Aparajita Goyal

This report discusses how African countries can take advantage of digital interoperability, remote sensing, and connectivity to reduce urban informality and improve the functioning of land and mortgage markets.

This book documents frontier knowledge on the drivers of agriculture productivity to derive pragmatic policy advice for governments and development partners on reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity. The analysis describes global trends and long-term sources of total factor productivity growth, along with broad trends in partial factor productivity for land and labor, revisiting the question of scale economies in farming. Technology is central to growth in agricultural productivity, yet across many parts of the developing world, readily available technology is never taken up. We investigate demand-side constraints of the technology equation to analyze factors that might influence producers, particularly poor producers, to adopt modern technology. Agriculture and food systems are rapidly transforming, characterized by shifting food preferences, the rise and growing sophistication of value chains, the increasing globalization of agriculture, and the expanding role of the public and private sectors in bringing about efficient and more rapid productivity growth. In light of this transformation, the analysis focuses on the supply side of the technology equation, exploring how the enabling environment and regulations related to trade and intellectual property rights stimulate Research and Development to raise productivity. The book also discusses emerging developments in modern value chains that contribute to rising productivity. This book is the fourth volume of the World Bank Productivity Project, which seeks to bring frontier thinking on the measurement and determinants of productivity to global policy makers.

By most accounts, poverty reduction in rural Malawi has lacked dynamism in the past decade and the gains from prosperity have not always reached the poorest. This Report explores the obstacles to reducing rural poverty and proposes a set of potential solutions to overcome them.

A crucial element in enhancing agricultural productivity growth in Africa is improving the provision of productive investments through more and better public spending in agriculture. Agricultural public spending in Africa not only lags behind other developing regions by several metrics of volume, it is also vitiated by misinvestment such as input subsidies programs and transfers that tend to benefit the better off, with insignificant gains for the poor. Shortcomings of the budgeting process also reduce spending effectiveness. Addressing the quality of public spending and the efficiency of resource use is perhaps even more important than addressing the level of spending. Investments in rural public goods combined with better policies and institutions have driven agricultural productivity growth around the world. The dividends from investments to strengthen markets, expand irrigation, develop and adopt improved technologies can be enormous. Despite high returns on such investments, Sub-Saharan African countries grossly underinvest in them. Rebalancing the composition of public agricultural spending would reap massive payoffs. To realize these benefits requires better choices about how to allocate public agricultural spending and how to ensure that budget processes support those allocations. And making those choices will require overcoming the inertia in policymaking that favors continuing with today s inefficient spending and that favors short-term visible programs over much higher, if less visible, long-term gains.