Valuing Pollination as an Ecosystem Services: The Case of Hand Pollination for Cocoa Production in Ghana

Submitted by Vicentia Quartey on

The promotion of cocoa farm productivity has necessitated the intensification of input use with ensuing loss of natural pollinators. Ghana Cocoa Board’s (COCOBOD) remedy to declining pollinator population is addressed in the rolling out of hand pollination in the 2016/17 crop year. Applying contingent valuation on field data covering 608 farmers in five cocoa growing regions, we estimate the value of pollinator services to the cocoa industry in Ghana and farmers willingness to pay for the service.

Agriculture

Do regional trade agreements affect agri‐food trade? Evidence from a meta‐analysis

Submitted by Vicentia Quartey on
EfD Authors:

AbstractRegional trade agreements (RTAs) have experienced significant growth worldwide, leading to an increase in studies assessing their impact on bilateral trade flows. With the availability of disaggregated trade data, numerous studies have examined the influence of these agreements specifically on agri‐food trade. However, the results of these studies exhibit heterogeneity, posing challenges for policymakers seeking to understand the effects of RTAs on agri‐food trade.

Agriculture

The effect of foreign capital inflows on economic growth in Nigeria

Submitted by Agha Inya on

Foreign capital inflows are major forms of resource transfer from the developed to the developing countries where they are usually found to be more productive and the result can be positive or negative. Hence, the work set out to empirically investigate the effect of foreign capital inflows and some selected macroeconomic variables on economic growth in Nigeria. The study applied the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model on time series data for the period, 1981-2020.

The ties that bind us: Social networks and productivity in the factory

Submitted by Ishita Datta on
EfD Authors:

This study analyzes high frequency productivity data from Indian garment manufacturing, exploring how caste-based social networks affect individual and group productivity. With nearly 35,000 worker-days, a 1 percentage point increase in the same-caste workers boosts daily individual productivity by at least 0.09 points. Notably, the least efficient worker's productivity rises by almost 0.17 points with a 1 point increase in caste homogeneity. These findings, robust to unobservable factors, suggest production externalities driven by within-network peer effects as potential explanations.

Experiments