This paper presents a model of the Malawi maize commodity market that is developed for use as a policy analysis tool. The model captures national and local maize market dynamics and the linkages existing within the maize market in the country. This research has been undertaken in order to provide policy makers with a robust tool which can be used to simulate the impact of policy changes on markets and households. Such a tool ensures the availability of evidence for informing food and agricultural policies. The model is a multiequation partial equilibrium model of the national maize market in Malawi. It is developed and linked in a top-down unidirectional manner to the local maize economy via a price linkage equation. A nonbehavioral arithmetic microaccounting approach is used to estimate rural household incomes that are linked to the local economy, through which macroeconomic-level maize price changes transmit. The model can be used as a tool for analyzing the impacts of macroeconomic and agricultural policy changes on the maize industry as well as on rural households that rely on maize. The novelty of the model is that it takes into account the interrelationships between farm/household, local-economy, and national maize market prices, as well as economic theory and existing empirical evidence, to build a framework that is capable of linking to the macroeconomy rural subsistence households that are traditionally deemed to have few or no backward and forward linkages.

The sector-wide approach currently dominates as the strategy for developing the agricultural sector of many African countries. Although it is recognized that agricultural research plays a vital role in ensuring success of sectorwide agricultural development strategies, there has been little or no effort to explicitly link the research strategies of the National Agricultural Research System (NARS) in African countries to the research agenda that is articulated in sectorwide agricultural development strategies. This study fills that gap by analyzing the readiness of Malawi’s NARS to respond to the research needs of the national agricultural sector development strategy, namely the Agriculture Sector Wide Approach (ASWAp) program. Results of a social network analysis demonstrate that public agricultural research departments play a central coordinating role in facilitating information sharing, with other actors remaining on the periphery. However, that analysis also shows the important role other actors play in relaying information to a wider network of stakeholders. These secondary information pathways can play a crucial role in ensuring successful implementation of the national agricultural research agenda. Policymakers and managers of public research programs are called upon to integrate other research actors into the mainstream national agricultural research information network. This is vital as other research actors are, at the global level, increasingly taking up a greater role in financing and disseminating research and research results, and in enhancing the scaling up and out of new agricultural technologies.

Since 2007, the government of Ghana has been providing subsidized agricultural machines to private enterprises established as Agricultural Mechanization Services Enterprise Centers (AMSEC) to scale up tractor-hire services to smallholder farmers. Although farmer’s demand for mechanization has increased in recent years, most of this demand concentrates on land preparation (plowing) service. Using the firm investment model and recent data, this paper quantitatively assesses whether AMSEC as a private enterprise is a viable business model attractive to private investors. Even though the intention of the government is to promote private sector-led mechanization, findings suggest that the AMSEC model is unlikely to be a profitable business model attractive to private investors even with the current level of subsidy. The low tractor utilization rate as a result of low operational scale is the most important constraint to the intertemporal profitability of tractor-hire services. Our findings further support the argument of Pingali, Bigot, and Binswanger (1987), who indicated that mechanization service centers supported through government’s heavy subsidy are not a policy option anywhere in the world, even in the current situation in Ghana. Although the tractor rental service market is a proper way of mechanizing agriculture in a smallholder-dominated agricultural economy such as Ghana, this paper concludes that the development of such a market depends crucially on a number of factors, including increased tractor use through migration across the two very different rainfall zones (north and south), increased tractor use through multiple tasks, and use of low-cost tractors. The government can play an important role in facilitating the development of a tractor service market; however, the successful development of such a market depends on the incentive and innovation of the private sector, including farmers who want to own tractors as part of their business portfolio, traders who know how to bring in affordable tractors and expand the market, and manufacturers in exporting countries who want to seek a long-term potential market opportunity in Ghana and in other west African countries.

This study has been conducted in order to generate evidence of the visibility of exit from farm input subsidies in an African context. The study simulates the impact of alternative exit strategies from Malawi’s farm input subsidy program on maize markets. The simulation is conducted using a multiequation partial equilibrium model of the national maize market, which is sequentially linked via a price-linkage equation to local rural maize markets. The model accounts for market imperfections prevailing in the country that arise from government price interventions. Findings show that some alternative exit strategies have negative and sustained impacts on maize yields, production, and acreage allocated to maize over the simulation period. Market prices rise steadily as a result of the implementation of different exit strategies. Despite higher maize prices, domestic maize consumption remains fairly stable, with a slow but increasing trend over the simulation period. Results further suggest that exit strategies that are coupled with improvements in agricultural extension services have the potential to offset the negative impacts of the removal or scaling down of agricultural input subsidies. The study findings demonstrate the difficulty of feasibly removing farm input subsidies. Study recommendations are therefore relevant for policymakers and development partners debating removal or implementation of farm input subsidies.

In an effort to inform social policy in Mexico, this paper analyzes the effects of a major social program on school attendance and household income distribution, accounting for its partial and general equilibrium effects. Linking a microeconometric simulation model and a general equilibrium model in a bidirectional way, the paper explicitly takes spillover effects of the Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program into account. Our results suggest that partial equilibrium analysis alone may underestimate the distributional effects of the program. Extending the coverage of the program leads to a significant increase in school attendance, which reduces labor supply and increases the equilibrium wages of the children who remain at work. This general equilibrium effect indirectly reduces income inequality and poverty at the national level.

This study is motivated by the idea that even though participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) is widely accepted as a tool to manage development programs to be effective, its application is widely constrained by its high start-up resource requirements in terms of both finance and time. However, this paper argues that after the initial investment is made, the payback from using PM&E is much higher both in terms of grassroots-level learning, empowerment, and capacity building and in terms of higher-level strategic decision making which enhances impact. This is demonstrated using field-level experience of implementing PM&E in farmer field schools (FFSs) under the Agricultural Services Support Program and Agricultural Sector Development Program–Livestock (ASSP/ASDP-L) program in Zanzibar, Tanzania. After describing the major steps followed in designing and implementing a PM&E for FFSs, the major lessons learned and challenges faced in the process are discussed. The study found out that PM&E has enabled the tracking of technology uptake and reasons behind adoption and nonadoption of technologies through detailed data collection. This informed and improved decision making at a higher level to design feasible methods to scale up adoption at other FFSs and to devise solutions for nonadoption. The need for incentives to undertake PM&E was found to be one of the major challenges of implementation, among others.

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of local-level (territory) multistakeholder platforms using data from 55 CARGs in 23 randomly selected territories in three provinces (Bandundu, Bas-Congo, and Kinshasa) of the DRC. The first CARG was established in 2008, and the survey was conducted three years later, from August to October 2011.