Market Impacts of Technological Change for Sorghum in Indian Near-Subsistence Agriculture

Evaluating market impacts of technological change for near-subsistence crops like sorghum in semiarid tropical India is complicated because of diversified agriculture, geographically isolated markets, and therefore feedbacks through prices, and producer-demander income links for such products. Dynamic simulations with a multicommodity market model suggest that increased sorghum productivity would have spillover effects on other markets, increase the welfare of sorghum consumers, and probably lower the sorghum price. Contrary to speculations of some experts, the output gain probably would be greater than the pure productivity effect despite the price decline because of induced input allocations favoring sorghum production

SAT crop markets, scenario analysis of impacts of changes in technology, fertilizer prices, highways, labor markets, consumption expenditure, rainfall, price policy

A major purpose of ICRISAT is to develop new technologies and procedures which will increase the productivity of the five mandate SAT crops (sorghum, pearl millet, pigeonpeas, chickpeas and groundnuts) under a variety of environmental conditions..

Scenario Analysis of Impacts of Changes in Technology, Fertilizer Prices, Highways, Labor Markets, Consumption Expenditure, Rainfall and Price Policy for Semi-Arid Tropical Crop Markets

A major purpose of ICRISAT is to develop new technologies and procedures which will increase the productivity of the five mandate SAT crops (sorghum, pearl millet, pigeonpeas, chickpeas and groundnuts) under a variety of environmental conditions. But a productivity change for a particular crop may have important impacts not only on production of that crop, but also on its market price and on the income and therefore the expenditure of its producers..

The history of AIDS exceptionalism

In the history of public health, HIV/AIDS is unique; it has widespread and long-lasting demographic, social, economic and political impacts. The global response has been unprecedented. AIDS exceptionalism - the idea that the disease requires a response above and beyond "normal" health interventions - began as a Western response to the originally terrifying and lethal nature of the virus. More recently, AIDS exceptionalism came to refer to the disease-specific global response and the resources dedicated to addressing the epidemic. There has been a backlash against this exceptionalism, with critics claiming that HIV/AIDS receives a disproportionate amount of international aid and health funding

Measuring and forecasting progress in education: what about early childhood?

A recent Nature article modelled within-country inequalities in primary, secondary, and tertiary education and forecast progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets related to education (SDG 4). However, their paper entirely overlooks inequalities in achieving Target 4.2, which aims to achieve universal access to quality early childhood development, care and preschool education by 2030. This is an important omission because of the substantial brain, cognitive and socioemotional developments that occur in early life and because of increasing evidence of early-life learning's large impacts on subsequent education and lifetime wellbeing. We provide an overview of this evidence and use new analyses to illustrate medium- and long-term implications of early learning, first by presenting associations between pre-primary programme participation and adolescent mathematics and science test scores in 73 countries and secondly, by estimating the costs of inaction (not making pre-primary programmes universal) in terms of forgone lifetime earnings in 134 countries. We find considerable losses, comparable to or greater than current governmental expenditures on all education (as percentages of GDP), particularly in low- and lower-middle-income countries. In addition to improving primary, secondary and tertiary schooling, we conclude that to attain SDG 4 and reduce inequalities in a post-COVID era, it is essential to prioritize quality early childhood care and education, including adopting policies that support families to promote early learning and their children's education

Social Mobility in Latin America: A Review of Existing Evidence

This paper reviews evidence on social mobility in Latin America. Several studies have used data sets that collect intergenerational socio economic information. The data, though limited, suggest that social mobility is low in the region, even when compared with low social mobility developed countries like the United States and United Kingdom, with high levels of immobility at the lower and upper tails of the income distribution. While Latin America has improved education mobility in recent decades, which may have translated into higher mobility for younger cohorts, the region still presents, except for Chile, lower education mobility than in developed countries. The paper also reviews studies on the main determinants of the region's low levels of social mobility, including social exclusion, low access to higher education, and labor market discrimination