Village Economies: The Design, Estimation, and Use of Villagewide Economic Models

Most of the world's population and the vast majority of the world's poor live and work in villages. Their activities are usually centered in households, but interactions among households shape the impacts of policy, market, and environmental changes on rural production, incomes, employment, and migration. This book presents a new generation of villagewide economic modeling designed to capture these interactions when assessing the impacts of policy, market and environmental changes on rural economies in less-developed countries. The authors present a general framework for modeling village economies based on computable general-equilibrium techniques, estimate models for villages and a village-town in five different countries, and use these models to conduct a series of comparative experiments.