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Alfred Maizels' work on commodity trade and prices documented trends in a major area of international economic relations. This title elaborates the ideas in the tradition of Maizels' contributions, and discusses and extends these theories in relation to current problems.

Nutrition outcomes among young children in Nigeria are among the worse globally. Mother's limited knowledge about food choices, feeding, and health care seeking practices contributes significantly to negative nutrition outcomes for children in most developing countries. Much less is known about the relationship between mother's nutrition-related knowledge and child nutritional outcomes in rural Nigeria. This paper investigates therefore: (i) the association of mother's nutrition-related knowledge with nutrition outcomes of young children living in rural Nigeria, where access to education is limited, and (ii) whether mother's education has a complementary effect on such knowledge in producing positive child nutrition outcomes in such settings. Using the Demographic and Health Survey data for Nigeria, we employ both descriptive and regression analyses approaches in analyzing the study's objectives. In particular, we apply ordinary least square (OLS) to investigate the association of mother's nutrition-related knowledge with child HAZ and WHZ while controlling for maternal, child, household and regional characteristics. An index was constructed for mother's nutrition-related knowledge using information on dietary practices, disease treatment and prevention, child immunization, and family planning. We found that mother's knowledge is independently and positively associated with HAZ and WHZ scores in young children. Higher levels of mother's education, typically above primary, have a significant, positive association with child HAZ and WHZ scores. We argue that mother's knowledge of health and nutrition may substitute for education in reducing undernutrition in young children among populations with limited access to formal education. However, the present level of mother's education in rural Nigeria appears insufficient to reinforce knowledge in producing better nutrition outcomes for children. This study suggests promotion of out-of-school (informal) education, such as adult literacy and numeracy classes where women without formal education can gain health and nutrition knowledge, and practices that could enhance child nutrition outcomes in Nigeria.

Children from rural households are often deprived of adequate micronutrient intakes either from food or supplementation. The present study examines: (i) the determinants of households' micronutrient-rich food consumption; and (ii) the combined effect of vitamin A supplementation and micronutrient-rich food consumption on child stunting in households with different food allocation patterns. Cross-sectional study. Households' micronutrient-rich food consumption frequency and vitamin A supplementation were used as a proxy measure for child micronutrient intakes. Intra-household food allocation patterns were assessed from caregivers' perception of the disparity in food distribution within the household. Descriptive statistics and logistic regression were employed in analysing the study's objectives. Rural communities in Kwara State, Nigeria.ParticipantsIncluded 419 children aged 6-59 months and 413 households. Owning small livestock and a refrigerator, knowledge of micronutrient-rich foods and higher parental education had strong associations with households' micronutrient-rich food consumption. Children from households that consumed micronutrient-rich foods and received more diverse diets were less likely to experience stunting. The combined effect of micronutrient-rich food consumption and vitamin A supplementation was stronger on the likelihood of stunting reduction than the separate effect of each. Assets ownership, human capital and knowledge of micronutrient-rich foods improve consumption of micronutrient-rich foods among the study population. Micronutrient supplementation to children with poor access to micronutrient-rich foods may not substantially enhance child growth unless reinforced through consumption of micronutrient-rich foods. Fruit and vegetable gardening, livestock holdings and nutrition education to parents should be integral parts of community nutrition programming.

Issues related to malnutrition, broadly defined, have received a growing attention in recent years, not only in connection with the Sustainable Development Goals but also recently with the unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, there exists a complex interaction between institutions, capital flows, and food and nutrition security that has received less attention in the relevant literature. In this paper we estimate a series of dynamic panel data models to examine the impact of institutional quality and capital flows on food security, nutrition security and undernourishment by using panel data for 25 SSA countries over the period 1996 to 2018. One of the key contributions of the paper is the use of both aggregate and disaggregated capital flows to examine the impact on both food and nutrition security, a dimension that has been surprisingly neglected in most of the relevant literature. We combine this with the interaction of various types of capital flows with an institutional quality index we constructed from various governance indicators to examine the impact of institutions on the overall nexus. Finally, we examine the impact not only on food and nutrition security but also on undernourishment. Our findings clearly demonstrate the importance of a heterogeneity approach and reflect on earlier work regarding the role of institutional quality in the overall nexus between external capital flows and various measures of food and nutrition security which leads, and as expected, to an interesting variation in the results obtained, depending on the type of capital flows and the interaction with the governance indicators.

One of the most serious challenges threatening agricultural sustainability in Nigeria is land degradation. Although this issue has received little attention, soil and water conservation practices have been identified as a possible pathway out of the potential problems posed by land degradation. Therefore, the central research question that this paper tries to address is the following: Do adoption of soil and water conservation (SWC) practices affect crop productivity and household welfare? This paper uses data collected by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) from maize farmers in rural Nigeria. We usedemploy the propensity score matching (PSM), inverse probability weighting adjusted regression model (IPWRA) approach, and the linear regression with endogenous treatment effect (LRETE) model to incorporate the typologies of SWC practices, and tested how the model affects crop productivity and household welfare. Additionally, multinomial logit was used to estimate the factors influencing the decision to adopt single and multiple SWC practices. The estimates show that education, age of the household head, access to credit, experience of drought, soil fertility, and occupational stress contribute to the decision to adopt SWC practices. The casual effect estimates reveal that both single and multiple adoptions of SWC practices had a positive and significant relationship with the crop productivity and welfare of the adopters. The results show that the adoption of combined SWC practices has a higher impact on crop productivity and welfare than single SWC practices. For instance, the adoption of a combination of three SWC practices was found to increase crop productivity and household welfare by 27.55% and 38.23%, respectively versus 13.91% and 15.11% in the case of single SWC practices. The study suggests that profile-raising agenda and efforts that focus on promoting the adoption of combination of SWC practices should be designed and implemented to enhance crop productivity and hence the welfare of the maize farming households in rural Nigeria.

Mother’s Knowledge Index construction using Principal Component Analysis Given a data matrix with variables (importance of colostrum, continued breastfeeding, Diarrhea prevention and treatment using ORS, family plaining and immunization) and 4,941 observations, we can write it as the following: Y 1 = e 11 X 1 + e 21 X 2 + ... + e p 1 X p ; Y 2 = e 12 X 1 + e 22 X 2 + ... + e p 2 X p ; Y p = e 1 p X 1 + e 2 p X 2 + ... + e pp X p where i = 1-n observations, j = 1-p Symmetrically, the objective of the PCA is to scheme the data matrix X from p dimensions (i.e., the five variables for mother’s knowledge) to a smaller dimension k , Mother’s Nutrition-related Knowledge Index, where k << p (1 index <<4 indicators), meanwhile keeping as much information (i.e., variance maximization) as possible in this dimension-reduced data matrix with the size n by k 4. Theoretically, we are able to track as many principal components as the number of variables in the data matrix X. But in practice, we search for a much smaller number of principal components (PCs) that is able to capture as much as information from the original set of X variables. 1 Principal components (eigenvectors) Variable Component 1 2 3 4 5 Kaiser-Meyer- Olkin measure Importance of colostrum 0.523 -0.380 0.318 0.181 0.670 0.549 Continued breastfeeding -0.496 0.447 -0.032 0.541 0.510 0.557 Diarrhea prevention and treatment using ORS 0.387 0.540 -0.478 -0.453 0.353 0.554 Family planning 0.523 0.140 -0.330 0.684 -0.358 0.574 Immunization 0.235 0.587 0.749 -0.042 -0.195 0.564 Overall 0.559 Variables Eigenvalue Proportion Component 1 1.319 0.264 Component 2 1.034 0.208 Component 3 0.957 0.192 Component 4 0.872 0.175 Component 5 0.8112 0.162 . 3 E i g e n v a l u e s 1 2 3 4 5 Number 95% CI Eigenvalues Scree plot of eigenvalues after pca 2 figshare Download Mother’s knowledge index construction using principal component analysis.

This study contributes to the literature on the drivers of migration and employment choices, with a particular focus on youth in Nigeria. It evaluates the effect of young Nigerians’ expected land inheritance on the likelihood of their migration and on their employment and livelihood choices. We conducted a series of differential analyses on data from two Nigeria Living Standards Measurement Study panel surveys to understand the likelihood of migration and employment decisions being influenced by land inheritance, while also considering social and economic mediating factors such as the level of land market development and levels of urbanization. Overall, our findings seem to suggest that land inheritance, proxied by the size of expected land inheritance, is significantly and negatively associated with long-distance migration and with migration to urban areas, while the impact is negligible when a broader definition of migration is adopted and when migration is deemed as temporary. We find heterogeneous responses to land inheritance among various groups of youth, as well as varying responses to different levels of land market development and levels of urbanization. The results indicate that older youth and those who are less educated are more likely to respond to different levels of land market development and urbanization. We also show that the larger the size of expected land inheritance, the lower the likelihood that a young person will be involved in nonagricultural activities and the higher his or her chance of staying in agriculture. These results suggest that improving the inheritance of land by youth will guarantee more success in deterring unrewarding migration and employment choices by those less educated.

Project portfolio selection is a common problem in modern organizations. The allocation of resources to projects taking into account (a) the multi-criteria evaluation of projects and (b) the policy requirements for the final portfolio, is often addressed with a combination of multi-criteria analysis for the evaluation part and integer programming for the optimization part. However, the final portfolio is sensitive to changes in the importance of criteria, due to the multi-criteria evaluation of the projects which is the driver of the optimization. In the proposed approach, we take into account the inherent subjectivity expressed in the weights of criteria using a variation of the Iterative Trichotomic Approach method (Mavrotas and Pechak in Int J Mult Criteria Decis Mak 3:79–97, 2013). Specifically, we use an iterative process that starts considering portfolios that emerge from optimizing separately each criterion and gradually converging to the original set of criteria weights. The additional information provided to the decision maker by the proposed method, is that she/he can realize if the selection or exclusion of a specific project in the final portfolio is objective or it depends on the subjective weights and to what extent, while the conventional MCDA-IP approach does not differentiate the selected projects according to the imposed degree of subjectivity. The method is illustrated with a real data application from a project portfolio selection problem in Greece with 540 R&D projects that have to follow sectoral and geographical constraints.

Improving maternal and child nutrition in resource-poor settings requires effective use of limited resources, but priority-setting is constrained by limited information about program costs and impacts, especially for interventions designed to improve diet quality. This study utilized a mixed methods approach to identify, describe and estimate the potential costs and impacts on child dietary intake of 12 nutrition-sensitive programs in Ethiopia, Nigeria and India. These potential interventions included conditional livestock and cash transfers, media and education, complementary food processing and sales, household production and food pricing programs. Components and costs of each program were identified through a novel participatory process of expert regional consultation followed by validation and calibration from literature searches and comparison with actual budgets. Impacts on child diets were determined by estimating of the magnitude of economic mechanisms for dietary change, comprehensive reviews of evaluations and effectiveness for similar programs, and demographic data on each country. Across the 12 programs, total cost per child reached (net present value, purchasing power parity adjusted) ranged very widely: from 0.58 to 2650 USD/year among five programs in Ethiopia; 2.62 to 1919 USD/year among four programs in Nigeria; and 27 to 586 USD/year among three programs in India. When impacts were assessed, the largest dietary improvements were for iron and zinc intakes from a complementary food production program in Ethiopia (increases of 17.7 mg iron/child/day and 7.4 mg zinc/child/day), vitamin A intake from a household animal and horticulture production program in Nigeria (335 RAE/child/day), and animal protein intake from a complementary food processing program in Nigeria (20.0 g/child/day). These results add substantial value to the limited literature on the costs and dietary impacts of nutrition-sensitive interventions targeting children in resource-limited settings, informing policy discussions and serving as critical inputs to future cost-effectiveness analyses focusing on disease outcomes. L’amélioration de la nutrition maternelle et infantile dans les milieux pauvres nécessite une utilisation efficace de ressources limitées, mais l’établissement des priorités est assujetti au manque d’informations sur les coûts et les impacts du programme, en particulier pour les interventions visant à améliorer la qualité du régime alimentaire. La présente étude a utilisé une approche de méthodes mixtes pour identifier, décrire et estimer les coûts et impacts potentiels de 12 programmes prenant la nutrition en compte sur l’apport alimentaire des enfants en Ethiopie, au Nigeria et en Inde. Ces interventions potentielles comprenaient des transferts conditionnels de bétail et d’argent, les médias et l’éducation, des activités complémentaires de transformation et de vente d’aliments, des programmes de production domestique et de tarification des denrées alimentaires. Les composantes et les coûts de chaque programme ont été identifiés grâce à un nouveau processus participatif de consultation régionale d’experts, suivi d’une validation et d’un étalonnage à partir des recherches documentaires et de la comparaison avec les budgets réels. Les impacts sur les régimes alimentaires des enfants ont été déterminés en estimant l’ampleur des mécanismes économiques favorables au changement de régime alimentaire, les examens complets des évaluations, l’efficacité des programmes similaires et les données démographiques sur chaque pays. Parmi les 12 programmes, le coût total par enfant atteint (valeur actuelle nette, parité ajustée du pouvoir d’achat) était très diversifié: de 0, 58 à 2650 USD/an pour les cinq programmes dÉthiopie; 2, 62 à 1919 USD/an pour les quatre programmes du Nigeria; et 27 à 586 USD/an pour les trois programmes de l’Inde. Lors de l’évaluation des impacts, on a observé que les apports en fer et en zinc ont été plus importants à la suite d’un programme complémentaire de production d’aliments en Éthiopie (augmentations de 17, 7mg fer/ enfant/jour et 7, 4mg zinc/enfant/jour), l’apport en vitamine A grâce à un programme de production animale et horticole domestique au Nigéria (335 RAE/enfant/jour) et l’apport en protéines animales provenant d’un programme complé- mentaire de transformation de denrées alimentaires au Nigéria (20,0 g/enfant/jour). Ces résultats ajoutent une valeur substantielle aux rares documents relatifs aux coûts et impacts diététiques des interventions nutritionnelles ciblant les enfants dans les milieux à ressources limitées, éclairent les débats politiques et sont des contributions essentielles aux futures analyses de rentabilité axées sur les effets de la maladie. 改善资源匮乏地区的孕产妇和儿童营养需要有效利用有限资 源, 但关于项目成本和影响的信息有限, 尤其是膳食质量改善 干预的信息有限, 制约了有限次序的选择。本研究采用混合方 法, 明确、描述并估计埃塞俄比亚、尼日利亚和印度12个营养 敏感型项目的潜在成本和对儿童膳食摄入的影响。研究涉及 的干预包括有条件牲畜和现金转移支付、媒体和教育、辅食 加工和销售、家庭生产和食品定价项目。通过专家地区咨询 的参与式过程确定各个项目的构成部分和成本, 根据文献检索 和对比实际成本进行验证和校准。估算膳食改变的经济机制 幅度, 全面回顾类似项目的评估和有效性以及各国人口数据, 从而确定对儿童膳食的影响。在这12个项目中, 每个儿童的总 成本（净现值、购买力平价）波动很大：埃塞俄比亚的五个 项目中从0.58美元/年到2650美元/年不等；尼日利亚的四个项 目为2.62美元/年到1919美元/年；印度三个项目为27美元/年 到586美元/年。在膳食影响方面, 最大的膳食改善是埃塞俄比 亚辅食生产项目改善的铁和锌摄入（每名儿童铁摄入增加 17.7mg/天, 锌摄入增加7.4mg/天）, 尼日利亚家庭动物和花卉 生产项目改善的维生素A摄入（每名儿童335RAE/天）, 以及 尼日利亚辅食加工项目改善的动物蛋白摄入（每名儿童20.0g/ 天）。上述结果为针对资源有限地区儿童的营养干预的成本 和膳食影响提供了丰富资料, 为政策讨论提供了证据, 可为未 来关注疾病结局的成本效果分析提供重要依据。 Mejorar la nutrición materna e infantil en entornos de escasos recursos requiere el uso efectivo de recursos limitados, pero el establecimiento de prioridades se ve limitado por la escasez de información sobre los costos e impactos del programa, especialmente para las intervenciones diseñadas para mejorar la calidad de la dieta. Este estudio utilizó un enfoque de métodos mixtos para identificar, describir y estimar los posibles costos e impactos en el consumo dietético infantil de 12 programas sensibles a la nutrición en Etiopía, Nigeria y la India. Estas intervenciones potenciales incluyeron transferencias condicionadas de ganado y efectivo, medios y educación, procesamiento y ventas de alimentos complementarios, programas de producción en el hogar y fijación de precios. Los componentes y los costos de cada programa se identificaron a través de un novedoso proceso participativo de consulta regional de expertos seguido de validación y calibración con búsquedas bibliográficas y comparación con los presupuestos reales. Los impactos en las dietas infantiles se determinaron mediante la estimación de la magnitud de los mecanismos económicos para el cambio en la dieta, revisiones exhaustivas de las evaluaciones y la efectividad de programas similares, y datos demográficos de cada país. Sobre los 12 programas, el costo total por niño alcanzado (valor presente neto, paridad del poder adquisitivo ajustado) varió ampliamente: de 0.58 a 2,650 USD/año entre cinco programas en Etiopía; 2.62 a 1,919 USD/año entre cuatro programas en Nigeria; y de 27 a 586 USD/año entre tres programas en India. Cuando se evaluaron los impactos, las mayores mejoras en la dieta fueron los consumos de hierro y zinc de un programa de producción de alimentos complementarios en Etiopía (aumentos de 17.7 mg hierro/niño/día y 7.4 mg zinc/niño/día), consumo de vitamina A de un animal doméstico y el programa de producción hortícola en Nigeria (335 RAE/niño/día), y el consumo de proteína animal de un programa de procesamiento complementario de alimentos en Nigeria (20.0g/niño/día). Estos resultados agregan un valor sustancial a la literatura limitada sobre los costos e impactos dietéticos de las intervenciones sensibles a la nutrición dirigidas a niños en entornos de recursos limitados, dando información para las discusiones de políticas y sirviendo como insumos críticos para futuros análisis de costoefectividad enfocados en los resultados de enfermedades.

This book explores country case studies and works that detail the exact transmission mechanisms through which financial development can enhance pro-poor development in order to derive best practices in this field. This is an important companion for professionals and policymakers, and also a vital reference source for students.