Farm Diversification as an Adaptation Strategy to Climatic Shocks and Implications for Food Security in Northern Namibia DP 20-01

Submitted by Eugenia Leon on

Limited non-farm opportunities in the rural areas of the developing world, coupled with population growth, means agriculture will continue to play a dominant role as a source of livelihood in these areas. Thus, while rural transformation has dominated recent literature as a way of improving welfare through diversifying into non-farm sectors, improving productivity and resilience to shocks in smallholder agricultural production cannot be  ownplayed.

Climate Change, Health

Weather Uncertainty and Demand for Information in Agricultural Technology Adoption: The Case of Namibia

Submitted by Eugenia Leon on

Climate change has compounded the uncertainties inherent in agriculture. Farmers have to make decisions faced with increasingly fluctuating weather, leaving them vulnerable. Access to climate-related information in developing countries, incidentally also the hardest hit by the adverse effects of climate change, is very limited. Given a choice set of technologies that yield different payoffs depending on seasonal weather outcomes, ambiguity arising from imprecise weather information may lead to sub-optimal choices.

Agriculture

Competition and Gender in the Lab vs. Field: Experiments with Off-Grid Renewable Energy Entrepreneurs in Rural Rwanda

Submitted by Eugenia Leon on

Applications of lab experiments to real-world phenomena are limited. We fill the gap by examining how gender attitudes and performance under competitive situations in the lab reflect microenterprise outcomes in the renewable energy sector of Rwanda – a country with progressive gender policies despite its traditional patriarchal setup. We use the standard Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) experimental design in addition to a unique dataset from off-grid microenterprises, managed by entrepreneurs who have been working in mixed and single-sex teams since 2016.

Energy, Gender, Policy Design

The Link Between Response Time and Choices in Choice Experiments

Submitted by Eugenia Leon on
EfD Authors:

Response time is a possible indicator of the cognitive processes employed by choice experiment participants when making choices. The decision-making literature suggests a positive correlation between slower response time and rational thinking, which is consistent with standard theories of decision-making. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between response time and respondents’ choices. We disentangle preference and willingness-to-pay estimates and explore whether response time sheds light on these aspects.

Experiments

Charging for Plastic Bags as an Effective Nudging Policy

Submitted by Eugenia Leon on
EfD Authors:

Policymakers have little experience regarding designing the right levels of pricing for plastic bags. Prices for bags are generally set low and are largely a symbolic reminder to consumers of the environmental concerns attributed to plastic bag use. The ineffectiveness of charging for bags in the long term, in countries such as South Africa, makes it imperative that we map the demand curve. Getting the price “right” depends on the size of the externality. Charging for plastic bags is therefore an effective nudging policy.

Experiments, Policy Design

South Africa

The Environmental Policy Research Unit (EPRU) works to enhance policy-making in the field of environmental and natural resource economics and support sustainable development and poverty reduction in South Africa and Southern Africa.

Based at the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and a regional center for EfD, EPRU is a leading institution in the field of resource economics in the Global South.