@inproceedings{Birner2006Financing,
abstract = {Acknowledging that the agricultural sector can play an important role as an engine of
pro-poor growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, the purpose of this paper is to identify the factors
that influence the ?political will? of governments to support this sector. The concept of
?political resources? from the political science literature is used to guide the analysis, as
it combines the insights from state-centered and society-centered approaches to explain
agricultural policies. Drawing on panel data covering 14 Sub-Saharan African countries
over the period 1980-2001, we present empirical evidence showing that political factors
play an important role in determining government?s commitment to supporting
agricultural development. We use a measure of democracy that varies both across
countries and within countries over time. Estimates are presented for separate samples of
democracies and non-democracies, and for a pooled sample of all countries and years
irrespective of the democratic status. Our results suggest that the rural poor do exercise
electoral leverage in democracies; larger rural population shares are associated with
higher spending on agriculture in democracies but not in authoritarian regimes. We also
find evidence consistent with the theoretical prior that larger farmers tend to be better
organized in interest groups. Specifically, we find that the share of traditional agricultural
exports such as coffee and cocoa in the total value of exports, which may be an indicator
for the ability of farmers? to organize themselves as interest groups, induces greater
spending on agriculture. This result holds true for both democracies and nondemocracies.},
author = {Regina Birner and Nethra Palaniswamy},
copyright = {http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/Nutzungsbedingungen},
keywords = {H3; O13; H5; Q18; 330},
language = {eng},
number = {4},
series = {Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Berlin 2006 / Verein f\"{u}r Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics},
title = {Financing Agricultural Development: The Political Economy of Public Spending on Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10419/19832},
year = {2006}
}
