Technical and economic features of agricultural production; peasant agriculture; agricultural household models; structural change and agriculture transformation; role of agriculture in economic development; land; farm organization and agrarian contracts; credit; risk and insurance; labor and migration; food security, rural-urban migration; human capital; access to market and value chain participation; environment and climate change; investments.
de Janvry, A., and Sadoulet, E., 2016. Development Economics. Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.
Norton, G.W., Alwang, J., and Masters, W.M., 2014. Economics of Agricultural Development: World Food Systems and Resource Use. London: Routledge.
Learning Objectives
Knowledge and comprehension of the determinants of agricultural and rural development in LDCs.
Ability to apply knowledge and comprehension.
Prerequisites
Teaching Methods
The course consists of two types of activities:
a) lectures: 22 lectures of two hours each (total 44 hours), and
b) homeworks, due every other week, to be done at home either individually or in groups of no more than 4 students, on selected lecture topics.
Further information
The lecture handouts and all relevant materials can be downloaded from the course website on the Moodle e-learning platform.
The course website on the Moodle platform provides also a direct link to Webex platform for lecture videostreaming or downloading recorded lectures.
In order to have access to the course website on the Moodle platform, students are required to:
a) first, access the Moodle e-learning platform (http://e-l.unifi.it/login/index.php), and
b) then access the course website on the Moodle platform.
The access to Moodle does not require any password for UNIFI students.
Incoming students who do not have yet an UNIFI account can request the password to access the course website, writing an email to the lecturer (donato.romano@unifi.it).
Type of Assessment
Lectures and homeworks are meant as coordinated components of the course and they jointly contribute to the student evaluation mechanism. Furthermore, the student attendance rate and participation in class discussions contribute also to the overall grade.
The evaluation mechanism for students attending the lectures is as follows:
• attendance and participation to classes (10%);
• homeworks (20%);
• final exam (written) (70%).
Non-attending students can take the exam provided that they had delivered all due homeworks at least one week before the exam session. In this case the evaluation mechanism is as follows:
• homeworks (20%);
• final exam (written) (80%).
Course program
L1 – Introduction: what is agriculture about?
• Introduction
• Technical features of agricultural production
• Economic characteristics of agricultural production
L3 – Structural change and agriculture transformation
• Patterns of development
• Economic growth and structural change
• The changing role of agriculture
L4 – The role of agriculture in economic development
• The four contributions of agriculture to economic growth
• Agriculture development and poverty reduction
L6 – Determinants of agricultural growth (II)
• Technical change
• Green vs. gene revolution
L7 – Land and farm organization
• Technical and economic characteristics of land
• Land tenure and farm organization
• Agrarian contracts
L8 – Access to land
• Land size and productivity
• Land and agrarian reform
• Land grabbing
HW2 – Land reform
L9 – Credit to rural households
• Characteristics of credit transactions
• Credit in rural areas
L10 – Access to credit
• Old credit policy
• Institutional innovations in the credit sector
• Microcredit and formal-informal integration
L11 – Risk and insurance
• Risks in rural areas
• Classification of risks
• Responses to risk
L12 – Limits to insurance and safety nets
• The perfect insurance model
• Informal insurance
• Index-based weather insurance
• Safety nets
L13 – Labor
• Casual labor vs. permanent labor
• Nutrition, health and labor
L14 – Migration
• Dualistic models and rural-urban migration
• The new economics of labor migration
• Impacts of migration
HW3 – Rural-urban migration
L15 – Human capital
• Nutrition
• Education
• Health
L16 – Food and nutrition security
• Multidimensionality of FNS
• FNS analysis
• FNS policies
HW4 – Human capital
L17 – International trade
• Gains from trade
• Agricultural protectionism
L18 – Value chains
• Value chains
• Small-holders participation in global value chains
L19 – Environment and agriculture
• Sustainability and SDGs
• Economy-environment interactions
• Market failures: externalities, public goods, property rights
• Poverty-environment dilemma
L20 – Climate change and agriculture
• What is climate change
• The two-way relationship between climate change and agriculture
• Mitigation measures
• Adaptation measures
L21 – Project cycle
• Result-based management of projects
• Logical framework
• Problem tree and objective tree
L22 – Financial and economic analysis of development projects
• Cash-flow and discounting
• Indicators: NPV, B/C, IRR
• Sensitivity analysis
HW5 – Project evaluation and cost-benefit analysis