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La teoría económica y la evidencia empírica disponible apoyan la tesis de que el direccionamiento del gasto público hacia bienes de naturaleza privada, en detrimento del gasto en bienes públicos, inhibe el desempeño del sector agrícola. Este trabajo presenta un análisis de la influencia de la composición de gastos relacionados con la agricultura en la generación de ingresos netos, mediante el uso de datos de 19 países de América Latina en el período 1985-2012. Los resultados econométricos demuestran que el total de gasto gubernamental en el sector agrícola influye positivamente en el desarrollo de la agricultura. Más importante aún, y de mayor relevancia económica en la práctica, al aumentar la fracción de gasto destinada a bienes públicos, ceteris paribus, se elevaría significativamente el ingreso rural medido como valor agregado del sector per cápita, para la población rural. Economic theory and econometric evidence support the thesis that the displacement of government expenditures on public goods by subsidies to private goods inhibits the performance of the farm sector. This paper presents an analysis of the influence of the mix of expenditures related to agriculture on net income generation, using data for 19 Latin American and Caribbean countries during 1985-2012. The econometric results demonstrate that total government spending on the farm sector positively impacts agriculture's performance. More importantly, and of greater practical economic significance, increasing the share of expenditures committed to public goods, ceteris paribus, would significantly raise rural income as measured by sector value added per capita of the rural population.

This paper presents a database of investment and capital in agriculture, an essential input for cross-country macro analysis of the primary sector of the economy. Our work stems from the innovative research undertaken by Larson et al. (2000). With respect to these authors, we extend country coverage and time span. Further we introduce some refinements to the methodology used to construct the series of fixed capital stock by changing how the agricultural GDP and investment is forecasted. Finally we document in details our data sources and the STATA program used to implement all the methods., FAO Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/3/a-am640e.pdf

Agriculture can be an important engine of growth and poverty reduction. But the sector is underperforming in many countries in part because women, who are often a crucial resource in agriculture and the rural economy, face constraints that reduce their productivity. In this paper we document the gender gap in access to and ownership of most inputs, asset and services important for agricultural activities. We focus in particular on education, land, livestock, financial services, modern inputs, information and extension and labour. Across assets and inputs women are disadvantaged. The gap in education has narrowed over the last decades but substantial gaps remain in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. For land, the key farm household asset, there are significant gender differences in access to land across regions. Moreover female-headed households also typically operate smaller land holdings than male-headed households, across regions. There are also significant and systematic gender differences with regard to livestock, financial services, modern inputs, information and extension and labour. Gender differences in assets are generally interlinked, for example when female farmers have lower levels of technology this is due to their having less access to land, less access to labour and less access to extension services, not their sex. This also helps explain why women farmers do not necessarily benefit from access to extension services, as some studies have found. The implication of this is that selective interventions are unlikely to be effective., FAO Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/3/a-am317e.pdf

Agriculture can be an important engine of growth and poverty reduction. But the sector is underperforming in many countries in part because women, who are often a crucial resource in agriculture and the rural economy, face constraints that reduce their productivity. In this paper we draw on the available empirical evidence to study in which areas and to what degree women participate in agriculture. Aggregate data shows that women comprise about 43 percent of the agricultural labour force globally and in developing countries. But this figure masks considerable variation across regions and within countries according to age and social class. Time use surveys, which are more comprehensive but typically not nationally representative, add further insight into the substantial heterogeneity among countries and within countries in women's contribution to agriculture. They show that female time-use in agriculture varies also by crop, production cycle, age and ethnic group. A few time-use surveys have data by activity and these show that in general weeding and harvesting were predominantly female activities. Overall the labour burden of rural women exceeds that of men, and includes a higher proportion of unpaid household responsibilities related to preparing food and collecting fuel and water. The contribution of women to agricultural and food production is significant but it is impossible to verify empirically the share produced by women. Women's participation in rural labour markets varies considerably across regions, but invariably women are over represented in unpaid, seasonal and part-time work, and the available evidence suggests that women are often paid less than men, for the same work. Available data on rural and agricultural feminization shows that this is not a general trend but mainly a sub-Saharan Africa phenomena, as well as observed in some sectors such as unskilled labour in the fruit, vegetable and cut-flower export sector. This paper re-affirms that women make essential contributions to agriculture and rural enterprises across the developing world. But there is much diversity in women's roles and over-generalization undermines policy relevance and planning. The context is important and policies must be based on sound data and gender analysis., FAO Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/3/a-am307e.pdf

FAO is the main provider of country-level estimates of undernourishment covering the whole world. Its methodology has the main advantage of facilitating comparisons across countries and over time, but also has a limited capacity to understand the causes of food insecurity within countries (FAO, 2003; Barret, 2010). The upward trends in global food prices, concerning many staple commodities between 2005 and 2008, stimulated us to extend the principles of the FAO methodology in order to assess the impact of rising food prices on household-level food security. The objective of this methodological note is to provide a detailed description of the methodology applied in Anriquez et al. (2010), providing guidelines for measuring undernourishment, and more specifically dietary energy deficiency at the household level; and suggestions for the implementation of micro-simulations of food price variations. Additionally this note provides guidelines to construct household specific dietary energy requirements, instead of using a single threshold (generally, 2100 kilocalories per person per day) for all households., FAO Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/3/a-al299e.pdf

Households' welfare in developing countries has been hit by dramatic food prices increases which occurred between 2005 and 2008. In this paper, we adopt a partial equilibrium approach to analyze the short-time effects of a staple food price increase on nutritional attainments, as a measure of welfare. The analysis consists of first approximating complete food-demand systems and then performing household level micro-simulations. Instead of focusing on a single country profile, we provide a more complete snapshot, by comparing the evidence through a cross-country assessment made possible by use of nationally representative household surveys. Comparability is assured by the adoption of the same methodological choices in the treatment of the micro data. We find that food price increase not only reduces the mean consumption of dietary energy, but also worsen the distribution of food calories further deteriorating the nutritional status of populations. We also discovered that access to agricultural land, plays a big role in assuring adequate nutritional attainments in rural areas, and surprisingly, even in urban areas., FAO Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/3/a-al054e.pdf

This paper has two main objectives. Firstly, it provides an overview of trends in the magnitude, location and nature of rural poverty, with emphasis on least developed countries. Secondly, it offers new evidence that advances our understanding of rural poverty, by presenting quantitative analyses of the determinants both of rural activities and of income from farm- and non-farm sources drawing on data from FAO's Rural Income Generating Activities (RIGA) data base of 15 countries, complemented by demographic, health, production and income data from other sources. In order to reduce rural poverty, policies should concentrate both on improving household activities already available ' most prominently farming ' and on expanding the range of potential activities of family members. The lesson from experience and much of the rural development literature is that the income generating potential ' the ability to access and take advantage of activities ' depends crucially on access to assets, such as education, land, and infrastructure., FAO Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/3/a-ak423e.pdf

In the light of an expanding rural non-farm (RNF) sector in developing rural economies, this paper explores the effects of this expansion within the household. Using rural Ghana as a case study this paper explores if the RNF economy allows for economies of diversification within farms; how input demands, agricultural-specific and shared, are transformed by the expansion of this sector; and if this expansion has measurable effects in overall household production efficiency. We first explore the characteristic of the intra-household linkages (technological and welfare driven) between the agricultural and RNF sectors both assuming perfectly working input and output markets, and assuming market failures, in particular missing labor and credit markets. We then try to measure the identified linkages by estimating a household level input distance function. This function is estimated consistently without making log-transformations as has been previously done in the literature. Our empirical analysis suggests that there are high levels of inefficiency in Ghanaian farms. Also, there are cost-complementarities between the RNF sector and the agricultural sector, particularly with food crops in which the poorest tend to specialize. The expansion of the RNF sector increases demand for most inputs including agricultural land. Finally, we show that smaller farms tend to be more efficient, and that RNF output is helping the farm household to become more efficient, but the latter result is not robust., FAO Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/3/a-ai509e.pdf

This paper suggests a methodology for estimating the effects of higher food prices on global undernourishment. The paper also presents the results of its implementation. The merits and drawbacks of this methodology are also discussed. The estimations of the number of new undernourished as a result of the current agricultural commodity price boom should not be taken as official FAO estimates, but rather as an illustration of the proposed methodology, and the promotion of an ongoing discussion., FAO Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/3/a-aj242e.pdf

In this paper we examine the effects of the composition (between private and public goods) of government expenditures in the rural world, and the effect that corruption has in the political game that determines these allocation decisions. In the first section of this paper we develop a political economy model where corruption and trade openness counteract to determine, within a political equilibrium, the amount of public funds to be devoted to the rural world, and their composition between public and private goods. In the second section we contrast the implications of the political economy model with recently released data on rural public expenditures in Latin America. We find that corruption reduces the amount of public funds that reach the rural world, but not its composition. We also find that after accounting for the endogeneity of public expenditure decisions, the composition of these expenditures significantly determines rural development (as proxied by agricultural GDP)., FAO Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/3/a-ah857e.pdf

This paper provides a long-term and global view at current farming trends by analyzing a specially created database of farming characteristics of 17 countries across 43 different agricultural censuses representing the different developing regions of the world. The study shows that while agricultural land appears to be a constraint in central and East Asia, it has been under expansion in Latin America, Northern Africa, and most of sub-Saharan Africa. We also estimate that 9 out of 10 farms are 'small' (i.e. smaller than 2 ha). These farms are more specialized in staple crops than their larger counterparts, and exhibit slower productivity growth., FAO Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/3/a-ah856e.pdf

This paper examines the relationship between rurality and poverty, and the role the agricultural sector can play in rural development, poverty reduction, and overall development. The historical views regarding the role of the primary sector in development are presented, and then using original data, the paper argues that there was an historical misjudgment against the primary sector that served as a foundation for anti-agricultural bias in public policy until the late 80's. Finally, this paper explains how under certain conditions territorial/regional development strategies may prosper, but in other conditions, particularly in the least-developed countries rural space, agriculture is still necessarily the starting point for rural development., FAO Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/3/a-ah885e.pdf

This paper studies rural demographic trends at the global level with an analysis of a specially prepared database of population age/gender/rurality tables from population censuses. The focus is to identify the main demographic differences in the evolution of rural and urban populations. Among the main findings of this study, we report that with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa there is no rural feminization. Also, rural ageing is not observed at aggregate levels in rural regions of the developing world. Perhaps the main adverse demographic trend of rural populations is the high dependency ratios brought about by higher fertility rates. This paper also carries out a census-based cross-country net-migration study identifying the main characteristics of rural out-migration in Latin America, and searches for common threads in East Africa. This analysis shows important improvements of welfare indicators and asset accumulation in rural Latin America (promoting an upward convergence of poorer and richer areas of countries), partially explained by migration. We did not find common characteristics in rural out-migration in East Africa, but report that education is the key asset that enables out-migration from poorer rural communities in East Africa., FAO Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/3/a-ah855e.pdf