@article{Headey:51818,
      recid = {51818},
      author = {Headey, Derek D. and Benson, Todd and Kolavalli,  Shashidhara and Fan, Shenggen},
      title = {Why African governments under-invest in agriculture:  results from an expert survey},
      address = {2009},
      number = {1005-2016-79075},
      series = {Contributed Paper},
      pages = {16},
      year = {2009},
      abstract = {Agricultural productivity growth is widely seen as an  essential instrument of poverty reduction, food security  and broader economic growth. Paradoxically, however, the  agricultural sector is often neglected by African  governments in what is often termed ‘urban bias’. This  paper explores what appears to be a very contemporary form  of urban bias: that despite open acknowledgement of the  importance of agriculture, public expenditure allocations  to the agricultural sector remain very low in Africa. An  innovation of the paper is to go beyond the broad  cross-country picture about why this might be the case to  instead examine more complex country stories through the  use of expert surveys. Specifically, we interview senior  policymakers in ministries of agriculture, ministries of  finance, planning authorities, and donor agencies, for two  sub-Saharan African countries - Uganda and Ghana - in which  agricultural expenditure shares have been very low since  the structural adjustments of the 1980s. Expert opinions on  this issue belie simplistic explanations of the neglect of  agriculture, in that under-investment is attributed to a  range of institutions and processes, including weak and  inconsistent political leadership, ineffectual and  organizationally dysfunctional ministries of agriculture,  and budgetary processes that disadvantage both short term  spending and long term planning in agriculture. The paper  concludes with some novel policy implications from these  results.},
      url = {http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/51818},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.22004/ag.econ.51818},
}