This article investigates how off-farm income affects crop output market participation decisions and marketed surplus of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia. A double-hurdle model is estimated using three waves of panel data from the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey. Unobserved heterogeneity is controlled for using a correlated random effect procedure and potential endogeneity of explanatory variables using a control function approach. The results show that off-farm income has no significant influence on household crop output market participation. However, conditional on market participation, additional off-farm earnings negatively affect the marketed surplus. This indicates that farmers use off-farm earnings for consumption rather than for investment in agricultural production. Policy measures that promote rural investment may help increase returns to labor for land-poor households participating in off-farm work in the process of agricultural commercialization.JEL classifications: C23, C26, Q12, Q13, Q18

In social-ecological systems, natural resource management can be characterized by trade-offs across sectors and sustainability targets. The water-energy-food (WEF) nexus concept makes explicit various trade-offs in order to maximize synergies of interventions. However, there are few successful examples of its operationalization in research settings. Here, we explore in a learning setting if sustainability impact assessment (SIA) protocols can be a useful process to be used to adopt a systemic, interdisciplinary perspective to operationalize WEF nexus in research for sustainable development. The process and method adopted of SIA protocol, evaluated for five exemplary WEF nexus cases in Central Asia during a week-long international workshop, adequately addressed the complexity of WEF interrelationships and associated sustainability issues, and facilitated a comparative case study analysis across scales. Results within this process highlight that water governance was critical for large-scale transboundary WEF nexus management, while land and soil management were decisive for minimizing trade-offs at local levels. Issues of interdisciplinarity, complexity, uncertainty, and reflection on impacts were adequately addressed, but challenges remain in the consideration of ethics and the design of transparent, multi-actor cooperation. Most importantly, this exercise showed that employment of the process of SIA protocol supported disciplinary experts to work across disciplines and take a systemic approach for analyzing WEF nexus.

Enhancing agricultural productivity through the adoption of improved technologies presents a credible pathway to economic development and poverty reduction especially through increased commercialisation of production. We used a triple hurdle (TH) model to estimate the production and commercialisation of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia. In doing so, we account for the adoption of improved Cicer arietinum (chickpea) varieties on commercialisation using a three-wave panel data set. We estimate a correlated random effect model with a control function and find the adoption of improved chickpea to have a significant positive effect on smallholder commercialisation. Our findings that are robust over different specifications and identification strategies also support the role of transaction cost in driving market participation (MP). Finally, we argue that the TH model is a better fit to the commonly used double hurdle model for MP, when not all households in a population produce a particular crop.

Conventional water use and management models have mostly emulated purposefully designed water use systems where centralized governance and rule-based cooperation of agents are assumed. However, water use systems, whether actively governed or not, involve multiple, independent decision makers with diverse and often conflicting interests. In the absence of adequate water management institutions to effectively coordinate decision processes on water use, water users’ behaviors are rather likely to be non-cooperative, meaning that actions by individual users generate externalities and lead to sub-optimal water use efficiency. The objective of this review is to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of recently proposed modeling systems dealing with non-cooperative water use regarding their ability to realistically represent the features of complex hydrological and socioeconomic processes and their tractability in terms of modeling tools and computational efficiency. For that purpose, we conducted a systematic review of 47 studies that address non-cooperative water use in decentralized modeling approaches. Even though such a decentralized approach should aim to model decisions by individual water users in non-cooperative water use, we find that most studies assumed the presence of a coordinating agency or market in their model. It also turns out that most of these models employed a solution procedure that sequentially solved independent economic decisions based on pre-defined conditions and heuristics, while only few modeling approaches offered simultaneous solution algorithms. We argue that this approach cannot adequately capture economic trade-offs in resource allocation, in contrast to models with simultaneous solution procedures.