Given the importance of maize in the diet of citizens and country's objectives in terms of food security and export, a study on maize production is of great importance. This paper examines the effect of mobile phone ownership on agricultural productivity in Benin: The case of maize farmers. It uses a micro-data from Benin by adopting a two stages regression strategy. As previous studies, the results show significant evidence that mobile phone ownership improves maize farmers' productivity in Benin. Specifically, the findings show that the mobile phones ownership enhances the production of 0.21 and 0.04 respectively in the two models. This implies that through phones, extension agents without moving can inform farmers about farming techniques and national leaders should seek to promote the telecommunications so that a greater number of citizens can benefit from better services that enhance their productivity and that of the country.

This study examines how small maize farmers allocate their production inputs and identifies the elements that characterize efficient farms. A Cobb Douglas stochastic frontier approach is used to estimate farm level technical efficiency of maize farmers. Average technical efficiency of sampled farms was estimated to be 65.40% with a minimum of 20.47% and a maximum of 93.46%. The study further showed that the farmers' sex, the use of improved seeds, the maize selling price, the non-farm income, the contact with an NGO, the access to credit and the production area played a positive and significant role in improving technical efficiency. The results imply that government can save resources used in extension services and focus on its improved seed distribution policy. Also, imperfections in the labor/capital market contribute to the low efficiency of farm households.Keywords: Technical efficiency, maize, Benin, stochastic frontier RésuméCette étude vise à analyser la manière dont les petits producteurs de maïs allouent leurs facteurs de production et à identifier les éléments qui caractérisent les exploitations efficaces. La méthode de frontière stochastique de production Cobb-Douglas est utilisée pour estimer les niveaux d'efficacité technique des producteurs du maïs. Le score moyen d'efficacité technique des producteurs de l'échantillon est estimé à 65,40% avec un minimum de 20,47% et un maximum de 93,46%. Les résultats indiquent que le sexe de l'exploitant, l'utilisation des semences améliorées, le prix de vente du maïs, la part du revenu non agricole, le contact avec une ONG, l'accès au crédit et la zone de production jouent un rôle positif et significatif dans l'atteinte de la frontière de production. Nos résultats nous amènent à suggérer au gouvernement d'économiser les ressources utilisées dans le cadre des services de vulgarisation et se focaliser sur sa politique de distribution des semences

Children are seriously affected by poverty and suffer particular deprivations. In addition, their situation is most of the time ignored in the strategies devoted to tackling poverty. This study examined the multidimensional poverty of children under five in Benin by identifying its determinants. It used the data from the demographic and health surveys in Benin from 2011-2012 and adopted the approach by Alkire & Foster (2011) to generate multidimensional poverty profiles of children. The weightings of the dimensions were generated by multiple correspondence analysis. The GLM and Logit models were used to identify the driving factors of child deprivation. Findings indicate that 54 percent of children were multidimensionally poor when the poverty line k = 1 against 32 percent of poor children when k = 3.  Nutrition and sanitation dimensions had the highest relative contributions of 41.12 and 28.77 percent respectively to the global multidimensional poverty index. JEL Classification:  D63, I32, O10