ILO pub-wep pub. Working paper on the impact of rural development and agricultural policies on rural area poverty, income distribution and land reform in Kenya - covers regional disparity in income, effect of extension services, industrialization policy, rural planning, etc. Bibliography pp. 60 to 66 and statistical tables.
Professor Ian Livingstone is one of a small group of British development economists who have achieved international renown and recognition. The objective of this book is to pay tribute to his life's work, particularly those aspects which related to key but challenging development issues. These issues include, at a broad level, the understanding of the economic forces determining the development of low income economies, more detailed micro work on agricultural development (irrigation in particular), decentralisation and local government finance, small scale enterprises, and large scale manufacturing development. Themes running through his work relate to his over-riding concern for rigour and for socio-economic justice. Ian Livingstone consistently used the traditional tools of economic analysis as a means to increase understanding of development issues - in a way which was, itself, just as radical as the contributions of political scientists and sociologists. This volume has been produced with similar aims.
First published in 1987. This book is based on an analysis of relevant literature and on the results of field studies carried out over a number of years in Sub-Saharan Africa. These studies were part of a research programme on agricultural commercialization and rural development in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, undertaken by the Department of Geography of Developing Countries, University of Utrecht.
Originally published in 1991, this book includes a detailed case study of Kenya’s co-operative movement – one of the largest in sub-Saharan Africa. Co-operatives have been given a major role in rural development strategies in both socialist and capitalist states. However in both context the results they have achieved have fallen short of expectations. The book focuses on specific elements of the institutional setting within which agricultural marketing co-operatives operate. Factors like land tenure, market regulations, co-operative legislation and direct development support are discussed and shown to have had dire effects on the managerial behaviour and social impact of the co-operative sector.
E. Wayne Nafziger analyzes the economic development of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and East-Central Europe. The book is suitable for those with a background in economics principles. Nafziger explains the reasons for the recent fast growth of India, Poland, Brazil, China, and other Pacific Rim countries, and the slow, yet essential, growth for a turnaround of sub-Saharan Africa. The fifth edition of the text, written by a scholar of developing countries, is replete with real-world examples and up-to-date information. Nafziger discusses poverty, income inequality, hunger, unemployment, the environment and carbon-dioxide emissions, and the widening gap between rich (including middle-income) and poor countries. Other new components include the rise and fall of models based on Russia, Japan, China/Taiwan/Korea, and North America; randomized experiments to assess aid; an exploration of whether information technology and mobile phones can provide poor countries with a shortcut to prosperity; and a discussion of how worldwide financial crises, debt, and trade and capital markets affect developing countries.
Part of a major report on world hunger instigated by the World Institute for Development Economics Research, this volume deals with possible solutions to the problem of regular outbreaks of famine in various parts of the world.
This book analyses the ethnic conflict that engulfed Kenya’s Rift Valley Province at the turn of the nineties when multi-party democratic politics were being reintroduced in the country. Its central thesis is that ethnic conflict in the country then was a function of several issues, among them ethnocentrism, politics, the land question and criminal behaviour in certain circles. Both its determinants and consequences are demographic, economic, political and socio-cultural, implying the risks involved in oversimplifying issues.
This book is an outcome of research on African development from the standpoint of economic geography which I have been undertaking over the last four years. The initial impetus for the research was a social science grant from the Rockefeller Foundation which enabled me to write most of the preliminary draft of the book during a sabbatical in1984/85 which I spent at the University of Zimbabwe as Visiting Professor of Geography. A good deal of the latter part of the book was written in September of 1985 at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and ConferenceCenter in Bellagio, Italy, where I spent three weeks as a member of theReflections on Development Fellows of the Foundation from Africa and Asia.
“No condition is permanent,” a popular West African slogan, expresses Sara S. Berry’s theme: the obstacles to African agrarian development never stay the same. Her book explores the complex way African economy and society are tied to issues of land and labor, offering a comparative study of agrarian change in four rural economies in sub-Saharan Africa, including two that experienced long periods of expanding peasant production for export (southern Ghana and southwestern Nigeria), a settler economy (central Kenya), and a rural labor reserve (northeastern Zambia). The resources available to African farmers have changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. Berry asserts that the ways resources are acquired and used are shaped not only by the incorporation of a rural area into colonial (later national) and global political economies, but also by conflicts over culture, power, and property within and beyond rural communities. By tracing the various debates over rights to resources and their effects on agricultural production and farmers’ uses of income, Berry presents agrarian change as a series of on-going processes rather than a set of discrete “successes” and “failures.” No Condition Is Permanent enriches the discussion of agrarian development by showing how multidisciplinary studies of local agrarian history can constructively contribute to development policy. The book is a contribution both to African agrarian history and to debates over the role of agriculture in Africa’s recent economic crises.