New land reforms are again high on the policy agenda and low-cost, propoor reforms are being tested in poor countries.

Risk implications of farm technology adoption vary by technology type. If properly implemented, the safety net program and the weather insurance programs currently piloted in some parts of Ethiopia are actions that could hedge against downside risk.

In most low-income countries, rural households depend on mixed rain-fed agriculture/livestock production, which is very risky. Due to numerous market failures, there are few ways to shift risks to third parties.

Using a choice experiment approach, the authors investigated what governs Ethiopian farmers’ in-situ conservation decisions and crop-variety preferences.

In developing countries, production and consumption risks play a critical role in the choice and use of production inputs and adoption of new farm technologies. The authors investigated impacts of chemical fertilizer and soil and water conservation technologies adoption on production risks, using a moment-based approach and two years of cross-sectional data.

Using a difference-in-difference approach, this paper assesses the effects on investment of a low-cost land registration program in Ethiopia, which covered some 20 million plots over five years. Despite policy constraints, the program increased land-related investment and yielded benefits significantly above the cost of implementation.

We evaluated the impacts of the Ethiopian Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) on rural households’ holdings of livestock and forest assets including trees, applying both regression analysis and propensity score matching to panel data.

In this paper, we study the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) in Ethiopia in order to see how it has affected households’ investment and disinvestment in productive assets. The PSNP is the largest currently operating social protection program in sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa, and its impacts and effectiveness are therefore important both in their own right and because they have implications for similar but smaller programs elsewhere.

Poor farmers need sustainable agriculture that relies on renewable local resources, such as conservation tillage and compost. This study looked at factors influencing decisions to adopt these two practices, using multinomial logit analysis of plot and household characteristics.

This paper analyzes the correlates of aggregated and disaggregated indices of common property forest management (CPFM) and the relationship between CPFM and the decision to grow trees and the number of trees grown in the Amhara region of Ethiopia.