Person:
Gautam, Madhur
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Agriculture,
Rural development
Degrees
Departments
Global Practice on Agriculture
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Madhur Gautam is a Lead Economist with the Agriculture Global Practice at the World Bank. He has a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Maryland. His experience at the World Bank over the past 25 years spans Development Economics (Research), the Agricultural Policies Unit, the Independent Evaluation Group, and Operations. He has focused mainly on agricultural and food policy analysis and strategy, and has wide experience in economic and policy analysis and dialogue in Africa and South Asia.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 13
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Publication
Debt Relief for the Poorest : An OED Review of the HIPC Initiative
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003-04)The review by the Operations Evaluation Department finds the Heavily Indebted poor Countries (HIPC) initiative highly relevant in addressing a key obstacle facing many poor countries. If the anticipated debt relief is delivered in full, the initiative will succeed in substantially achieving its fundamental goal of reducing the excessive debt burden of the qualifying countries. But the legitimizing process that helped make the initiative a reality has also expanded its objectives. The initiative seeks to provide a "permanent" exit from debt rescheduling, promote growth, and release resources for social expenditures targeted at poverty reduction. Achieving these objectives will require actions by donors and the HIPC governments that are beyond the scope and means of the initiative. Unmanageable debt is a problem that needs to be effectively dealt with, but it is also a result of economic and political factors constraining growth and poverty reduction. The HIPC Initiative is thus an important but small part of the overall development assistance framework. Having provided the HIPCs with an opportunity for a "fresh start," the international community still faces a challenge in helping these countries set out on a sustainable path for growth and poverty reduction. -
Publication
Agriculture and Water Policy : Toward Sustainable Inclusive Growth
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-03)This paper reviews Pakistan's agriculture performance and analyzes its agriculture and water policies. It discusses the nature of rural poverty and emphasizes the reasons why agricultural growth is a critical component to any pro-poor growth strategy for Pakistan. It supports these arguments by summarizing key results from recent empirical analysis where the relative benefits of agricultural versus non-agricultural led growth are examined. The results also provide an illustration of farm and non-farm linkages. It summarizes recent performance of the agriculture sector, and discusses key characteristics of its sluggish productivity growth. Three key issues related to increasing productivity are discussed: namely technology, water use and water management, and policy reforms related to markets and trade that can strengthen the enabling environment and contribute to the promotion of diversification towards high value agriculture. -
Publication
Property Rights in a Very Poor Country : Tenure Insecurity and Investment in Ethiopia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-09)This paper provides evidence from one of the poorest countries of the world that the property rights matter for efficiency, investment, and growth. With all land state-owned, the threat of land redistribution never appears far off the agenda. Land rental and leasing have been made legal, but transfer rights remain restricted and the perception of continuing tenure insecurity remains quite strong. Using a unique panel data set, this study investigates whether transfer rights and tenure insecurity affect household investment decisions, focusing on trees and shrubs. The panel data estimates suggest that limited perceived transfer rights, and the threat of expropriation, negatively affect long-term investment in Ethiopian agriculture, contributing to the low returns from land and perpetuating low growth and poverty. -
Publication
Indonesia : The Challenges of World Bank Involvement in Forests
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2000-01)This case study is one of six evaluations of the implementation of the World Bank's 1991 Forest Strategy. This and the other cases (Brazil, Cameroon, China, Costa Rica, and India) complement a review of the entire set of lending and nonlending activities of the World Bank Group and the Global Environment Facility. A review of World Bank assistance to Indonesia in the forest sector since 1991 faces two challenges. The first is maintaining a distinction between an assessment based on quick solutions to outstanding problems and one based on long-term underlying objectives and historical facts, and how they shaped government and Bank actions toward Indonesia's forests until 1997. The second challenge is to assess the performance of the Bank's 1991 Forest Strategy in a situation where, despite largely adopting the principles that its strategy espouses, the Bank has been unable to influence the rate of destruction of natural forests. Following a brief discussion of the background and context to the current forest sector situation in Indonesia, this review is divided into two parts. The first part presents the state of the forests and the forest sector and identifies the pressures on forests and the key issues. The second part assesses the Bank's involvement in the sector and concludes with the main findings of the review. -
Publication
Dynamics of Rural Growth in Bangladesh: Sustaining Poverty Reduction
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-06-15)The rural economy in Bangladesh has powerfully advanced economic growth and substantially reduced poverty, especially since 2000, but the remarkable transformation and unprecedented dynamism in rural Bangladesh remain an underexplored, underappreciated, and largely untold story. Dynamics of Rural Growth in Bangladesh: Sustaining Poverty Reduction tells that story and inquires what specific actions Bangladesh might take—given the residual poverty and persistent malnutrition—to accelerate and channel its rural dynamism to sustain the gains in eliminating poverty, achieving shared prosperity, and advancing national aspirations to achieve middle-income status. The central element of this study, undertaken with the Government of Bangladesh Planning Commission to address key questions elicited through extensive consultation, is an empirical analysis that illuminates the underlying dynamics of rural growth, particularly the role of agriculture and its relationship to the nonfarm economy. Using all sources of data available for the macro-, meso-, and microhousehold levels, the analysis provides new evidence on changes in the rural economy and the principal drivers of rural incomes. It also examines market performance for high-value agricultural products and agriculture–nutrition linkages, based on new surveys and analysis. The resulting evidence, examined in light of the rich knowledge of rural development in Bangladesh, is used to delineate the implications for policy and the strategic priorities for sustaining future rural development, poverty reduction, food security, and nutrition. The effects of policy reforms, changes in technology, and investments in infrastructure and human capital described here, along with the persistent enterprise of rural Bangladeshi households, offer a compelling case study of how mutually reinforcing actions can trigger the highly-sought-after virtuous cycle of rural development. The findings clearly demonstrate the pro-poor nature of agricultural growth and its catalytic role in stimulating the rural nonfarm economy. They show that households have no linear or predictable pathway out of poverty; instead, they wisely employ a combination of farm and nonfarm income strategies to climb out of, and then stay out of, poverty. The results represent a strong contribution to the global thinking on rural transformation and on how agriculture in particular sustains the economic momentum that fosters poverty reduction and more widespread prosperity. -
Publication
Managing Food Price Volatility in a Large Open Country: The Case of Wheat in India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-02)India has pursued an active food security policy for many years, using a combination of trade policy interventions, public distribution of food staples, and assistance to farmers through minimum support prices defended by public stocks. This policy has been quite successful in stabilizing staple food prices, but at a high cost, and with potential risks of unmanageable stock accumulation. Based on a rational expectations storage model representing the Indian wheat market and its relation to the rest of the world, this paper analyzes the cost and welfare implications of this policy and unpacks the contribution of its different elements. To analyze alternative policies, social welfare is assumed to include an objective of price stabilization and optimal policies corresponding to this objective are assessed. Considering fully optimal policies under commitment as well as optimal simple rules, it is shown that adopting simple rules can achieve most of the gains from fully optimal policies, with both potentially allowing for lower stockholding levels and costs. -
Publication
Harvesting Prosperity: Technology and Productivity Growth in Agriculture
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020)This book documents frontier knowledge on the drivers of agriculture productivity to derive pragmatic policy advice for governments and development partners on reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity. The analysis describes global trends and long-term sources of total factor productivity growth, along with broad trends in partial factor productivity for land and labor, revisiting the question of scale economies in farming. Technology is central to growth in agricultural productivity, yet across many parts of the developing world, readily available technology is never taken up. We investigate demand-side constraints of the technology equation to analyze factors that might influence producers, particularly poor producers, to adopt modern technology. Agriculture and food systems are rapidly transforming, characterized by shifting food preferences, the rise and growing sophistication of value chains, the increasing globalization of agriculture, and the expanding role of the public and private sectors in bringing about efficient and more rapid productivity growth. In light of this transformation, the analysis focuses on the supply side of the technology equation, exploring how the enabling environment and regulations related to trade and intellectual property rights stimulate Research and Development to raise productivity. The book also discusses emerging developments in modern value chains that contribute to rising productivity. This book is the fourth volume of the World Bank Productivity Project, which seeks to bring frontier thinking on the measurement and determinants of productivity to global policy makers. -
Publication
Too Small to Be Beautiful?: The Farm Size and Productivity Relationship in Bangladesh
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03)This paper examines the agricultural productivity–farm size relationship in the context of Bangladesh. Features of Bangladesh's agriculture help overcome several limitations in testing the inverse farm size–productivity relationship in other developing country settings. A stochastic production frontier model is applied using data from three rounds of a household panel survey to estimate simultaneously the production frontier and the technical inefficiency functions. The “correlated random effects” approach is used to control for unobserved heterogeneous household effects. Methodologically, the results suggest that the stochastic production frontier models that ignore the inefficiency function are likely mis-specified, and may result in misleading conclusions on the farm size–productivity relationship. Empirically, the findings confirm that the farm size and productivity relationship is negative, but with the inverse relationship diminishing over time. Total factor productivity growth, driven by technical change, is found to have been robust across the sample. Across farm size groups, the relatively larger farmers experienced faster technical change, which helped them to catch up and narrow the productivity gap with the smaller farmers. -
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Property Rights in a Very Poor Country: Tenure Insecurity and Investment in Ethiopia
( 2011)This article provides evidence from one of the poorest countries in the world that the institutions of property rights matter for efficiency, investment, and growth. With all land state-owned, the threat of land redistribution never appears far off the agenda. Land rental and leasing have been made legal, but transfer rights remain restricted and the perception of continuing tenure insecurity remains quite strong. Using a unique panel data set, this study investigates whether transfer rights and implied tenure insecurity affect household investment decisions, focusing on trees and shrubs. The panel data estimates suggest that limited perceived transfer rights negatively affects the long-term investment in Ethiopian agriculture, contributing to the low returns from land and perpetuating low growth and poverty. -
Publication
Agriculture for Inclusive Growth in Uganda
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012)Agriculture is critical for sustainable development and poverty reduction, and agricultural growth can be a powerful means for inclusive growth. Uganda's success in using agriculture for development and inclusive growth will depend on a variety of factors, some of which are within the sector, some are cross-cutting and general to the economy, and some are outside Uganda's sphere of influence, such as the global and regional price development of agricultural commodities. This policy note focuses on those factors that Ugandan policymakers can influence, both within and outside the direct mandate of agricultural policymakers. The key policy question in the Ugandan context is how to shift as many farmers as possible out of subsistence agriculture into commercial agriculture. During the past two decades, a diverse array of initiatives has promoted the commercialization of smallholder agriculture in Uganda. This policy note presents major interventions needed to accelerate agricultural commercialization. This policy note is part of the larger analytical work carried out by the World Bank on inclusive growth in Uganda. It therefore feeds into that larger effort. This note does not deal with migration from rural to urban areas because that topic is covered in other notes.