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This thesis analyzes factors affecting adoption of integrated pest management (IPM) techniques by Kenyan vegetable farmers, including the role of their risk preferences. It also analyzes factors affecting their pesticide applications and expenditures. A survey was administered to 450 Kenyan vegetable growers to identify their pest management practices, and a behavioral experiment was run to elicit their risk preferences utilizing. Cumulative Prospect Theory. Loss aversion was found to be correlated with higher likelihood of IPM adoption while risk aversion was associated with higher pesticide application rates and expenditures. The influence of IPM adoption on pesticide use differed by IPM technique. / Master of Science / Integrated Pest Management (IPM) techniques can improve small holder farmers' livelihoods by lowering production costs and decreasing dependence on chemical pesticides. Even though some IPM techniques have been available to Kenyan vegetable farmers since the 1990's, IPM adoption remains relatively low while chemical pesticide use remains high. A farm-household survey and behavioral experiment were conducted to identify factors that influence farmer decisions to adopt IPM and to apply pesticides. Factors that influence IPM adoption were found to differ from those that influence pesticide decisions. Furthermore, IPM adoption by Kenyan farmers does not decrease use of chemical pesticides for all IPM techniques.

Smallholder livestock keeping and agriculture systems in the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) seem to be caught into poverty traps, in as much as they cannot any longer provide ecosystem services on which local communities depend for their survival. I used a regime shifts framework to carry out a thorough assessment of these two case studies in arid and semi-arid lands and smallholder by identifying relevant traps and alternate desirable regimes. Using systems analysis and modelling, I drew casual loop diagrams of the two case studies, which helped me to identify the feedback loops that maintain the systems in undesirable traps and the external driving forces of change. A set of interventions points or leverage points were identified to change the dynamics of the systems and shift them towards more desirable regimes. Essentially, a structural change of both systems is called for if sustainable livelihoods in the rural areas of the SSA are to be seriously envisaged. Human capital investments present the main opportunity for facilitating escape from poverty by transforming farmers to non-farmers and livestock keepers to non-livestock keepers.

The practices related to the growing, harvesting, preparation, and celebration of food over millennia have given rise to diverse biocultural landscapes the world over. These landscapes – rich in biological and cultural diversity – are often characterised by persistent poverty, and, as such, are often the target of development interventions. Yet a lack of understanding of the interdependencies between human well-being, nature, and culture in these landscapes means that such interventions are often unsuccessful - and can even have adverse effects, exacerbating the poverty they were designed to address. This thesis investigates different conceptualisations of persistent poverty in rural biocultural landscapes, the consequences of these conceptualisations, and the ways in which development interventions can benefit from, rather than erode, biocultural diversity. The thesis first reviews conceptualisations of persistent poverty and specifically, the notion of a poverty trap (Paper I), and examines the consequences of different conceptualisations of traps for efforts to alleviate poverty (Paper II). Paper I argues that the trap concept can be usefully broadened beyond a dominant development economics perspective to incorporate critical interdependencies between humans and nature. Paper II uses multi-dimensional dynamical systems models to show how nature and culture can be impacted by different development interventions, and, in turn, how the degradation of both can undermine the effectiveness of conventional poverty alleviation strategies in certain contexts. In the second section, the thesis focuses on the effects of, and responses to, trap-like situations and development interventions in a specific context of high biocultural diversity: the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan. Paper III advances a typology of responses to traps based around the mismatch of desires, abilities and opportunities. Observing daily practice provides a way to study social-ecological relationships as a dynamic process, as practices can embody traditional and tacit knowledge in a holistic way.  Paper IV examines the diverse effects of a development intervention on the coevolution of biocultural landscapes and the ways in which everyday practice – particularly around food – can be a source of both innovation and resilience. Papers I-IV together combine insights from diverse disciplines and methodologies, from systematic review to dynamic systems thinking and participant observation. Paper V provides a critical analysis of the opportunities and challenges involved in pursuing such an approach in sustainability science, underscoring the need to balance methodological groundedness with epistemological agility. Overall, the thesis contributes to understanding resilience and development, highlighting the value of viewing their interrelation as a dynamic, coevolving process. From this perspective, development should not be regarded as a normative endpoint to be achieved, but rather as a coevolving process between constantly changing ecological and social contexts. The thesis proposes that resilience can be interpreted as the active and passive filtering of practices via the constant discarding and retention of old and new, social and ecological, and endogenous and exogenous factors. This interpretation deepens understanding of resilience as the capacity to persist, adapt and transform, and ultimately shape new development pathways. The thesis also illustrates how daily practices, such as the growing, harvesting, and preparation of food, offer a powerful heuristic device for understanding this filtering process, and therefore the on-going impact of development interventions in rural landscapes across the world. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 4: Manuscript.</p>

In South Africa, the majority of youth entering emerging adulthood find themselves in a protracted struggle to access further education, training or to secure their first decent job. The purpose of this multi-case study is to deepen the understanding of how capability measurement approaches and tools can empower marginalized youth to better understand their aspirations and map their way through emerging adulthood and out of poverty. This research aims to deepen the understanding of youth's experience utilizing 'Poverty Stoplight'; a poverty measurement and capability building instrument that utilizes a self-assessment survey and mentorship methodology. The researcher utilized a youth-focused participatory approach in conducting focus groups and in-depth one-on-one interviews across five marginalized communities in the Western Cape to gain insight into their experience using the tool, their ability to envision their future selves and develop their aspirations. What emerged from the data were insights into the youth's aspirations, the perceived enabling factors and impediments towards their aspirations and their experiences utilizing Poverty Stoplight. This process enabled youth to genuinely reflect and assess their situation, and have the opportunity to define their aspirations. Overall the Poverty Stoplight programme was experienced as empowering by participants, with several implications for the programme pertaining to data accessibility, communication, mentorship and solution sharing, as well as the importance of youth-specific participatory approaches. Aligned to this, the findings yielded several recommendations pertaining to providing support and enabling opportunities for emerging adults to realise their aspirations. Despite the limitations of this research, this study is relevant for stakeholders in South Africa and globally as it examines the critical issue of youth development, with a focus on the ability of young people to attain their aspirations. Further, it analyses the capability measurement approach as a means to ensuring young people can better understand and plot their way out of poverty, making the most of their individual capabilities and attributes within the broader structural and systemic challenges they face. This exploration of practical tools and methodologies being developed and utilized by pioneering organisations in the South African context provides empirical evidence of the merit of such approaches, with recommendations on how tools and approaches can even better serve the needs of youth. Further, longitudinal research is merited into the use of such capability measurement approaches to empower youth and the further use of participatory methodologies.

L'Afrique de l'Ouest se caractérise par de forts taux de pauvreté et par une protection sociale et des marchés financiers formels défaillants. Dans un tel contexte, les familles remplissent des rôles importants qui façonnent la vie économique et sociale de leurs membres. Cependant, l'efficacité de cette institution fait débat, notamment lorsqu'elle est analysée du point de vue individuel. Ainsi, un nombre croissant d'études en économie du développement se penchent sur les coûts individuels induits par les fonctions familiales. Ma thèse de doctorat s'appuie sur cette littérature et y contribue en analysant la façon dont les décisions économiques individuelles sont prises au sein de la famille au Sénégal, et illustre des cas où la famille ne parvient pas à assurer le bien-être individuel de ses membres.Le premier chapitre s'attache à mesurer les coûts individuels de la redistribution informelle qui a lieu au sein des réseaux sociaux et entre ces derniers, et en particulier au sein de la famille élargie. En effet, en tant que mécanisme d'assurance, de fortes pressions redistributives modifient les choix économiques individuels. En s'appuyant sur des données expérimentales, nous estimons une taxe sociale d'environ 9% et nos résultats indiquent l'existence de fortes distorsions dans les choix d'allocation individuels. Par ailleurs nos résultats montrent que la pression à la redistribution est du fait, principalement, de famille élargie et non du ménage, des cercles amicaux ou du voisinage. Le deuxième chapitre examine comment l'environnement sanitaire contraint les investissements parentaux en termes de santé des enfants. Son objectif est de déterminer si les risques concurrents en mortalité réduisent les investissements des parents dans la santé de leurs enfants. Pour cela nous faisons, dans cet article, l'hypothèse qu'il existe des complémentarités entre les investissements en santé spécifiques à certaines maladies ; et testons celle-ci en nous appuyant sur une intervention récente visant à éradiquer le paludisme au Sénégal. Nos résultats soutiennent ce modèle de risques concurrents et impliquent que les comportements privés d'investissement en santé des parents et les politiques publiques de santé sont complémentaires. Enfin, le troisième chapitre explore comment une stratégie de gestion des risques ex-post, le mariage d'enfants, est lié aux chocs de mortalité au sein des familles. En particulier, j'examine si les décès paternels ont des conséquences néfastes en termes de transition sur le marché du mariage des jeunes orphelines. Mes résultats mettent en évidence la grande vulnérabilité de ce groupe d'enfants en termes de mariages précoces. / In the West Africa subregion, poverty is pervasive and social protection at the state-level, as well as formal financial markets poorly function. In such a context, families fulfill important roles, which shape the economic and social life of its members and are key drivers of economic development. How this private institution performs is, however, quite a debate and a growing body of the literature in development economics has focused on the question of the economic inefficiencies of the family institution. My PhD thesis builds upon this literature and contributes to it by shedding light on how individual economic decisions are taken within the family in Senegal, and in which cases the family fails to ensure individual welfare of its members.The first chapter focuses on the individual costs of the informal redistribution that take place within and between social networks, and in particular within the extended family. Using a lab-in the field experiment, we aim at identifying the hidden costs of social obligations for redistribution on individual resource allocation choices. Our results are threefold: (i) we estimate a social tax of about 9\%; (ii) we provide evidence on strong distortions in individual allocation choices; (iii) our results point at people fearing redistributive pressure from the extended family members, but not from within the household or from friends and neighbors. We expand on prior literature by both identifying the individual cost of informal redistribution and then relating it to postexperiment resource-allocation decisions, and by disentangling intra- and interhousehold redistributive pressure. The second chapter investigates how the health environment prevents parents from investing in child health. Its main objective is to investigate whether the health risks faced by children, and in particular their competing nature as mortality risks, depress parental investment in child health. We argue that there are complementarities between disease-specific investments and we test this hypothesis by exploiting recent interventions that made anti-malaria products suddenly affordable to most households in 2009 in Senegal. Our first contribution is to be the first to use data on private health expenditures to validate a model with complementarities between disease-specific investments. Our second contribution is to show that parental behavioral responses clearly complement anti-malaria campaigns, whereby they magnify their impact on all-cause mortality for children. Finally, the third chapter explores how a quite harmful ex-post risk management strategy, child marriage, relates to changes in family structures (mortality shocks). In particular, I investigate whether paternal death induces adverse marriage outcomes for young orphans. I also discuss the channel that could induce such effects. My results underpinned the high vulnerability of this group of children: when the father dies, the young girls are more likely to marry as child brides and to be child mothers than their non-orphan counterparts. Those girls have more frequently broken marital trajectories, in particular due to divorce. This paper builds upon the existing demographic literature and provides at least two contributions. First, it is, to my knowledge, the first to study jointly the timing of the father's death and other dimensions of well-being such as fertility, marital dissolution and consumption. Second, it discusses the extent to which selection on unobservables might bias the analysis, an issue that is discarded in most studies.

In their famous paper on the "Big Push", Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny (1989) show how the combination of increasing returns to scale at the firm level and pecuniary externalities can give rise to a poverty trap, thereby formalising an old idea due to Rosenstein-Rodan (1943). We develop in this paper an oligopoly model of the Big Push that is very close in spirit to the Murphy-Shleifer-Vishny (MSV) model, but in contrast to the MSV model it is easily extended to the case of an economy that is open to international trade. Having a workable open-economy framework allows us to address the question whether globalisation makes it easier or harder for a country to escape from a poverty trap. Our model gives a definite answer to this question: Globalisation makes it harder to escape from a poverty trap since the adoption of the modern technology at the firm level is impeded by tougher competition in the open economy.

In their famous paper on the "Big Push", Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny (1989) show how the combination of increasing returns to scale at the firm level and pecuniary externalities can give rise to a poverty trap, thereby formalising an old idea due to Rosenstein-Rodan (1943). We develop in this paper an oligopoly model of the Big Push that is very close in spirit to the Murphy-Shleifer-Vishny (MSV) model, but in contrast to the MSV model it is easily extended to the case of an economy that is open to international trade. Having a workable open-economy framework allows us to address the question whether globalisation makes it easier or harder for a country to escape from a poverty trap. Our model gives a definite answer to this question: Globalisation makes it harder to escape from a poverty trap since the adoption of the modern technology at the firm level is impeded by tougher competition in the open economy.

This thesis is an investigation into the microeconomic mechanisms that govern some of the occupational choices faced by workers in Sub-Saharan Africa, and into the monetary and non-monetary returns to their decisions. Chapter 1 begins by exploring the decision process that leads workers to allocate themselves to different occupations within the economy. In particular, I investigate the role of risk-aversion in the allocation of workers between formal and informal jobs in Ghana, hence attempting to explain a fundamental dimension of duality through an investigation into workers' preferences. In my model of sectoral allocation risk-averse workers can opt between entering the free-entry informal sector and queuing for formal occupations. Conditional on identifying the riskier option, the model yields testable implications on the relationship between risk-aversion and workers' allocation. My testing strategy proceeds in two steps. First, using the first three waves of the Ghana Household Urban Panel Survey (GHUPS) dataset, I estimate expected income uncertainty and find it considerably higher in the informal sector than in formal employment. Second, using experimental data to elicit risk-attitudes I estimate the effect of risk-aversion on occupational choices and I find that, in line with the first result, more risk-averse workers are more likely to queue for formal jobs and less likely to be in the informal sector. The conclusion of the first chapter is that attitudes to risk should feature more prominently in models of sector allocation and in the design of labour market policies, in particular when those policies aim to impact workers' vulnerability to risk and uncertainty. Chapter 2 focuses on the largest occupational category in the Developing world, self-employed workers with small productive activities, and it tries to estimate the returns to different productive assets, namely physical capital, labour and human capital. These are the workers that form most of the informal sector analysed in chapter 1, which allows me to draw a direct link with the analysis so far. The chapter begins by specifying a model for the income-generating process grounded in the literature on firms' production and hence abridging the gap between the analysis of individual earnings and the study of firms' value added. Identification in the empirics is achieved by means of panel estimators that are suitable to address the endogeneity of input choices, which derives from both time-varying and time-invariant unobservable heterogeneity. The use of these estimators is made feasible by the length of the Ghanaian Household Urban Panel Survey dataset at CSAE. I also explore issues of endogeneity in the selection of different technologies, defined by their relative capital and labour intensity. Finally, I analyse the shape of returns to capital, with the aim to detect potential non-convexities in technology. The results show that capital and work-experience play the strongest role in income-generation, while the shares of value added attributed to labour and to formal schooling are low. Marginal returns to investment are high at low capital levels and they decrease very rapidly, pointing against the existence of non-convexities due to minimum scale requirements, but implying that real income gains resulting form micro-investment are modest. Chapter 3 returns to the issue of earnings uncertainty and risk-aversion explored in Chapter 1, but it now takes the allocation choice as given and explores the direct welfare implications of income uncertainty for worker's well-being. Namely, the chapter explores the relationship between income and welfare, with a particular attention on the link between income vulnerability and happiness. Using unique longitudinal data on life-satisfaction and labour market outcomes, I estimate an individual measure of vulnerability (defined as the probability of falling below a low-income threshold) and investigate its effect on well-being. After controlling for unobservable individual fixed effects, work-satisfaction, relative income and other relevant worker characteristics, I find a sizable impact of vulnerability, over and above the income effect. When I explore the mechanisms behind my results, I find that aspiration adaptation to current income may result in a transitory income effect. Moreover, using my direct measure of attitudes to risk from field-experiments (already used in chapter 1), I can test directly the hypothesis that more risk-averse agents suffer more heavily from a given increase in income vulnerability. Overall, my findings support policy interventions that aim to reduce vulnerability, as I expect such policies to have a 'direct' impact on agents' happiness given the prevailing attitudes to risk and uncertainty in the population. Finally, from the point of view of overall social welfare, my results suggest that non-Rawlsian growth models, whereby 'someone may be left behind', may fail to enhance general welfare, for high enough levels of risk-aversion in the population, if the risk of falling behind is sufficiently widespread.

Le Niger est un pays enclavé d’Afrique de l’Ouest. Son positionnement à la périphérie des pôles essentiels de la sous région explique en partie son retard de développement. A cela, s’ajoute, un nouveau retard, qualifié de fracture numérique. Son parc d’infrastructures vétuste ne lui permet pas de profiter des flux mondiaux d’information pour bénéficier des avantages de la compétitivité de la nouvelle société de l’information. Sous l’impulsion de récents débats internationaux sur les nouvelles technologies, il apparaît que le développement économique du Niger nécessiterait une appropriation des TIC par la population. Dès lors, ces nouvelles technologies de l’information sont à l’épicentre des questions de développement qui se posent au Niger. Cette recherche s’est donnée le but d’analyser le système actuel des TIC au Niger et sa capacité à enclencher le développement économique dans un contexte de mondialisation des économies fondé sur l’information et la connaissance grâce à l’usage des TIC. Elle examine en premier lieu, le potentiel des ressources techniques, humaines et des plans et politiques gouvernementaux en matière des TIC, à l’échelle territoriale. A la suite de cette analyse et des questionnements qu’elle pose, des théories économiques ont émergé : l’économie de l’information et ses dérivées. En second lieu, cette étude explore, décrit, explique, interprète et illustre ces théories dans un contexte d’accès aux TIC. Les exemples illustratifs montrent que les TIC corrigent certaines de ces prédictions. Elles améliorent le capital humain, affinent les anticipations des agents et réduisent le risque des décisions économiques. C’est en cela que les TIC peuvent être considérées comme un facteur de développement économique au Niger. Dans cette révolution des NTIC, les économies n’ont nécessairement pas besoin de passer par l’étape de l’industrialisation comme à l’ancienne. L’exemple de la Chine et des dragons asiatiques le témoigne. / Niger is a landlocked country in West Africa. Its position on the outskirts of essential poles in the under-region partly explains its delayed development. To this is added, a further delay, called digital divide. Its fleet of obsolete infrastructure does not allow it to take full advantage of global flows of information to take advantage of the competitiveness of the new information society. Spurred on by recent international discussions on new technologies, it appears that the economic development of Niger would require an appropriation of ICTs by the population. Therefore, these new information technologies are at the epicenter of development issues facing the Niger. This research was given the objective to analyze the current system of ICT in Niger and its ability to set off economic development in a context of globalization of economies based on information, knowledge and expertise, by using ICTs. Following this analysis and the questions it poses, some economic theories have emerged, the information economy and its derivatives. In the second time, this study explores, describes, explains, interprets and illustrates these theories in the context of ICTs access. Illustrative examples show that ICT correct some of these predictions. ICT improves human capital, refine agents' anticipations and reduce the risk of economic decisions. That’s why, ICTs can be considered as an economic development factor in Niger. In this revolution of new technologies, the economies have not necessarily need to go through the stage of industrialization as the old theories. The example of China and the Asian dragons shows that.