Role of government in rural and agri-finance : Transitioning to private sector involvement: Briefing note 17

The long-term growth and development of agricultural markets depends on access to a range and volume of capital which, over time, naturally eclipses governments’ ability to provide that capital directly. As private capital markets and financial service providers become involved in the agricultural finance market, the challenge for governments becomes how to appropriately create, incentivize and regulate space for the private sector. As countries move to higher levels of agricultural productivity, more mature agricultural markets, more sophisticated banking systems, and larger farm sizes, the commercial business case for financial service provision emerges. However, this process can take decades and often remains incomplete with some market segments requiring on-going subsidy to attract financial services. Questions remain: How to accelerate the participation of private sector financial service providers while markets are still developing? How to do so in ways that are aligned with national development goals, including transitioning subsistence farmers to viable livelihoods and ensuring domestic food security?This Briefing Note builds on previous analysis of the natural stages of agricultural finance and interrogates more deeply the transition that coun-tries make from government-led to more bank-led agricultural finance. By adding the historical experiences of Mexico, Turkey, and Uganda (as well as other specific initiatives in other coun-tries around the world) to past research by ISF Advisors into the United States, Germany, and South Korea, we gain a greater understanding into the unique approaches that different coun-tries have taken to make this transition. While these approaches are heavily influenced by each country’s macro-level approach to managing the economy, analysis shows the importance of meso-level enablers and more direct micro-level interventions. As we unpack government actions into these different levels and acknowledge the dynamic interplay between the agricultural and finance sides of the market we create a more systemic view of these historical experiences.<br/

Taxation, Labor Market Policy and High-Impact Entrepreneurship

entrepreneurship, gazelles, high-growth firms, high-impact entrepreneurship, innovation, institutions, labor market policy, tax policy, H32, L5, L25, M13, O31, P14,

De novo assembly of a haplotype-resolved human genome

© 2015 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. The human genome is diploid, and knowledge of the variants on each chromosome is important for the interpretation of genomic information. Here we report the assembly of a haplotype-resolved diploid genome without using a reference genome. Our pipeline relies on fosmid pooling together with whole-genome shotgun strategies, based solely on next-generation sequencing and hierarchical assembly methods. We applied our sequencing method to the genome of an Asian individual and generated a 5.15-Gb assembled genome with a haplotype N50 of 484 kb. Our analysis identified previously undetected indels and 7.49 Mb of novel coding sequences that could not be aligned to the human reference genome, which include at least six predicted genes. This haplotype-resolved genome represents the most complete de novo human genome assembly to date. Application of our approach to identify individual haplotype differences should aid in translating genotypes to phenotypes for the development of personalized medicine.Link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Assembly of a pan-genome from deep sequencing of 910 humans of African descent

We used a deeply sequenced dataset of 910 individuals, all of African descent, to construct a set of DNA sequences that is present in these individuals but missing from the reference human genome. We aligned 1.19 trillion reads from the 910 individuals to the reference genome (GRCh38), collected all reads that failed to align, and assembled these reads into contiguous sequences (contigs). We then compared all contigs to one another to identify a set of unique sequences representing regions of the African pan-genome missing from the reference genome. Our analysis revealed 296,485,284 bp in 125,715 distinct contigs present in the populations of African descent, demonstrating that the African pan-genome contains ~10% more DNA than the current human reference genome. Although the functional significance of nearly all of this sequence is unknown, 387 of the novel contigs fall within 315 distinct protein-coding genes, and the rest appear to be intergenic