Nepals 2072 Federal Constitution Implications For The Governance Of The Agricultural Sector

In this paper we explore the implications of Nepal’s new federal Constitution—passed in September 2015—for governance of the agricultural sector. Agriculture is the backbone of the Nepali economy, providing a livelihood for approximately two-thirds of the population, contributing one-third of the country’s GDP, and constituting more than half of the country’s exports. In transitioning from a unitary to a federal republic—with greater authority and autonomy granted to subnational units of government—it is of paramount importance to ensure that the agricultural sector is guided by coordinated planning, retains sufficient human capacity, and receives adequate fiscal resources. These considerations are particularly important given that the governance of Nepal’s agricultural sector already suffers from poor coordination, low human resources capacity, and inadequate financial resources. Addressing these issues may become more difficult under a federal structure. This paper begins by laying out the main challenges for agricultural governance in Nepal under the current structure. To do so, it relies on an original survey of 100 district agricultural and livestock officers in charge of local agricultural service delivery in Nepal as well as perspectives collected through more than two dozen semi-structured interviews with officials from the Ministry of Agricultural Development, the Ministry of Livestock Development, civil society, the private sector, and donors. Because Nepal is embarking on a pathway to more decentralized governance, which has been well-trodden by a number of other countries, the paper proceeds by examining five case studies, drawing lessons from India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, and South Africa. Based on these analyses, the paper offers policy recommendations on how the sector can be restructured to meet the constitutional provisions, while simultaneously ensuring that the government can deliver on its long-term objectives to develop the agricultural sector.

In 2009, Ghana began pursuing the devolution of functions and responsibilities from the central government to the country’s 216 Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs). Agriculture was among one of the first sectors to be devolved, a process that became effective in 2012. This paper analyzes how this transition has proceeded, with a focus on the implications for agricultural civil servants within the MMDAs, accountability to citizens, and agricultural expenditures. Empirically, the paper draws on a survey of 960 rural households, 80 District Directors of Agriculture (DDAs), district level budget data from 2012 to 2016, and semi-structured interviews with a range of national and local government stakeholders.

This publication presents a gender equality and social inclusion (GeSi) analysis of six priority sectors in Nepal: agriculture and natural resources management, energy, skills development, urban development, transport and water, and sanitation and hygiene. The publication identifies practical ways in which gender equality, social inclusion, and women’s empowerment approaches can be integrated into each of these sectors. The diagnostic aims to inform the GeSi initiatives of the Government of Nepal, the Asian development Bank, and other development partners of the country.

How does the amount of land youth expect to inherit affect their migration and employment decisions? This paper explores this question in the context of rural Ethiopia using panel data from 2010 and 2014. We estimate a household fixed-effects model and exploit exogenous variation in the timing of land redistributions to overcome endogenous household decisions about how much land to bequeath to descendants. We find that larger expected land inheritances significantly lower the likelihood of long-distance permanent migration and of permanent migration to urban areas during this time. Inheriting more land is also associated with a significantly higher likelihood of employment in agriculture and a lower likelihood of employment in the nonagricultural sector. Conversely, the decision to attend school is unaffected. These results appear to be most heavily driven by males and by the older half of our youth sample. We also find several mediating factors matter. Land inheritance plays a much more pronounced role in predicting rural-to-urban permanent migration and nonagricultural-sector employment in areas with less vibrant land markets and in relatively remote areas (those far from major urban centers). Overall, the results suggest that inheritance strongly influences the spatial location and strategic employment decisions of youth.

This study focuses on the feed milling industry, which serves as the link between maize and poultry, through a field assessment of feed millers in Ghana. The findings establish the importance of feed in the poultry value chain. In addition, they show how the sector has become more integrated with poultry production, especially on larger-scale poultry farms. Because maize accounts for 60 percent of poultry feed, its availability and price have important implications for the profitability and growth potential of feed and, therefore, for poultry production as well. We illustrate these linkages by means of a simple spatial market equilibrium model that ties together the three sectors of the poultry value chain: the primary inputs (maize and soybeans), intermediate inputs (feed), and final products (meat and eggs). This model also enables us to assess the future growth potential of the poultry industry given alternative policy-driven changes in productivity and the production capacities of all three sectors. The results show that for poultry meat, replacing imports with domestic production in the short term would be nearly impossible. For the egg industry, however, there is potential for Ghana to export to neighboring countries by reducing production costs through improvements in yellow maize production.

This paper develops a novel methodology to estimate the degree of spatial basis risk for an arbitrary rainfall index insurance instrument. It relies on a widelyused stochastic rainfall generator, extendedto accommodate nontraditional dependence patterns—in particular spatial upper-tail dependence in rainfall—through a copula function. The methodology is applied to a recentlylaunched index product insuring against excess rainfall in Uruguay. The model is first calibrated using historical daily rainfall data from the national network of weather stations, complemented with a unique,high-resolution dataset from a dense network of 34 automatic weather stations around the study area. The degree of downside spatial basis risk is then estimated by Monte Carlo simulations and the results are linked to both a theoretical model of the demand for index insurance and to farmers’ perceptions about the product.

This paper assesses the Subramanian and Deaton (S–D) approach for imputing the caloric intake of households from food prepared away from home (FAFH) and composite foods (CF) by juxtaposing it with the imputations of alternative approaches, and extends these approaches to four additional nutrients—vitamin A, iron, zinc, and calcium. The apparent relative nutritional insignificance of FAFH and CF in Bangladesh obfuscates our efforts to assess alternatives to the S–D approach to imputation, and we remain uncertain about the relative value of the alternative imputation approaches examined. FAFH and CF—although widely consumed in Bangladesh—constitute a relatively unimportant source of nutrients, regardless of how the nutrient content of FAFH and CF is imputed.

In recent years, some counties in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA) have experienced growth in their economies and improvements in living standards. Although there is some debate, it is clear that the share of the population living below the poverty line fell significantly over the past decade and a half; there has been a general decline in infant mortality rates and increased access to education; in some of the fastest-growing economies, average growth rates have been positive for the first time in decades; and since the early 1990s, real consumption in SSA has grown between 3.4 and 3.7 percent per year. The reasons behind this so-called “African growth miracle” are not well understood, and to our knowledge, this paper is the first to connect these improvements in living standards to important occupational changes. Using data from the Groningen Growth and Development Center’s Africa Sector Database and the Demographic and Health Surveys, we show that much of SSA’s recent growth and poverty reduction has been associated with a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture. This decline is most pronounced for rural females over the age of 25 who have a primary education. This has been accompanied by a systematic increase in the productivity of the labor force, as it has moved from low productivity agriculture to higher productivity services and manufacturing. We also show that although the employment share in manufacturing is not expanding rapidly, in most of the low-income SSA countries, the employment share in manufacturing has not peaked and is still expanding, albeit from very low levels. Although these patterns are encouraging, more work is needed to understand the implications of these shifts in employment shares for future growth and development in SSA.

This review evaluates the role of the state in development, offering a new framework for understanding what capabilities states need to overcome different types of market failures. This framework is employed to understand the successes and failures of state-led development in Malaysia. The review addresses three key questions. First, what do we know about developmental states and why they emerged? Second, what have developmental states achieved? In answering this question, I look not only at growth but also at structural transformation, economic “upgrading,” equity, and human capability enhancement. In contrast to the idea of a single “East Asian model” of development, I find five distinct development trajectories. Third, how did developmental states utilize state structures to pursue development? To answer this final question, I examine in depth the history of state-led development in Malaysia—including agricultural, industrial, and social policies. This case study sheds light on what specific institutional and political capacities helped Malaysia to improve productivity in agriculture, expand the manufacturing sector, and reduce inequality. It also explores why Malaysia has been less successful in developing linkages with the export-based manufacturing sector.

Industrial wages have increased significantly in China in recent years. At the same time, there have been widening gaps in wages across provinces. These trends are likely to prompt company headquarters to relocate. The relocation choices of headquarters are likely to change under different ownership, as a result of variations in their internal capabilities as well as the distinctive nature of their businesses. This paper is the first attempt to examine the effects of rising wages on headquarters’ relocation by ownership. Data were obtained from the China Statistical Yearbook and the Annual Survey of Industrial Enterprises for the period 1998 through 2008. These data allow for differentiation among companies with regard to five types of enterprises: foreign owned, Sino-foreign owned, state owned, domestically joint owned, and privately owned. We use a conditional logit model to identify factors to determine which province headquarters chose to relocate. In addition, we consider the impact of these choices on the “minimum wage standard” introduced in 2004. Results indicate that wages insignificantly affected the relocation choice of all types of headquarters before 2004. After 2004, on average, headquarters were more likely to relocate to low-wage provinces, as predicted by “overall cost leadership.” However, we also find that relocation choices are significantly affected by ownership type. While privately owned and state-owned enterprises are likely to relocate to areas with lower wages, foreign-owned headquarters tend to relocate to high-wage areas, as predicted by the “efficiency wage theory.” Wages did not affect the relocation choices of Sino-foreign-owned companies, but had a negative effect on those of domestically joint-owned headquarters.