Mesfin Tilahun

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• PhD
• Research Associate at Norwegian University of Life Sciences

Multiple Price Lists (MPLs) or Choice Lists (CLs) are widely used to elicit risk and time preferences, yet are prone to cognitive biases, particularly among respondents with limited numeracy skills. This paper compares three elicitation approaches; row-by-row from the top, from the bottom, and a Rapid Elicitation (RE) method using random starting p...

Our study investigates the impact of the November 2020 to November 2022 Tigray war on youth groups and their members based on survey data from 281 youth group leaders and 2528 youth group members in five districts in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. The data was collected from August to December 2023 using standardized survey instruments. Ou...

Our study investigates how the devastating 2020-2022 Tigray War has affected the social preferences, reciprocity norms, and trust in a large sample of rural young adults in Tigray, Ethiopia, belonging to rural business groups. We rely on field experimental data with standardized incentivized experiments conducted in 2019 and 2023 to categorize subj...

We study risky inter-temporal choice in a large random student sample (n=721) and a large rural sample (n=835) in Malawi. All respondents were exposed to the same 20 Multiple Choice Lists with a rapid elicitation method that facilitated the identification of near-future Certainty Equivalents of future risky prospects placed 6, 12, and 24 months int...

We investigate how random luck in repeated variants of the risky investment game of Gneezy, Leonard, and List (2009); Gneezy and Potters (1997) influences risk-taking and discounting behavior in future risky prospects with probabilistic payouts one week, six, 12, and 24 months into the future. We test non-parametrically whether luck enhances risk-t...

Land degradation is one of the major challenges causing food insecurity and instability in Ethiopia. A comprehensive study on trends and drivers of land degradation and, socioeconomic and ecological impact of land degradation is necessary for an effective and sustainable mitigation measures. This study reviewed the drivers, trends and impacts of la...

Land degradation is one of the major challenges causing food insecurity and instability in Ethiopia. A comprehensive study on trends and drivers of land degradation and, socioeconomic and ecological impact of land degradation is necessary for an effective and sustainable mitigation measures. This study reviewed the drivers, trends and impacts of la...

Land degradation and desertification is one of the world’s greatest environmental challenges and currently being accelerated by a growing world population, alongside climate change and an increasing demand for food, energy, and fibre. With a total land area of 4.3 billion ha, Asia is the largest and most populated continent in the world. Degraded a...

Land degradation is one of the greatest environmental challenges that nations need to address to achieve sustainable development goals. his case study aims to estimate the costs and benefits of action against soil erosion-induced agricultural land degradation in Africa. We relied on agricultural production and input data from global databases for a...

Summary: Ethiopia has been facing serious land degradation due to natural and anthropogenic influences. In response to this the country has been implementing sustainable land management interventions. Application of sustainable land management interventions by farmers could enhance the ecosystem services that the land provides. When the benefits of...

While economists in the past tended to assume that individual preferences, including risk preferences, are stable over time, a recent literature has developed and indicates that risk preferences respond to shocks, with mixed evidence on the direction of the responses. This paper utilizes a natural experiment with covariate (drought) and idiosyncrat...

We argue that while community forest management is effective in protecting forest resources, as argued by Ostrom, such management may fail to provide the proper incentives to nurture such resources because the benefits of forest management are collectively shared. This study proposes a mixed private and community management system characterized by...

The objective of this study was to investigate the determinants of food security and quantify the impact of livelihood diversification as an adaptation strategy on the level of food security of pastoral households in Arero district in Borena zone and Rayitu district in Bale zone in Ethiopia. A multistage sampling technique was used, selecting 396 h...

The purpose of this study was, therefore, to examine the determinants of poverty depth in pastoral households, and the impact of adopting livelihood diversification on the poverty level of households in the Arero district of Borena Zone and Rayitu district of Bale Zone, Ethiopia. A multistage sampling technique was used, and 396 households were sel...

We have used the standard trust game on a random sample of university students (N=764) and a random sample of rural residents (N=834) in Malawi. The study identifies social preference types (Bauer, Chytilová, & Pertold-Gebicka, 2014; Fehr, Glätzle-Rützler, & Sutter, 2013) and how these relate to variations in trust and trustworthiness based on the...

Basic numeracy skills are obviously important for rational decisionmaking when agents are facing choices between risky prospects. Poor and vulnerable people with limited education and numeracy skills live in risky environments and have to make rational decisions in order to survive. How capable are they to understand and respond rationally to econo...

Youth unemployment has been prevalent in Ethiopia. Over the past decades, efforts to rehabilitate degraded communal lands have been taking place in Ethiopia. This has created the opportunity to organize landless and land-poor youth and implement a policy of allocating rehabilitated lands for youth to engage in agriculture as a livelihood option. Ho...

While economists in the past tended to assume that individual preferences , including risk preferences, are stable over time, a recent literature has developed and indicates that risk preferences respond to shocks. This paper utilizes a natural experiment with covariate (drought) and idiosyncratic shocks in combination with an independent field ris...

Can luck predict risk-taking behavior in games of chance? Economists have not widely studied this issue although overconfidence, optimism-, and pessimism bias have received substantial attention in recent years. In this study, we investigate how good and bad luck outcomes in a simple repeated risky investment game affect risk-taking behavior in the...

We study whether luck in a repeated risky investment game can contribute to measurement errors and also help improve the predictive power of the game. We investigate how good and bad luck affect risk-taking behavior in the following rounds of the game. The luck outcome of the previous round is known when the subjects decide how risky their next cho...

We analyze individual investment behavior among 822 young men and women that are members of 111 formal business groups in northern Ethiopia. We collected baseline data and investment data one year later combined with incentivized field experiments to obtain dis-aggregated risk preference data. We find that businesswomen on average invest significan...

This study is based on a survey of 764 students at the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR), Lilongwe, Malawi. It aims to provide evidence on the extent of exposure to the pandemic among university students, their knowledge and beliefs related to the corona virus and the ways they protect themselves against getting infe...

This study investigates the covid risk perceptions, information updating behavior related to the pandemic, use of protective measures, especially facemasks, and the demand for vaccines among university students in Malawi. In particular, the study focuses on how religion and belief in prayer as a protective device against covid-19 are affecting perc...

This study provides the initial survey data from a sample of 764 students at the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR), Lilongwe, Malawi. It aims to provide evidence on the extent of exposure to the pandemic among university students, their knowledge and beliefs related to the corona virus and the ways to protect oneself...

The incentivized risky investment game has become a popular tool in lab-in-the-field experiments for its simplicity and ease of comprehension compared to some of the more complex Multiple Choice List approaches that have been more commonly used in laboratory experiments. We use a field experiment to test whether the game can predict real-world inve...

We use a field experiment and a within-subject design based on multiple Choice Lists (CLs) that integrate time and risk. Diminishing impatience with extended time horizons is studied by varying time horizons from one week to two years. Time-dated risky prospects are constant within CLs and are always compared with time-dated certain amounts to iden...

The risky investment game of Gneezy and Potters (Q J Econ 112(2):631–645, 1997) has been proposed as a simple tool to measure risk aversion in applied settings, especially attractive in settings where participants may have limited education. However, this game can produce a significant endowment effect (attached to the initial position), so that an...

We analyze individual investment behavior among 822 young men and women that are members of 111 formal business groups in northern Ethiopia. We collected baseline data and investment data one year later combined with incentivized field experiments to obtain dis-aggregated risk preference data. We find that businesswomen on average invest significan...

We analyze individual investment behavior among 822 young men and women that are members of 111 formal business groups in northern Ethiopia. We collected baseline data and investment data one year later combined with incentivized field experiments to obtain dis-aggregated risk preference data. We find that businesswomen on average invest significan...

Our time preferences deviate systematically from that of Homo economicus. They seem to be driven by a form of mental zooming, where higher and more distant amounts induce a more holistic perspective in contrast to smaller and near future amounts. The authors model zooming as variable asset integration and ask whether this can explain the observed v...

Digital information and communication technologies are recognized as vital tools for empowering marginalized groups such as women in low-income developing countries through reducing the costs of communication and connectivity. This study aimed at assessing the gender difference in mobile phone ownership among youth business group members, and how i...

While economists in the past tended to assume that individual preferences, including risk preferences, are stable over time, a recent literature has developed that indicates that risk preferences respond to shocks. This paper combines survey data and field experiments with three different tools that facilitated elicitation of dis-aggregated measure...

Land degradation and its serious consequences are increasing across the globe. For this reason, the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15.3 is to “combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought and floods, and to strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral (LDN) world”, whereby the am...

We study how social preferences and norms of reciprocity are related to generalized (outgroup) and particularized (ingroup) trust among members of youth business groups in northern Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government promotes youth employment among land-poor rural youth by allocating them rehabilitated communal lands for the formation of sustainable...

The risky investment game of Gneezy and Potters (1997) has been a popular tool used to estimate risk tolerance and myopic loss aversion. Holden and Tilahun (2021) tested and found that the simple one-shot version of this game that is attractive as a simple tool to elicit risk tolerance among respondents with limited education, produce significant e...

Continued population growth in densely populated parts of Sub-Saharan Africa makes it harder for youth to choose agriculture as main source of income. We investigate whether near landless youth can access rented land as a source of income. We used data collected in 2016 (from 1138 youths in 119 youth business groups) and 2019 (from 2427 youths in 2...

The main objective of this study is to assess the economic, environmental, and societal benefits of the investment on water spreading wires and compare these benefits against the costs using a cost-benefit analysis. The study is based on data provided by the project other relevant data from the literature and other sources. The study showed that eq...

We have used simple incentivized social preference experiments for a sample of 2427 resource-poor rural youth that have formed natural-resource based youth business groups in their home communities. The experiments were combined with questions investigating their attitudes towards environmental conservation and willingness to contribute to conserva...

Our time preferences deviate systematically from that of Homo economicus. They seem to be driven by a form of mental zooming, where higher and more distant payouts induce a more holistic perspective in contrast to smaller and near future payouts. We model zooming as variable asset integration and ask whether this can explain the observed variation...

Land is an essential asset for the livelihood and welfare of rural households in agriculture-based rural economies. This study utilizes land registry data from the First and Second Stage Land Registration (FSLR and SSLR) Reforms that took place in 1998 and 2016 in Tigray region of Ethiopia, the first region in Ethiopia to implement land registratio...

The short-term training on the topic “Integrated approaches for land restoration through sustainable land management” will be delivered as a joint training by ELD Initiative (Based in GIZ-Bonn), GRO-LRT-UNESCO (based at Agricultural University of Iceland), and Mekelle University (based in Ethiopia).

The risky investment game of Gneezy and Potters (1997) has been a popular tool used to estimate risk tolerance and myopic loss aversion. We have assessed whether a simple one-shot version of this game that is attractive as a simple tool to elicit risk tolerance among respondents with limited education, can lead to biased estimates of risk aversion...

We study how social preferences and norms of reciprocity are related to generalized and particularized trust among members of youth business groups in northern Ethiopia. Members of these groups are recruited among land-poor rural youth. The Ethiopian government promotes youth employment among land-poor rural youth by allocating them rehabilitated c...

This working paper is an output from the research project "Youth Business Groups for Sustainable Development: Lessons from the Ethiopian Model" that is funded by Research Council of Norway under the NORGLOBAL2 research program for the period 2019-2022. This working paper provides updated and extended information on the gender differences among grou...

Continued strong population growth in already densely populated rural areas in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa makes it harder for youth to choose agriculture as their main source of income. We investigate whether near landless youth still can access rented land as a complementary source of income. We utilize a unique data of rural youth that have been...

This working paper is an output from the research project "Youth Business Groups for Sustainable Development: Lessons from the Ethiopian Model" that is funded by Research Council of Norway under the NORGLOBAL2 research program for the period 2019-2022. This working paper provides a summary of baseline survey data collected in the period January-May...

We use a field experiment to estimate the risk preferences of 945 youth and young adult members of 116 rural business groups organized as primary cooperatives in a semi-arid risky environment in northern Ethiopia. Multiple Choice Lists with binary choices between risky prospects and varying safe amounts are used to identify the certainty equivalent...

Risk and time preferences are fundamentally important for financial decisions. We study such preferences for business group members based on field experiments in Ethiopia. The relationship between risk preferences and time preferences has been subject to intensive research and debate among behavioral and experimental economists lately. We aim to co...

We use a field experiment to estimate the risk preferences of 945 youth and young adult members of 116 rural business groups organized as primary cooperatives in a semi-arid risky environment in northern Ethiopia. Multiple Choice Lists with binary choices between risky prospects and varying safe amounts are used to identify the certainty equivalent...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the allocation efficiency in the tenancy market, and thereby the potential of the market to facilitate operational farm size adjustment that can help land‐poor tenant households to transform into smallholder commercial farms. We analyzed three rounds of balanced panel data for the production seasons 2005/...

The scarcity of land for crop and livestock production is critical in countries with growing populations. The idea that increasing population density leads to natural resource depletion and economic failure, as predicted by Malthus, or rather to farm intensification, as hypothesized by Boserup, motivates this research. This paper examines how high...

Most rural households in Ethiopia use fuelwood as a main source of energy; and women are largely responsible for both its collection and use. Existing analyses of fuelwood in the literature are more or less limited to demand, supply, and consumption issues. In this study, we examined women’s workloads in rural areas, vis-à-vis the collection and co...

We assess the gender difference in mobile phone ownership among youth business group members, and how it affects election into leadership and group board positions in recently established rural youth business groups in northern Ethiopia. Based on data on 1125 youths from 119 youth business groups where 32% of the members were female, 37% of the fem...

Brief Summary Background: The global community has acknowledged the risks that degradation poses to stability, food security and livelihoods by setting Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15, “Life on Land”. By 2030, this goal aims to protect, restore and promote the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems. Target 15.3 specifically states that “B...

The global community has acknowledged the risks that degradation poses to stability, food security and livelihoods by setting Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15, “Life on Land”. By 2030, this goal aims to protect, restore and promote the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems. Target 15.3 specifically states that “By 2030, combat desertificat...

The paper assesses risk tolerance, trust and trustworthiness among male and female youth group members in recently formed primary cooperative businesses in Ethiopia. Male members are found to be more risk tolerant, trusting and trustworthy than females. There is a strong positive correlation between individual risk tolerance and trust for male but...

Youth unemployment and migration are growing challenges that need more political attention in many countries, particularly countries with rapid population growth and economic transformation. Proactively mobilizing the youth as a resource in the creation of sustainable livelihoods can potentially be a win-win-win solution that Ethiopia is currently...

Youth unemployment and migration are growing challenges that need more political attention in many countries, particularly countries with rapid population growth and economic transformation. Proactively mobilizing the youth as a resource in the creation of sustainable livelihoods can potentially be a win-win-win solution that Ethiopia is currently...

The report provides overview of the data required for the next phase study and presents annotated chapter outlines.

Action against erosion and poverty induced agricultural land degradation in a number of African countries needs to be taken as strategy for achieving a number of the sustainable Development goals such as SDG-1(No Poverty), SDG-2 (No Hunger), SDG-8 (Economic Growth), and SDG-15.3 (Land Degradation Neutral World).

Prosopis juliflora, which is an alien tree species in Ethiopia, has invaded over 360,500 ha of land in the Afar region of the country and is threatening pastoral livelihoods. We conducted a contingent valuation study to assess rural households’ willingness to contribute in cash and labor to mitigate P. juliflora invasion in three districts of Afar....

Citation suggérée: ELD Initiative & UNEP (2015). L’économie de la dégradation des terres en Afrique: les bénéfices de l’action l’emportent sur ses frais; disponible sur www.eld-initiative.org.

Land rental markets can potentially improve the access to land for land-poor households that possess complementary resources that can enable them to utilize land efficiently. Land rental markets can also enable landowners who are poor in non-land resources to rent out their land such that their land is utilized more efficiently and they themselves...

Suggested citation: ELD Initiative & UNEP (2015). The Economics of Land Degradation in Africa: Benefits of Action Outweigh the Costs. Available from www.eld-initiative.org.

Rural households in northern Ethiopia had no access to frankincense production and trading. However, following the recent devolution of forest use-rights, rural communities in norther Ethiopia are getting access through organizing frankincense cooperatives. This study examines the effects of membership in the rural frankincense firms on income and...

This report is in continuation of previous State of the Environment and Outlook Reports published by the Rwanda Environment Management Authority (REMA) every two years as a part of its mandate. The report is primarily organized in two parts. Part I provides the geographical context and describes the main drivers of environmental change. It then ass...

The main purpose of this study was to assess the status and potential for frankincense based value chain development in Tigray. We applied the conceptual framework of Porter’s Value Chain Structure Conduct Performance to analyze the status and potential for frankincense-based value chain development in Tigray. The analysis is based mainly on second...

The question of whether the rural land registration and certification has an impact on farm level investment or not, remains an important policy question. It is also a deeply sensitive political issue in present day of Ethiopia. Using household level data collected from 279 household, this article investigates the impacts of rural land certificates...

High rates of deforestation and forest degradation are among the serious environmental problems in Africa that dwindling the level and quality of forest ecosystem services.Forest protected area management plays an important role in the global and nation level efforts of nature conservation. The Ankasa Forest Conservation Area is one of the most imp...

High rates of tropical deforestation and forest degradation are among the serious environmental problems in Africa that are dwindling the level and quality of forest ecosystem services. In response to the challenge of deforestation and forest degradation Ghana has been implementing a National Forest Development Program that involves the participati...

The Ankasa Forest Conservation Area is one of the most important protected areas in tropical forests of Western Africa. However, there is dearth of information on the quantity and value of ecosystem services provided by the forest conservation area. The main objectives of this study were, therefore, to estimate the economic values of selected ecosy...

Frankincense from Boswellia papyrifera forest (BPF) is a traded commodity used in the pharmaceutical, food, cosmetic and chemical industries. Ethiopia is an important producer of frankincense, but the resource is under continuous degradation and requires conservation. We applied a contingent valuation to assess rural households' willingness to pay...

Dryland forests provide a number ecosystem services important for human welfare. The objective of this paper is to identify the best available methods for valuation of dry land forest ecosystems. According to the total economic value (TEV) approach, the values of dry land forests can be broadly classified into use and non-use values. A number of sc...

Converting degraded grazing lands into exclosures is one option to restore soil nutrients and to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. We estimate the economic value of such a conversion and assess the perception of local communities concerning exclosures in the highlands of Tigray, Ethiopia. Our research combines a soil and vegetation study with a...

In Ethiopia, environmental degradation leads to a reduction of forest areas with economically important tree species like Boswellia papyrifera. In an attempt to reverse this development and assist natural rehabilitation, closing degraded forest from free grazing, fuel wood collection and other interference is practiced in Tigray. Sustainability of...

Prosopis juliflora, which is an alien tree species in Ethiopia, has invaded over 360,500 ha of land in the Afar region of the country and is threatening pastoral livelihoods. We conducted a contingent valuation study to assess rural households’ willingness to contribute in cash and labor to mitigate P. juliflora invasion in three districts of Afar....

Copyright 2011 by [Tilahun et al., 2011]. All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. Abstract: Frankincense from Boswellia papyrifera forest (BPF) is a traded non timber forest product (NTFP) used in pharmaceutical,...