Investing in Risky Inputs in Senegal: Implications for Farm Profit and Food Production

While the productivity effects of the application of modern inputs, such as im- proved seeds or inorganic fertilizer, are well known, farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa tended to underinvest in purchased inputs. This underinvestment appears related to the unpredictable nature of agricultural production that is subject to risks and shocks. Farmers make production decisions before climatic and other shocks are realized. They, therefore, have no certainty about the outcome of their decisions. This makes investments in agricultural inputs very risky. This paper uses recent data for Senegal to identify the main drivers of the decision to purchase risky inputs (seeds and/or fertilizers), the level of investment and to quantify the impact of the use of risky inputs on household welfare. Using a Heck- man model, results show that the main drivers of the decision to purchase risky inputs include household composition, farmer organization, farm size, access to livestock income, and crop diversification. Drivers of the level of investment in risky inputs are gender, extension services, farm size, agricultural capital, and cropping patterns. Using an endogenous switching regression, we find a positive impact on the adoption of risky inputs on farm profit per hectare, and food available from production. The expected impact for non-adopters is found to be higher than that for adopters because they are involved in rice production (which is more responsive to inputs use) and in millet production (which is central for food security)

Evaluation of relative merits/demerits of different signaling schemes used at a railway station for an approaching train in Indian Railways today

Indian Railways, one of the largest railway networks in the world today, has a peculiarity that a station exists almost every 5-7 km. Most trains do not stop at all stations and run through more stations than they stop at. The speed at which the trains run through the stations, therefore, is a crucial parameter that determines the run time of a train through a section and, hence, the total throughput (or carrying capacity of the railways). Indian Railways uses several signaling schemes to enable movement of trains in a safe manner. The signaling schemes play an important role in determining the action of the driver in terms of slowing down of trains and, consequently, on the throughput of the railway system. This paper examines the different signaling schemes used currently and in the recent past by Indian Railways from the point of view of information that they present to the train driver and the impact that it has on total throughput. The signaling schemes are compared using total signal entropy presented to the driver at each stage. Apart from theoretical computation of signal entropy, results of some experiments conducted to obtain the impact of signaling schemes on run time of trains are also presented

Groundnuts Export Tax in Senegal: Winners and Losers

Groundnut is the most common cash crop and the main source of income for farmers in Senegal. Groundnut exports, so far marginal, have increased significantly in recent years. This new dynamic motivated Senegalese Government to introduce an exit tax on groundnut exports in the 2017 Finance Act. Empirical analyses produced so far paid little attention to countries like Senegal which have a weak market power on the global groundnut market. This study uses the multi-sectoral general equilibrium model to contribute to apprehend ex-ante global and distributive effects of the tax on groundnut exports in Senegal. Findings indicate that economic activity will slow down and the well-being of the population will deteriorate with the enforcement of the groundnut export tax. Producers and processors suffer the most adverse effects of the export tax. Economic activities and rural area populations also pay the high price. These negative effects are cancelled when tax revenue is used primarily to compensate the losers. However, economic activities that are subject to increased competition from abroad benefit from the export tax by improving their price competitiveness. Acknowledgement

The impact of COVID-19 on staple food prices: Location matters

This chapter summarizes the findings from analyses conducted by AKADEMIYA2063 on local staple food market dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa. With the outbreak of the highly contagious virus in Africa in March 2020, various measures were implemented by African governments to contain its spread. These measures included bans on public gatherings and markets; restrictions on movement within and between countries; closures of schools, restaurants, and hotels; and curfews. All these measures were likely to cause market disruptions and revenue losses for vulnerable groups by disrupting supply and demand of agricultural staples, either directly or indirectly. The objective of these analytical studies is therefore to generate evidence on how the various COVID-19 response measures have affected food supply and demand patterns in Africa, taking into account the locational characteristics (that is, whether an area is urban or rural, has a surplus or deficit of the commodity in question, and is in a coastal or landlocked country) and whether the commodity is perishable or nonperishable. Such evidence can then be used to inform efforts to anticipate and respond to food crises arising from infectious disease outbreaks and the measures implemented to limit their spread

Toward a Definition of and Linguistic Support for Partial Quiescence

Abstract. The global quiescence of a distributed computation (or distributed termination detection) is an important problem. Some concurrent programming languages and systems provide global quiescence detection as a built-in feature so that programmers do not need to write special synchronization code to detect quiescence. This paper introduces partial quiescence (PQ), which generalizes quiescence detection to a specified part of a distributed computation. Partial quiescence is useful, for example, when two independent concurrent computations that both rely on global quiescence need to be combined into a single program. The paper describes how we have designed and implemented a PQ mechanism within an experimental version of the JR concurrent programming language. Our early results are promising qualitatively and quantitatively