Laboratory of Rural Development Finance

Staff

Takeshi Sakurai, Professor
Takao Yurugi, Associate Professor

Outline

Our research covers broad area of international development including 1. Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa and Poverty Reduction: The Assessment of Policies Using Panel Data (Madagascar, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal), 2. Comparative Economic History on the Development of Market Institutions: Taking an Example from Rice in Africa (Madagascar, Nigeria, Ghana, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Japan), 3. Short-term Responses against Shocks and Resilience of Rural Households based on Very High Frequency Panel Data (Zambia), 4. Study on Poverty Dynamics of Rural Households based on Long-term Panel Data (Burkina Faso), 5. Institutions for the Management of Rural Resources and Their Efficiency in South Asia (Nepal and India), 6. Demand for Index-based Insurance and Its Impact in Developing Countries (Zambia and Myanmar), 7. Investigation of Nexus between Agriculture and Nutrition at Household Level in Developing Countries (Ghana, Zambia, and Burkina Faso), 8. Performance of agricultural cooperatives in Japan and developing countries (Japan, China).

Education Policy

A graduate student can choose any topic depending on his/her own interest, but it is preferable that he/she to conduct rigorous hypothesis testing based on micro-level dataset. Such data can be collected through his/her own fieldwork or will be obtained from existing dataset. These days there are a lot of publicly available datasets that a graduate student can use. But the advantage of our laboratory is that we have a various kind of household survey datasets from on-going research projects as well as past projects (please refer to our web site: http://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ruralfinance/). Moreover please notice that our approach is multi- or inter-disciplinary and works with researchers with other disciplines such as agronomists, meteorologists, foresters, medical scientists, nutritionists, and so on.

Publications

• Arimoto, Yutaka, Hisaki Kono, Tsilavo Ralandison, Takeshi Sakurai, and Kazushi Takahashi. “Price and non-price information frictions in regional arbitrage: The case of rice traders in Antananarivo, Madagascar,” Economic Development and Cultural Change (forthcoming).
• Sanou, Bakary, Kimseyinga Savadogo, and Takeshi Sakurai. “Determinants of Adoption and Continuous Use of Improved Maize Seeds in Burkina Faso,” Japanese Journal of Agricultural Economics, Vol. 19, pp. 21-26, March 2017.
• Kanno, Hiromitsu, Takeshi Sakurai, Hitoshi Shinjo, Hidetoshi Miyazaki, Yudai Ishimoto, Tazu Saeki, and Chieko Umetsu. “Analysis of Meteorological Measurements Made over Three Rainy Seasons and Rainfall Simulations in Sinazongwe District, Southern Province, Zambia,” Japan Agricultural Research Quarterly, Vol. 49(1), pp. 59-71, January 2015.
• Yurugi, Takao, Yu Ajima and Kazuhiko Kobayashi, Profit Structure of Organic Rice Farming: A Case Involving a Family Farm in the Northern Kanto Region of Japan, Journal of Rural Community Studies　126, 2018, 1-15. (in Japanese)
• Yurugi, Takao, An Analysis of Business Shares and Profitability of Zen-Noh and Prefectural Economic Federations of Agricultural Cooperatives through Their Consolidations, Journal of Rural Economics 87(2), 2015, 138-144. (in Japanese)
• Yurugi, Takao and Tsuyoshi Miyata, The Present Situation and the Problems of Rice Production for Feed under the Income Compensation Policy for Individual Farms, Journal of Rural Economics (Special Issue), 2013, 9-14. (in Japanese)