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Growing populations and rising per capita incomes have led to an increasing worldwide demand for livestock products--in particular poultry. Most countries have attempted to meet this demand by raising domestic production. This dissertation investigates the types of policies that have been used to enable countries to meet this demand, and second the effect of rapid growth in terms of the environment. A supply response function is used to relate poultry supply to a vector of input and output prices and supply shifters related to technology, research, and institutional factors for a group of thirty-six countries over thirty-two years and it is estimated in fixed effects. These analysis indicate that the rate and direction of technology change in the poultry industry appears to reflect the relative factor scarcity of inputs such as the price of meat relative to the price of corn, as well as access to new technologies (hatching eggs and compound feed) and institutional services such as veterinary care.

Understanding people's knowledge, attitudes, practices, and perceptions (KAPP) about and toward risk is an important step in determining which cost-effective measure to adopt. It also is important in assessing poor people's willingness to adopt cost-effective prevention and control measures for reducing the risk of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). Although studies in several countries indicate some level of awareness about HPAI, practices and attitudes for preventing and controlling HPAI disease spread and outbreaks have not changed (Fielding et al. 2005, Maton et al. 2007, DiGiuseppe et al. 2008, Leslie et al. 2008).

In the absence of market data on the price of poultry before and after the outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), one method of capturing the costs of HPAI on farmers' income is the use of non-market valuation techniques, such as the contingent valuation (CV) method (Whitehead 2006). This brief presents the results of a CV study that aimed at capturing farmers' willingness to accept (WTA) compensation for birds with three different health statuses due to an HPAI outbreak--1) healthy, 2) risky, or 3) sick. The differences among farmers' willingness to accept compensation for these three types of birds could indicate the extent of the economic costs that may be borne by farmers in the case of an HPAI outbreak. Moreover, the WTA compensation levels could be used to inform the design of efficient, effective, and equitable compensation schemes. This study also investigated that the impact of farmers' knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions (KAP) of HPAI as well as their poultry-production and household-level characteristics on their WTA compensation (i.e., the HPAI costs that they would bear).