The authors looked at risk and ambiguity attitudes among Ethiopian peasants in one of the poorest regions of the world and compared their attitudes to a standard Western university student sample elicited by the same decision task.

Strong risk aversion and ambiguity aversion were found with the Ethiopian peasants, and these attitudes are similar to those of the university students. Testing for the effect of socioeconomic variables on uncertainty attitudes showed that poor health increased both risk and ambiguity aversion.

Using household surveys with highly disaggregated geographic reference, the authors explored how national parks affect local wages in Costa Rica and how effects on local welfare can be positive or negative in different parks or even within different areas of a park.

A new EfD/RFF Book titled "Land Reforms in Asia and Africa - Impacts on Poverty and Natural Resource Management" is planned for 2012. Editors are Professors Stein Holden and Keijiro Otsuka.

The research project on land reforms is ongoing, and a first book workshop was held on Jan 24-25, 2010, at Peking University.

"The contribution of sustainable agriculture and land management to sustainable development" - This brief discusses the potential for sustainable agriculture to contribute towards sustainable development with a particular focus on developing countries. It briefly describes different sustainable agricultural practices and the extent of their adoption, identifies constraints to their further adoption, and presents some actions and policy options that could accelerate the widespread adoption of sustainable agricultural practices.

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.

This paper analyses differences in the choice of health care facility by ill individuals in HIV/AIDS-affected households in the Free State province of South Africa.

Food-for-work (FFW) is the most widely used type of public works program in Ethiopia through which a high share of the food aid is distributed.

This paper assesses the impacts of FFW in Tigray, a chronically food insecure region in Ethiopia, in terms of relieving liquidity constraints and thereby improving input use in agriculture. A Heckman selection model on the adoption and intensity of fertilizer use demonstrated that FFW positively influenced the decision to adopt fertilizer and there was no evidence of disincentive effect.

Fertilizer use (including dung) in Ethiopia is low, particularly in the northern highlands, where dung is a significant source of household fuel.