Ethiopian Development Research Institute

The achievement of several sustainable development goals and the Paris Climate Agreement depends on rapid progress towards sustainable food and land systems in all countries. We have built a flexible, collaborative modeling framework to foster the development of national pathways by local research teams and their integration up to global scale. Local researchers independently customize national models to explore mid-century pathways of the food and land use system transformation in collaboration with stakeholders. An online platform connects the national models, iteratively balances global exports and imports, and aggregates results to the global level. Our results show that actions toward greater sustainability in countries could sum up to 1 Mha net forest gain per year, 950 Mha net gain in the land where natural processes predominate, and an increased CO2 sink of 3.7 GtCO2e yr−1 over the period 2020–2050 compared to current trends, while average food consumption per capita remains above the adequate food requirements in all countries. We show examples of how the global linkage impacts national results and how different assumptions in national pathways impact global results. This modeling setup acknowledges the broad heterogeneity of socio-ecological contexts and the fact that people who live in these different contexts should be empowered to design the future they want. But it also demonstrates to local decision-makers the interconnectedness of our food and land use system and the urgent need for more collaboration to converge local and global priorities.

ABSTRACTAgroforestry is increasingly promoted as an economically and environmentally sustainable land use system. Understanding factors affecting smallholder farmers’ decision to adopt agroforestry technologies and intensity of adoption is thus considered critical for the development of agroforestry. This research attempts to analyze and understand why agroforestry technologies are not being taken up more by examining household level factors that could influence the adoption of agroforestry technologies. We estimate Heckman selection model using household level data collected from different regions of rural Ethiopia. Our findings show that the age of the household head, land size, tenure insecurity, and proximity to towns have a significant effect on the probability of adopting. They also show that, once adoption decision had been taken, the area devoted to agroforestry technologies is influenced by household characteristics such as gender of the household head, land size, and proximity to towns. We also identify important measures that could help promoting agroforestry technologies in rural Ethiopia. Our findings may also provide scientific evidence for other similar countries whose livelihood depends mainly on agriculture and natural resources such as forests.

This chapter examines private-sector development in Ethiopia, focusing on the situation since the incumbent government took power in 1991 and private-sector development became an integral part of Ethiopia’s economic development strategy. Several private entrepreneurs and enterprises have emerged since the reform and are now playing a critical role in the economic development of the country. However, the private sector has not yet made strong inroads into the manufacturing sector and the export market, which are perceived as crucial for industrialization and structural transformation. This chapter thus also seeks to highlight the key constraints impeding private-sector participation in these sectors and to suggest pathways to resolve these challenges.

Abstract Cross‐border travel for business, personal and tourism purposes is an important component of trade in services. In 2013, travel accounted for 25% of services export in the world. Trade in services accounted for 12% of GDP in the world. Hence, the role of travel in many economies is substantial. The current paper studies the determinants of cross‐border flows of people with a particular emphasis on the role of visa policies. We adopt the UN General Assembly Affinity Index, a measure of the quality of bilateral relations between nations, to instrument for bilateral visa policy. We find that, ceteris paribus, imposing visa restrictions on a country reduces travel from that country by about 73% in 2010 implying restrictive visa policies discourage cross‐border travel significantly. This implies an adverse impact of restrictive visa policies on trade‐in‐services.

This paper presents an analysis of the multi-sectoral and distributional economic impacts of rainfall shocks in the Awash river basin in Ethiopia. Using novel disaggregated data on crop production, we estimate the direct impacts of rainfall shocks on agriculture and then use a Computable General Equilibrium model to simulate how these rainfall shocks propagate through the wider economy of the basin under three different climate change scenarios. The basin's economy and expanding agricultural sector are highly vulnerable to the impacts of rainfall shocks. A rainfall decrease scenario could lead to a 5% decline in the basin's GDP, with agricultural GDP standing to drop by as much as 10%. All sectors benefit from greater rainfall amounts. Distributional impacts depend on income group, with poor households accruing greater benefits relative to non-poor households under a scenario of additional rainfall and suffering proportionally lower income losses under a scenario of rainfall decrease.