high quality imports. Yet, while freq...

This second edition of Development Economics: Theory and Practice continues to provide students and practitioners with the perspectives and tools they need to think analytically and critically about the current major economic development issues in the world. Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet identify seven key dimensions of development-growth,...

Government provision of disaster transfers is typically hampered by liquidity constraints and by weak rules and administrative capacity to disburse reconstruction resources. We show that by easing these hurdles, Mexico’s indexed disaster fund (Fonden) considerably accelerates economic recovery after a disaster. To estimate Fonden impact on recovery...

For most poor countries of today, using agriculture for development is widely recognized as a promising strategy. Yet, in these countries, investment in agriculture has mostly been lagging relative to international norms and recommendations. Current wisdom on how to use agriculture for development is that it requires asset building for smallholder...

Using data from a two-year pricing experiment, we study the impact of subsidy policies on weather insurance take-up. Results show that subsidies increase future insurance take-up through their influence on payout experiences. Exploring mechanisms of the payout effect, we find that for households that randomly benefited from financial education, rec...

Agriculture has a long tradition of randomized experiments in the research station and of comparative demonstration plots under scientist control. The BDK Nobelists have pioneered randomized field experiments under agency control to fight global poverty, thus making behavior, contextual circumstances, and institutional constraints key determinants...

Choice of a share vs. fixed rent land rental contract has figured prominently in the theory of industrial organization. This theory tells us that, while a share contract is inefficient in a first‐best world, it may be the preferred option under second‐best conditions. It has thus predicted the existence of sharecropping as the potentially preferred...

We provide a quantitative diagnostic of attempts by Bangladeshi workers at migrating to foreign countries and the risks that they face in doing so. We show that migration failures may be as high as one-third of attempts at migrating, with large financial losses for households with an aspiring migrant. Using a duration model, we find that success in...

We assess the responsiveness of Senegalese onion producers to their knowledge of expected changes in product market conditions, whereby onions would no longer be sold based on volume but rather on weight and with labeling certifying quality. A village-level randomized information campaign on the upcoming introduction of these reforms induced signif...

Admission to an elite school imposes substantial risks on many students while offering modest academic benefits relative to admission in their most preferred nonelite school. Using variation in school assignment generated by the allocation mechanism, we find that admission to a system of elite public high schools in Mexico City increases the probab...

With uninsured risk representing a major hurdle to investment, productivity growth, and poverty reduction in developing country smallholder agriculture, index-based agricultural insurance has offered the promise of overcoming the hurdles of traditional indemnity-based insurance for this context. In spite of extensive experimentation, take-up has be...

This chapter provides a review of the role of field experiments (FEs) in answering research questions in agriculture that ultimately let us better understand how policy can improve productivity and farmer welfare in developing economies. We first review recent FEs in agriculture, highlighting the contributions they have already made to this area of...

We use a randomized experiment in India to show that improved technology enhances agricultural productivity by crowding in modern inputs and cultivation practices. Specifically, we show that a new rice variety that reduces downside risk by providing flood tolerance has positive effects on adoption of a more labor-intensive planting method, area cul...

In many developing countries property rights over rural land are maintained through continuous personal use instead of by land titles. We show that removing the link between land use and land rights through the issuance of ownership certificates can result in large-scale adjustments to labor and land allocations. Using the rollout of the Mexican la...

The Yemen Social Fund for Development (SFD) was established in 1997 to combat national poverty and reinforce the limited existing social safety net. Since its inception, SFD has been widely viewed as effective in implementing programmes throughout the country and has steadily expanded its activities, despite Yemen’s weak state and political unrest....

Index-based Weather Insurance for Developing Countries : A Review of Evidence and a Set of Propositions for Up-scaling Index-based weather insurance is a major institutional innovation that could revolutionize access to formal insurance for millions of smallholder farmers and related individuals. It has been introduced in pilot or experimental form...

Using data from a randomized experiment in rural China, we study the influence of social networks on weather insurance adoption and the mechanisms through which they operate. To quantify network effects, the experiment provides intensive information sessions about the product to a random subset of farmers. For untreated farmers, the effect of havin...

The Fair Trade (FT) coffee initiative attempts to channel charity from consumers to poor producers via increased prices. We show that the rules of the FT system permit this rent to be eliminated due to free entry and costly excess certification of output. Using data from an association of coffee cooperatives in Central America, we verify that expec...

Index-based weather insurance is a major institutional innovation that could revolutionize access to formal insurance for millions of smallholder farmers and related individuals. It has been introduced in pilot or experimental form in many countries at the individual or institutional level. Significant efforts have been made in research to assess i...

The Green Revolution, consisting of using High Yielding Variety (HYV) seeds together with high fertilizer doses, has been widely adopted under irrigated conditions, but generally not in rainfed areas that are prone to stresses like drought and flooding. This puzzling lag in technology adoption is holding back the role of agriculture for development...

What is the impact on voting behavior of strengthening property rights over agricultural land? To answer this question, we use the 14-year nationwide rollout of Mexico's land certification program (Procede) and match affected communities (ejidos) before and after the change in property rights with voting outcomes in corresponding electoral sections...

Sixty years after its entry in academic circles, development economics has now been mainstreamed in economics. It has proven itself in placing articles in top economic journals, in mobilizing a vast membership of students and researchers, in receiving important financial contributions from development actors, and in influencing decision-making in e...

In recent years, index-based insurance has been offered to smallholder farmers in the developing world to protect against common shocks such as weather shocks. Despite their attractive properties, these products have met with low demand. We consider the frequent situation where farmers are members of groups with common interests. We show that this...

Sixty Years of Development Economics: What Have we Learned for Economic Development? Sixty years after its entry in academic circles, development economics has now been mainstreamed in economics. It has proven itself in placing articles in top economic journals, in mobilizing a vast membership of students and researchers, in receiving important fin...

Approximately 30% of the cultivated rice area in India is prone to crop damage from prolonged flooding. We use a randomized field experiment in 128 villages of Orissa India to show that Swarna-Sub1, a recently released submergence-tolerant rice variety, has significant positive impacts on rice yield when fields are submerged for 7 to 14 days with n...

Can microfinance borrowers use the discipline of regular loan repayments in order to accumulate savings if prompted to do so? In an experiment, we offered commercial savings products to the microfinance borrowers of Guatemala’s largest public-sector bank. We find that giving these borrowers the opportunity to develop a savings plan and be reminded...

Full text includind summary available at: http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/hlpe/hlpe_documents/HLPE_Reports/HLPE-Report-6_Investing_in_smallholder_agriculture.pdf

This paper examines historically the World Bank's twin features: lending to developing economies to achieve tangible results and advocating specific development policies. Section 1 provides some conceptual underpinnings for the view that an effective state is essential for development. It asks whether development can be engineered, and state capaci...

Using data from a randomized experiment in rural China, this paper studies the influence of social networks on the decision to adopt a new weather insurance product and the mechanisms through which social networks operate. We provided financial education to a random subset of farmers and found a large social network effect on take-up: for untreated...

We use administrative data from the lottery-based open enrollment system in Beijing middle schools to obtain unbiased estimates of school fixed effects on student performance. To do this, we classify children in selection channels, with each channel representing a unique succession of lotteries through which a child was assigned to a school. Result...

From Conclusion: "We have argued in this paper that the legacy of state-led land reforms has left two major tasks incomplete: (1) providing access to the land for the rural poor, particularly the landless and minifundists, in situations where other routes out of poverty are socially more costly, and (2) securing the competitiveness of land reform b...

Governments need the capacity to manage price instability and its social consequences; but in countries where people suffer most, they are least able to respond, because of limited fiscal and institutional resources. This article argues that policies used by middle- and high-income countries are unsuitable for poorer, agricultural countries; it rec...

Weather Index Insurance (WII) has recently gained increased attention as a tool to providing farmers coverage against losses from weather shocks. Despite extensive implementations in African and Latin Amercian countries, there is yet little empirical evidence about the effectiveness of WII. This paper is the first to analyze the economic effects of...

Food price volatility over the last four years has hurt millions of people, undermining nutritional status and food security. The level of price volatility in commodity markets has also undermined the prospects of developing countries for economic growth and poverty reduction. After staying at historic lows for decades, food prices have become sign...

The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) at its meeting of October 2010 requested the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) to conduct a study on land tenure and international investments in agriculture and to present the findings at its next session in October 2011. The study of the HLPE is to undertake analysis and f...

While land reforms have long been motivated as a potential policy lever of rural growth and development, there is remarkably little evidence of the direct impacts of such reforms. In an effort to fill this lacunae, this paper examines South Africa's Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) program. We show that the implementation of...

The Fair Trade (FT) initiative has been hugely popular with coffee consumers around the world, and yet the creation of durable producer rents is challenging in a competitive market environment. We model the FT premium actually received by producers and suggest that rents are in fact dissipated, but that this occurs in ways that are quite obscure to...

We use administrative data from the lottery-based open enrollment system in Beijing middle schools to obtain unbiased estimates of school fixed effects on student performance. To do this, we classify children in selection channels, with each channel representing a unique succession of lotteries through which a child was assigned to a school. Result...

This paper analyzes how electoral incentives affected the performance of a major decentralized conditional cash transfer program intended on reducing school dropout rates among children of poor households in Brazil. We show that while this federal program successfully reduced school dropout by 8 percentage points, the program's impact was 36 percen...

We conducted a randomized experiment at the time of the 2004 flu vaccine shortage, providing information about the sharply reduced number of clinics and their schedule, and an appeal on cooperative restraint to a campus population. This strategy was intended to reduce demand for vaccination among non-priority individuals and to free available suppl...

We utilize a unique pair of experiments to isolate the ways in which reductions in asymmetric information alter credit market outcomes. A Guatemalan microfinance lender gradually started using a credit bureau across its branches without letting borrowers know about it. One year later, we ran a large randomized credit information course that describ...

The role of agriculture as an instrument for industrialization had been rigorously conceptualized in the 1960s and 1970s under the classical paradigm of development economics. After many implementation failures under import substitution industrialization policies and protracted neglect of agriculture under the policies of the Washington Consensus t...

This paper shows that insecurity of property rights over agricultural land can have large efficiency and equity costs because of the way it affects matching in the tenancy market. A principal-agent framework is used to model the landlord's decision to rent when he takes into account the risk of losing the land to the tenant and when contract enforc...

Summary International food prices rose sharply during 2006-08, precipitating the "global food crisis." We analyze the welfare effects of changes in prices over categories of households in Guatemala and find three surprising results. The first is that the transmission of international into domestic prices was quite modest. The second is that most fa...

It is broadly recognised that vigorous agricultural growth is essential for African development, both in support of aggregate economic growth and a structural transformation of the economy towards industrialisation, and of poverty reduction and improved food security. For the first, this is because agriculture is a large sector, with important mult...

The world of agriculture is in a state of crisis. And nowhere is this more important than for Africa, where economies depend heavily on agriculture and hunger is on the rise. Agriculture is in the headlines, but for the wrong reasons: failures instead of successes. It is receiving rare political attention and financial commitments by governments an...

Formal village organizations can be classified into market-oriented (MO) and community-oriented (CO) organizations, with the former aimed at raising members' incomes and the latter at delivering local public goods. This study investigates the role of community conservatism in opposing economic differentiation and, thereby, constraining the emergenc...

The fundamental role that agriculture plays in development has long been recognized. In the seminal work on the subject, agriculture was seen as a source of contributions that helped induce industrial growth and a structural transformation of the economy. However, globalization, integrated value chains, rapid technological and institutional innovat...

High levels of inequality are a persistent feature of many rural areas in the developing world. Rural inequality is correlated with major impediments of rural development, such as crime, elite-capture, and lack of collective action. Cash transfer programs, such as conditional cash transfer, unemployment in-surance, old-age pension or similar progra...

Agricultural growth has long been recognized as an important instrument for poverty reduction. Yet, measurements of this relationship are still scarce and not always reliable. The authors present additional evidence at both the sectoral and household levels based on recent data. Results show that rural poverty reduction has been associated with gro...

Among the many seminal contributions made by Yujiro Hayami to our understanding of international agricultural development, his research on the rural community has been hailed by the profession for its unique insights (Hayami, 1988). This is in part because of the distinct approach he followed for this research, analyzing in great detail village mic...

Credit agents in microfinance institutions (MFIs) must be given incentives to acquire information on potential borrowers and select them in accordance with the MFI's objectives. We show that while giving incentives has no cost in for-profit MFIs, it is costly in pro-poor MFIs: When repayment and wealth are positively correlated, a pro-poor MFI cann...

One major concern with public school open enrollment programs is the potential for parents’ school selection errors to adversely affect their children's academic achievement. In this study of the Beijing middle school open enrollment program, we estimate the degree to which children's school outcomes were negatively affected by the poor choices the...

Even though several studies have assessed the degree of progressivity in targeting communities under the participatory Social Investment Fund (SIF) approach to the provision of local public goods, there is yet little evidence on how increasing decentralization affects the quality of this targeting. We identify the impact of increasing decentralizat...

This chapter outlines the evolution of Mexico’s payments for hydrological services program from its inception through the first 2 years of the program’s implementation. Background information on forests, deforestation, and potential environmental services provide context for a political economy analysis of the path the program traveled through Mexi...