Using case materials from four major cereal growing countries in Asia (Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan), the article analyzes key aspects of agricultural input policies in Asia. Results suggest that Asian policies differ from the current wave of African input subsidy programs in three important ways: (i) instead of focusing mostly on seed and chemical fertilizer, input promotion in Asia involved a package approach involving investments in agricultural R&D, irrigation, promotion of domestic fertilizer, and investments in rural roads; (ii) farmers in three of four countries paid higher prices (net taxed) for fertilizer during the height of the green revolution, suggesting that it was the profitability, not the subsidy, that was central to increasing fertilizer use; and (iii) Asian countries did not target input subsidies, but given leakage and diversion estimates of targeted programs, it is unclear whether targeting would have been more cost‐effective. Both continents have two challenges in common: degradation of soil health and increasingly larger shares of public spending on input subsidies. The first challenge calls for paying attentions to improving fertilizer use efficiency, which is an achievable target, with high pay off in the long run. The other challenge is now a historical fact—that is, once introduced, subsidies are hard to eliminate, even if they no longer contribute to agricultural productivity growth.

The rapid growth in aquaculture production, globally and in Bangladesh is well documented. Over 2000-2010, per capita production of aquaculture grew 76%, while the consumer price of fish declined 45%. Previous studies have suggested pro-poor effects of aquaculture based on fish production and consumption patterns. This study attempts to quantify the contribution of aquaculture to income growth and poverty reduction in Bangladesh, using household survey data and a microsimulation approach based on an expanded version of Deaton's concept of net benefit ratio. We estimate that aquaculture's contribution to income growth between 2000 and 2010 was 2.1%, including both price and quantity effects. This income growth was translated into poverty reduction of 1.7 percentage points. Although these estimates seem small, they represent almost 10% of the overall poverty reduction in Bangladesh during the first decade of the 21st century. Put differently, of the 18 million Bengalis who escaped poverty during 2000-2010, about 1.8 million of them managed to do so because of the rapid growth in aquaculture, which contributed to rural income while making fish more accessible to consumers. JEL classifications: Q21, Q22, C15, I3

While the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) is widely considered a successful market institution, very little rigorous empirical investigation has been done on it. This paper contributes to filling this knowledge gap. Using a unique set of spatially disaggregated prices for five different coffee varieties, we examine how the ECX has influenced the dynamics of international and domestic prices for coffee, the largest traded commodity in terms of trade value on the exchange floor. We follow a multivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) approach to assess the extent of market interdependence (conditional correlations) and volatility transmission. We also evaluate structural changes in price dynamics over time. Our results suggest that, contrary to popular media stories, the ECX's success in strengthening coffee price relationships has been limited. We discuss the underlying reasons and implications of this finding.

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