patterns of agrarian transition karen macoursuniversity of california berkeley and katholieke universiteit leuvenjohan f m swinneneuropean commission and katholieke universiteit leuveni introductioneconomic reforms have induced important output and productivity changesin the agricultural sectors of transition countries tcs there are however large differences between the countries in terms of the direction and themagnitude of these changes for example agricultural output increased con siderably in the east asian tcs while there was a large output fall in thecentral and east european countries ceecs and the former soviet union fsu during transition g 1

the dynamic cost and persistence of asset inequality in an agrarian economy abstract a growing literature suggests that asset inequality can be economically costly in the presence of agency costs that constrain labor and capital markets unclear in this literature is whether asset markets and optimal individual accumulation of self finance capacity suffice to eliminate costly inequality over time this paper uses numerical dynamic programming methods to explore this question with a model of an initially inegalitarian agrarian economy while an egalitarian asset distribution emerges over time the process involves sufficiently great productivity losses along the way that a redistributive policy could improve on the market s performance by both equity and efficiency criteria

learning about a new technology pineapple in ghana this paper investigates the role of social learning in the diffusion of a new agri cultural technology in ghana we use unique data on farmers communication patterns to define each individual s information neighborhood conditional on many potentially confounding variables we find evidence that farmers adjust their inputs to align with those of their information neighbors who were surpris ingly successful in previous periods the relationship of these input adjustments to experience further indicates the presence of social learning in addition applying the same method to input choices for another crop of known technol ogy correctly indicates an absence of social learning effects jel d83 013 033 q16

an empirical investigation of rationing constraints in rural credit markets in india abstract the literature on rural credit markets has generally assumed that households are rationed in their access to subsidized formal credit the validity of this assumption depends on the level of effective demand for formal credit in turn a function of the demand for credit and its availability from informal sources this paper estimates the demand and the sector specific costs of credit and hence the extent of formal sector rationing through an analysis of household participation in both the formal and the informal credit sectors the results show that the extent of rationing is considerably less than what is conventionally assumed

distorted agricultural incentives and economic development asia s experience earnings from farming in many low income countries have been depressed by a pro urban bias in own country policies as well as by governments of richer countries favouring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies both sets of policies reduce national and global economic welfare the rapid development of many asian emerging economies has been accompanied by a gradual reduction in their anti agricultural policies but many distortions remain and some countries have moved from negative to positive assistance for farmers following the earlier examples of first japan and then korea and taiwan drawing on results from a new multi country research project this paper examines the extent of these changes relative to those of other developing countries over the past five decades it concludes by pointing to prospects for further policy reform in asia

distributional effects of wto agricultural reforms in rich and poor countries rich countries agricultural trade policies are the battleground on which the future of the wto s troubled doha round will be determined subject to widespread criticism they nonetheless appear to be almost immune to serious reform and one of their most common defenses is that they protect poor farmers the authors findings reject this claim the analysis uses detailed data on farm incomes to show that major commodity programs are highly regressive in the united states and that the only serious losses under trade reform are among large wealthy farmers in a few heavily protected subsectors in contrast analysis using household data from 15 developing countries indicates that reforming rich countries agricultural trade policies would lift large numbers of developing country farm households out of poverty in the majority of cases these gains are not outweighed by the poverty increasing effects of higher food prices among other households agricultural reforms that appear feasible even under an ambitious doha round achieve only a fraction of the benefits for developing countries that full liberalization promises but protect u s large farms from most of the rigors of adjustment finally the analysis indicates that maximal trade led poverty reductions occur when developing countries participate more fully in agricultural trade liberalization

induced innovation evolutionary theory and path dependence sources of technical change the i960s to the i98os were very productive of new theory and empirical insights into the sources of technical change in the i96os and i970s major attention focused on the implications of changes in demand and relative factor prices on the rate and direction of technical change in the late i 970s and early i980s attention shifted to evolutionary models inspired by a revival of interest in schumpeter s insights into the process of economic development since the early i98os these have been complemented by the development of historically grounded path dependent models of technical change each of these models has contributed substantial insight into the sources of technical change this paper was motivated by a perception that each of the three research agendas is approaching a dead end the three models induced evolutionary and path dependent represent elements of a more general theory that has not yet been invented ruttan 1996 a in a closing comment i suggest some steps toward the development of a more general theory of the sources of technical change

social networks and technology adoption in northern mozambique despite their potentially strong impact on poverty agricultural innovations are often adopted slowly using a unique household dataset on sunflower adoption in mozambique we analyse whether and how individual adoption decisions depend upon the choices of others in the same social networks since farmers anticipate that they will share information with others we expect farmers to be more likely to adopt when they know many other adopters dynamic considerations however suggest that farmers who know many adopters might strategically delay adoption to free ride on the information gathered by others we present empirical evidence that shows that the relationship between the probability of adoption and the number of known adopters is shaped as an inverse u in line with information sharing the network effect is stronger for farmers who report discussing agriculture with others the data contains information which is needed to ameliorate the identification issues that commonly arise in this context in particular social networks are precisely identified and in addition we can control for village heterogeneity and endogenous group formation

getting agriculture moving do markets provide the right signals abstract political discrimination has often pushed the domestic value of agriculture in developing countries below its value in markets at the border this paper seeks to explain the reasons why border prices themselves undervalue the linkages that agriculture has to economic growth in the early stages of development if agriculture is critically important to stimulating and sustaining rapid economic growth those countries that fail to correct this discrimination exact a heavy toll in economic performance furthermore the poorest countries will suffer the most agricultural development and development of the non agricultural economy are closely linked the traditional market mediated linkages form the core of economic analysis of the role of agriculture in economic development providing labour for an industrial work force food for an expanding population with higher incomes savings for industrial investments markets for industrial output export earnings to pay for imported capital goods and raw materials for agro processing industries a second category of linkages is not well mediated by market forces even when markets are working well the impact of agricultural growth on the rest of the economy through non market linkages can be traced using a simple growth accounting framework that examines contributions to the labour force capital investment and the productivity with which these two physical factors are utilised several linkages stand out as likely to be important and potentially measurable because they draw on the efficiency of decision making in rural households the low opportunity cost of their labour resources the opportunity for farm investment without financial intermediaries the potential to earn high rates of return on public investments that correct for urban bias the contribution of food price stability to increased efficiency in investment decisions and the impact of growth in food production on widespread improvement in nutrient intake and labour productivity each of these factors alone as public investment and favourable policy stimulate growth in the agricultural sector should cause an increase in the efficiency of resource allocation and thus higher total factor productivity several of these mechanisms will also serve to speed factor accumulation by increasing the savings rate or improving factor mobility

a decomposition of total factor productivity growth the case of chinese agricultural growth before and after reforms our objective in this paper is to explain a method to decompose the sources of total factor productivity tfp growth into technological progress and changes in technical efficiency within the framework of the varying coefficients frontier production function an empirical application is demonstrated using the chinese provincial level agricultural data covering the period 1970 87 the results indicate that tfp growth in the prereform period was negative in twenty out of twenty eight provinces and that it was positive in almost all provinces during the reform periods while negative in sixteen out of twenty eight provinces in the postreform periods of 1984 87

the economics of poverty traps and persistent poverty an asset based approach abstract longitudinal data on household living standards open the way to a deeper analysis of the nature and extent of poverty while a number of studies have exploited this type of data to distinguish transitory from more chronic forms of income or expenditure poverty this paper develops an asset based approach to poverty analysis that makes it possible to distinguish deep rooted persistent structural poverty from poverty that passes naturally with time due to systemic growth processes drawing on the economic theory of poverty traps and bifurcated accumulation strategies this paper briefly discusses some feasible estimation strategies for empirically identifying poverty traps and long term persistent structural poverty as well as relevant extensions of the popular foster greer thorbecke class of poverty measures the paper closes with reflections on how asset based poverty can be used to underwrite the design of persistent poverty reduction strategies

effect of public subsidies on farm technical efficiency a meta analysis of empirical results abstractinvestigating the impact of public subsidies on farm technical efficiency is becoming a critical issue in applied agricultural policy analysis this article presents a meta analysis of empirical results on this issue based on data gathered from a systematic literature review we find that in the empirical literature subsidies are commonly negatively associated with farm technical efficiency meta regression estimation results show that the direction significantly negative significantly positive or non significant of the observed effects is sensitive to the way subsidies are modelled in the empirical studies

local versus global separability in agricultural household models the factor price equalization effect of land transfer rights commonly employed global tests for separability between production and consumption decisions are theoretically inappropriate when the market failures creating non separabilities differentially constrain some but not all households simulated maximum likelihood estimates using chinese panel data reject the restrictions implied by a global separability test in favor of regime specific or local separability tests the estimates also show that a global approach to separability obscures the significant effect that less encumbered land transfer rights would have on shadow factor price equalization across households and allocative efficiency the findings on transfer rights suggest a resolution to the debate in china on further property rights reform copyright 2002 oxford university press

risk aversion and credit constraints in farmers decision making a reinterpretation in 1976 the agricultural development council sponsored a conference on risk uncertainty and agricultural development which has been summarised in a volume edited by james roumasset jean marc boussard and inderjit singh 1979 the volume provides an excellent review of the state of the art at that time however as discussed in the summary chapters of that volume there were few theoretical empirical or policy issues on which clear conclusions could be reached on the basis of knowledge then available in the intervening years progress has been made on a number of issues as a result of both empirical investigations and theoretical advances this paper concentrates on advances which have relevance to the controversy about the relative roles of risk aversion and credit constraints in limiting farmers investment levels especially for purchased inputs such as seeds or fertilizers in particular we review recent experimental studies on the extent of risk aversion among farmer populations in developing

welfare dynamics in rural kenya and madagascar this paper presents comparative qualitative and quantitative evidence from rural kenya and madagascar in an attempt to untangle the causality behind persistent poverty we find striking differences in welfare dynamics depending on whether one uses total income including stochastic terms and inevitable measurement error or the predictable structural component of income based on a household s asset holdings our results suggest the existence of multiple dynamic asset and structural income equilibria consistent with the poverty traps hypothesis furthermore we find supporting evidence of locally increasing returns to assets and of risk management behaviour consistent with poor households defence of a critical asset threshold through asset smoothing

institutions and agricultural productivity in sub saharan africa agricultural productivity in 41 sub saharan africa ssa countries from 1960 to 1999 is examined by estimating a semi nonparametric fourier production frontier over the four decades the estimated rate of productivity change was 0 83 per year although the average rate from 1985 99 was a strong 1 90 per year former uk colonies exhibited significantly higher productivity gains than others while liberia and countries that had been colonies of portugal or belgium exhibited net reductions in productivity we measure a significant reduction in productivity during political conflicts and wars and a significant increase in productivity among those countries with higher levels of political rights and civil liberties

google search keywords that best predict energy price volatility abstract internet search activity data has been widely used as an instrument to approximate trader attention in different markets this method has proven effective in predicting market indices in the short term however little attention has been paid to demonstrating search activity for keywords that best grab investor attention in different markets this study attempts to build the best practically possible proxy for attention in the market for energy commodities using google search data specifically we confirm the utility of google search activity for energy related keywords are significant predictors of volatility by showing they have incremental predictive power beyond the conventional garch models in predicting volatility for energy commodities prices starting with a set of ninety terms used in the energy sector the study uses a multistage filtering process to create combinations of keywords that best predict the volatility of crude oil brent and west texas intermediate conventional gasoline new york harbor and us gulf coast heating oil new york harbor and natural gas prices for each commodity combinations that enhance garch most effectively are established as proxies of attention the results indicate investor attention is widely reflected in internet search activities and demonstrate search data for what keywords best reveal the direction of concern and attention in energy markets

earnings news and small traders an intraday analysis abstract this study separates trading volume into buyer and seller initiated activities and examines the directional volume reaction in small and large trades to different types of earnings news good bad news triggers brief but intense buying selling in the large trades however a persistent period of unusually high buying activity is observed in the small trades irrespective of the news this anomalous proclivity of small traders to buy is robust across firm size trading volume and different earnings expectation models several explanations are discussed although the behavior does not seem fully explained by existing theories

learning by doing and learning from others human capital and technical change in agriculture household level panel data from a nationally representative sample of rural indian households describing the adoption and profitability of high yielding seed varieties hyvs associated with the green revolution are used to test the implications of a model incorporating learning by doing and learning spillovers the estimates indicate that i imperfect knowledge about the management of the new seeds was a significant barrier to adoption ii this barrier diminished as farmer experience with the new technologies increased iii own experience and neighbors experience with hyvs significantly increased hyv profitability and iv farmers do not fully incorporate the village returns to learning in making adoption decisions

access to capital and agrarian production organisation there are two problems both universal that entrepreneurs in any economy must contend with firstly an agent generally has access only to a limited amount of working capital secondly workers hired by an agent are subject to moral hazard and this necessitates their supervision this paper models for an agrarian economy the constraints imposed on entrepreneurs activities by these two problems and endogenously determines the various organisational forms of production as well as the allocation of resources that will obtain with a simple model we endeavour to explain a diverse set of empirical observations pertaining to the less developed countries in terms of the general processes that determine the distribution of income among the various agents and the hierarchical relationships that develop among them agricultural production typically involves a period of several months between the time the inputs are purchased and the time the output is marketed access to working capital and hence to the credit market thus plays an important role in a farmer s production decisions the distribution of access to credit in turn tends to be an important determinant of income distribution in poor agrarian economies credit is invariably rationed according to the ability to offer collateral the amount of working capital a farmer can mobilise therefore depends on the amount of land he owns which is often a good proxy for his overall wealth and thus his ability to offer collateral further since hired hands have a propensity to shirk they need to be supervised and therefore the

modeling technology adoption in developing countries an analysis of technology adoption decisions by poor farmers is provided some possible empirical models for studying technology adoption are reviewed the issue of theoretical consistency is dealt with in terms of the costs of such consistency measured in data needs and model complexity and the benefits measured in terms of understanding the micro economic foundations of adoption

the dynamic dependence of fossil energy investor sentiment and renewable energy stock markets abstract this study investigates the dynamic directional information spillover of return and volatility between the fossil energy market investor sentiment towards renewable energy and the renewable energy stock market using the connectedness network approach empirical results show that the spillover effects of the volatility system are generally stronger than that of the return system which suggest that risk transmission among the markets is more obvious in both systems the impact of the fossil energy market especially crude oil on the renewable energy stock market is greater than the impact of investor sentiment on the renewable energy stock market this finding shows that the renewable energy stock market is closely related to the fossil energy market furthermore the rolling window approach is adopted to examine the time varying information spillover among them the dynamic findings suggest that investor sentiment towards renewable energy can explain the return and volatility of renewable energy stock to a certain degree

the paradigm of agricultural efficiency and its implication on food security in africa what does meta analysis reveal summary the study investigates whether african agricultural efficiency levels have been improving or not and what drives them over the years based on 442 frontier studies using meta regression analysis the results show that the mean efficiency estimates from studies decrease significantly as year of survey in the primary study increases also studies published in journals with parametric specification and with panel data produced significantly higher efficiency estimates while those with a focus on grain crops reported significantly lower efficiency estimates other results show that education followed by experience extension and credit are the major drivers of agricultural efficiency levels in africa

productivity growth and the effects of r d in african agriculture this article measures and compares total factor productivity growth in african agriculture under contemporaneous and sequential technology frontiers over the period 1970 2004 the sources of productivity growth are examined using a fixed effects regression model and a polynomial distributed lag structure for agricultural r d expenditures while conventional estimates show an average productivity growth rate of only 0 3 per year the improved measures under sequential technology show that african agricultural productivity grew at a higher rate of 1 8 per year technical progress rather than efficiency change was the principal source of productivity growth agricultural r d weather and trade reforms turned out to have significant effects on productivity in african agriculture with a rate of return of 33 per year r d is shown to be a socially profitable investment in african agriculture while a strong r d expenditure growth of about 2 per year in the 1970s led to strong productivity growth after the mid 1980s stagnation of r d expenditure in the 1980s and early 1990s led to slower productivity growth in the 2000s consistent with recent economic recovery in africa evidenced by stronger agricultural gdp growth rates results showed that policy reforms as well as improved weather contributed to the recovery of agricultural productivity after the mid 1980s

risk efficiency and the adoption of modern crop varieties evidence from the philippines efficiency among farmers of less developed countries has been the focus of numerous studies since t w schultz hypothesized that farmers in developing agricultures are poor but efficient 1 a growing body of literature supports schultz s argument that farmers in developing agricultures have low incomes not because they use their resources inefficiently but because they lack the technology and resources they need to realize higher productivity and thus higher incomes a high priority in agricultural development assistance since the 1960s has been the generation of technology that would enable farmers to increase their productivity much research has been devoted to the causes of low agricultural productivity and the longer term productivity gains that may be forthcoming from modern technology but less attention has been devoted to the process of technology adoption by low income farmers as noted in the recent survey of adoption of agricultural innovations by g feder r e just and d zilberman there have been efforts to model adoption in the context of risk but there is a dearth of empirical evidence on the ways that farmers respond over time as a new production technology is introduced in a risky environment 2 in this article we address the empirical analysis of technical efficiency as farmers adopt new production technology taking into account production risk and learning we utilize recently developed efficiency criteria applicable when production is risky and implement these criteria using an approximation to a representative farmer s decision model 3 pooled time series and cross sectional data collected by the international rice research institute are used to investigate the

peasant household behaviour with missing markets some paradoxes explained a model of peasant household behavior under varying degrees of household specific food and labor market failures is constructed to show that these structural features can explain several well known patterns of peasant response which have often been attributed to peculiar motives presumed specific to peasants the model explains sluggish response to cash crops prices and high instability in perceived food and labor scarcities the key role of manufactured consumer goods prices in stimulating peasants effort in cash crops production the effectiveness of taxation as opposed to incentives in stimulating cash crops production and the key role of technological change in food production to enhance cash crop production results are obtained analytically in the case of one market failure and by numerical simulation with more than one

efficiency measurement in swedish dairy farms an application of rotating panel data 1976 88 this paper introduces a new specification of technical inefficiency in panel data models first the overall technical inefficiency is decomposed into a persistent component and a residual component second a multistep procedure is used to estimate the parameters of the production function as well as persistent and residual technical inefficiency the advantage of this multistep procedure is that the parameter estimates are robust to distributional assumptions on the error components distributional assumptions are required in the final stage to estimate the residual component of technical inefficiency the model is used to examine technical efficiency in swedish dairy farms during the period 1976 to 1988

transactions costs and agricultural household supply response we develop and estimate a model of supply response when transactions costs create a situation where some producers buy others sell and others do not participate in markets we present two rationales for why producing households may have different relationships to the market proportional and fixed transactions costs using data on mexican corn producers we estimate an empirical model that allows for separate tests of the significance of both types of transactions costs revealing that both fixed and proportional transactions costs matter for the estimation the results provide consistent estimates of supply elasticity and measures of the relative importance of factors determining both proportional and fixed transactions costs

household production in the philippines a non neoclassical approach the starting point of any economic analysis is a microeconomic theory of the decision making unit by providing a set of explicit assumptions regarding individual choices a microeconomic theory lays the necessary foundation for the explanation of economic behavior just as a theory of the firm underlies analyses of market production a theory of the family underlies analyses of household production explanations of long run trends such as fertility decline grow out of assumptions regarding the nature of household decision making developing what they term the economic approach to human behavior gary becker and other neoclassical economists forcefully argue that household behavior is motivated primarily by a collective concern for economic efficiency they assume that households seek to maximize exogenously given joint utility functions and they hypothesize that differences in household behavior represent efficient responses to differences in the prices and incomes which households face this approach provides the foundation for an explanation of fertility decline based on long run changes in relative prices associated with economic development simply stated the argument runs as follows as the rate of return to human capital rises and levels of education increase the cost of rearing children goes up as higher wages draw women out of the household into the labor force the opportunity cost of mothers time goes up further increasing the cost of children the demand for children decreases and fertility levels gradually adjust 2 the assumption that joint utility functions are exogenous constant over time and vary randomly if at all across households is crucial to this argument systematic differences in unobservable joint utility functions could seriously confound the interpretation of observed relationships between changes in household behavior and changes in rela

rural reforms and agricultural growth in china this paper employs province level panel data to assess the contributions of decollectivization price adjustments and other reforms to china s agricultural growth in the reform period decollectivization is found to improve total factor productivity and to account for about half of the output growth during 1978 84 the adjustment in state procurement prices also contributed positively to output growth its impact came mainly from the responses in input use the effect of other market related reforms on productivity and output growth was very small reasons for slowdown in agricultural growth after 1984 are also analyzed copyright 1992 by american economic association

the effects of farm subsidies on farm exports in the united states we estimate the elasticity of u s farm exports to u s farm subsidies using a gravity model of state level farm exports to 100 major trading destinations for the period 1999 to 2011 our identification strategy exploits the within state variation that is free of endogeneity bias in the levels and trends of farm subsidies and farm exports we find that a 1 decrease in farm subsidies would reduce u s farm exports by 0 40 per annum this equivalently means that the complete abolishment of the farm subsidy program would reduce u s farm exports by approximately 15 3 billion per year importantly we document robust evidence that amber box subsidy programs such as counter cyclical payments and marketing loan gains have the strongest effect on farm exports while green box subsidy payments such as direct payments have negligible effects finally subsidy payments affect exports only in agricultural commodities not in livestock our subsidy elasticity estimates are statistically significant stable and economically meaningful and are vitally needed by u s and global policymakers in the face of critical domestic and international developments

transport costs and smallholder cropping choices an application to siaya district kenya smallholders regularly devote shares of resources to low yielding food crops than they do to cash crops that have higher market returns in this paper costly exchange is incorporated into an agricultural household model and a numerical nonseparable version of the model is used to show that seemingly inefficient cropping choices of this type in siaya district kenya can be explained as rational food import substitution given high transport costs in product markets improved rural road networks that reduce these costs could abate motives to meet food needs through domestic production and promote specialization that raises farm incomes

gender agricultural production and the theory of the household virtually all models of the household assume that the allocation of resources is pareto efficient within many african households agricultural production occurs on many plots controlled by different members of the household pareto efficiency implies that factors should be allocated efficiently across these plots i find in contrast that plots controlled by women are farmed much less intensively than similar plots within the household controlled by men the estimates imply that about 6 percent of output is lost because of inefficient factor allocation within the household the paper suggests a new approach to modeling intrahousehold allocation consistent with the empirical results

energy demand fdi nexus in africa do fdis induce dichotomous paths abstract this study investigates the nexus between energy demand and foreign direct investment fdi in africa using the simultaneous system generalized method of moments estimator and panel data that consists of 27 african countries over the period 2000 2014 specifically the study hypothesizes a non linear relationship between energy demand and fdi which imposes the assumption that conditions such as the level of technology absorptive capacity the level and stage of development and adjustment cost are likely to be heterogeneous across cross section and over time several empirical strategies such as changing the structure of the model set up using different sample groupings and applying different estimators with different assumptions were employed to substantiate the robustness nature of the hypothesized relationship the findings revealed a robust concave effect of fdi on energy consumption this suggests that there are learning and imitation experiences associated with fdi and these experiences produce dichotomous paths in terms of realizing the energy saving benefits of fdi

innovation systems and technical efficiency in developing country agriculture this article examines how different components of an agricultural innovation system interact to determine levels of technical inefficiency in developing country agriculture the analysis draws on data from 85 low and middle income countries for the period 2004 2011 to estimate latent class stochastic frontiers in which the technological class to which the country belongs is determined within the model to enable efficiency comparisons between countries across these technological classes we estimate a meta frontier that encompasses all the class frontiers we embed components of an agricultural innovation systems framework in this estimation to explain countries technical inefficiency with respect to their respective class frontiers mobile phone subscriptions as a measure of institutions that facilitate the transfer of knowledge and information as well as the number of scientific and technical journal articles as a measure of research productivity and knowledge production are found to improve technical efficiency of agricultural production in these countries the mean technical efficiency score of agricultural production between 2004 and 2011 for countries in class one is 44 1 whereas it is 62 7 for countries in class two indicating sizeable potential to improve agricultural production from the same level of agricultural inputs through efficiency enhancing investments

developing countries in the wto system applying robert hudec s analysis to the doha round in his 1987 developing countries in the gatt system robert hudec concluded that the identity of developing countries in the gatt system was primarily a matter of their demanding non reciprocal and preferential treatment developed countries responding grudgingly to those demands and that this situation had been unfruitful either to support developing country reforms or to discipline developed country restrictions aimed at developing countries hudec was pessimistic about the relationship becoming more productive but his expression of despair offered a glimmer of hope there are those who believe that the gatt has become so committed to the current policy that the only way to change it would be to start a new organization a new organisation was started the world trade organization but has the wto achieved what hudec hoped a new organisation might at the 1987 95 uruguay round developing country leaders acted as hudec had hoped they used international rules and bindings as leverage to support their own internally driven reforms to overcome generations of accumulated protection to lock in reforms against the backsliding that had undone previous reforms dealing with the uruguay round s unbalanced outcome and the overlapping implementation problem have shaped the doha round but the negotiations have misconceived and mismanaged both issues rather than seeking to identify their real economics the negotiations have gone back to the traditional idea of special and differential treatment perhaps the largest cost of this mismanagement is that in many developing countries the unilateral momentum for liberalisation has waned to the extent that the doha negotiations have drawn attention away from the domestic issues that were the basis of developing country liberalisation and enhanced the status of negotiators relative to the leaders who fought at home for reform they have contributed to that waning

direct elicitation of credit constraints conceptual and practical issues with an application to peruvian agriculture abstract this article provides a methodological bridge leading from the well developed theory of credit rationing to the less developed territory of empirically identifying credit constraints we begin by developing a simple model showing that credit constraints may take three forms quantity rationing transaction cost rationing and risk rationing each form adversely affects household resource allocation and thus should be accounted for in empirical analyses of credit market performance we outline a survey strategy to directly elicit households status as unconstrained or constrained in the credit market and if constrained to further identify which of the three nonprice rationing mechanisms is at play we discuss several practical issues that arise due to the use of a combination of factual and interpretative survey questions finally using a farm level data set from peru we illustrate how the methodology can be used to estimate the impacts of credit constraints

the impact of eu export refunds on the african continent an impact assessment abstractthe eu s export refund policy has long been a source of controversy for its perceived impacts on third country markets however the eu commission maintain that these concerns are largely historic as cap reforms mean that export refunds are now used infrequently the purpose of this article is therefore to assess the impacts of refunds in the wake of the 2003 reform of the cap using two complementary analyses first an analysis using a computable general equilibrium model and second two case studies to assess the potential impact of export refunds in selected african developing countries

land tenure security and investment incentives puzzling evidence from burkina faso abstract the commonsense logic associating higher land security and higher incentives to invest has been recently called into question in the case of african agriculture to be meaningful empirical tests have to be carefully designed so as to take account of the possible endogeneity of the land rights variable this is done in this paper by applying suitable econometric methods to the original data collected in burkina faso the results obtained cast doubt on the existence of a systematic influence of land tenure security on investment by reviewing the justifications for scepticism in the recent literature we are able to conclude that the traditional village order where it exists provides the basic land rights required to stimulate small scale investment

rural bias in the east and south east asian rice economy indonesia in comparative perspective this study analyses the rise in protection of rice farmers in east and south east asia since 1960 a statistical model of price formation is tested for japan south korea malaysia the philippines and indonesia on average about 90 per cent of variation in rice prices in these five countries relative to the world price can be an attributed to efforts at price stabilisation rather than farmer protection or discrimination in earlier periods the shift from urban bias to rural bias is more a result of price stabilisation and declining real rice prices in world markets than basic shifts in political economy

decomposition of technical efficiency in agricultural production in africa into transient and persistent technical efficiency under heterogeneous technologies abstract the agricultural sector remains a cornerstone to africa s economic transformation and the achievement of the sustainable development goals sdgs however the sector s performance in terms of productivity growth has been sub optimal when compared with performances in asia america and europe technical efficiency is a major contributor to the growth in agricultural productivity however there is limited research about the sources of technical inefficiency in agricultural production in africa this is critical given that africa has problems with food security and high poverty this study applied a parametric technique to estimate technical efficiency in africa s agricultural sector under heterogeneous technologies while separating unobserved country specific heterogeneities from transient and persistent technical efficiency data consisted of 49 african countries spanning from 1990 to 2016 assuming a homogeneous technology the estimated mean technical efficiency of 38 2 suggests that in africa about 62 of the potential agricultural output is untapped however considering heterogeneity in production technologies the mean estimated technical efficiency value differed between the two classes the numbers suggest that about 59 and 69 of untapped potential agricultural output in class one and class two groups respectively in all cases persistent technical inefficiency hinders technical efficiency an indication that government or regional agricultural policies should be long term oriented with the evidence of conditional convergence in technical efficiency efforts to improve persistent technical efficiency can drive regional targets in food security and poverty alleviation and induce inclusive growth and sustainable development

spillovers between the oil sector and the s p500 the impact of information flow about crude oil crude oil is one of the most important commodities in the real economy and as such the relationship between oil prices and broader equity markets has attracted a lot of research attention recent work has considered directional spillovers or links between oil and equity markets in recent times there has been a growing body of research into the impacts of news and media attention on asset returns both in the context of and in particular with both the oil and equity markets but also within each of these this paper considers how news or information flows about crude oil influence the spillover links between these assets using realized volatility estimates based on high frequency data the empirical analysis reveals a number of novel results in terms of the behavior of these linkages increased news flow about oil reduces the impact of the broader equity market on the oil sector implying that it is driven more by oil specific shocks and less by more general financial market conditions it also increases the impact of the oil sector on the broader equity market these results have potential implications for hedging and portfolio allocation

opec in the news abstract this paper introduces a newspaper article count index related to opec that rises in response to important opec meetings and events connected with opec production levels i use this index to measure how interest in opec varies over time and investigate how oil price volatility behaves when the index unexpectedly changes i find that unexpected increases in the newspaper index are strongly associated with higher levels of oil price volatility both realized and implied in some cases these unexpected movements appear to be driven by an unpredictable opec event such as the iraq invasion of kuwait in other cases such as the oil price collapses in late 2008 and late 2014 unforeseen developments in the oil market or broader economy seem to generate the unexpected movements in price volatility and interest in opec the newspaper index is highly correlated with google search volume data on opec an alternative measure of the amount of attention paid to opec events

a century long perspective on agricultural development this article strategically surveys the past century s literature on agricultural development we organize the discussion around three grand themes that reveal the richness of agricultural development as an intellectual endeavor first we explore the role of agriculture in the broader development process from a macroeconomic and political economy perspective we then examine the role of technological and institutional change in successful agricultural development finally the focus turns to a microeconomic perspective on agricultural household decision making and the problems of imperfect and missing markets asymmetric information and transactions costs that lead to widespread apparent inefficiency and disequilibrium

investor attention and crude oil prices evidence from nonlinear granger causality tests abstract using the google search volume index gsvi to measure investor attention this paper investigates the relationships between investor attention and crude oil prices for the main crude oil markets worldwide to account for possible structural breaks and nonlinearity in the relation between investor attention and oil returns fourier unit root test and nonlinear granger causality tests are employed the empirical results suggest that the bidirectional nonlinear granger causality exists only between investor attention and wti future crude oil return however wti crude oil return granger causes investor attention weakly for dubai spot daqing spot wti spot and brent future oil markets unidirectional nonlinear granger causality runs from investor attention to oil returns which is relatively weak

how decoupled is the single farm payment and does it matter for international trade the extent to which decoupled agricultural support including the european union single farm payment sfp creates production incentives remains unclear we apply an extended version of the standard global trade analysis project model and generate a set of 21 databases that captures a comprehensive representation of domestic support by considering and modeling a range of different assumptions regarding the sfp s degree of decoupling we investigate the sfp s effect on the model s results the results of our analysis reveal substantially different effects that depend on the degree of decoupling and the findings can help validate trade analysis results particularly for developing countries

the mobilization of women s labor for cash crop production a game theoretic approach in the last decade or so economists have modeled phenomena such as household labor supply fertility behavior and child survival rates using the household as the unit of analysis this paper presents data that call into question the assumption that the household is a joint decision making unit which maximizes a neoclassical household utility function the data come from a study of the mobilization of women s labor by their husbands for irrigated rice production in north cameroon the first section of this paper describes briefly the massa rice and sorghum farming system and then considers the relationship between the amount of compensation women receive from their husbands for their labor on rice production and the amount of labor they allocate to rice production the findings suggest that a bargaining model may describe the intrahousehold relations of production and distribution better than the neoclassical model the second section specifies a nash bargaining model and contrasts it with the neoclassical model of the household using the bargaining framework the third section explores in more detail possible explanations of the allocative inefficiency which seems to characterize many of the rice cultivating households

transfer costs spatial arbitrage and testing for food market integration conventional tests for food market integration ask often misleadingly whether prices in different locations move together in this paper an alternative methodology the parity bounds model pbm is developed which uses information on transfer costs in addition to food prices to assess the efficiency of spatial arbitrage monte carlo experiments using data generated by a point space spatial price equilibrium model show the pbm to be statistically reliable an application to philippine rice markets demonstrates that the pbm detects efficient arbitrage when other tests do not

agricultural export subsidies and domestic support reform under the wto system what does it mean for welfare in west africa this paper analyses the potential welfare impacts west africa tends to encounter from liberalising agricultural export subsidies and domestic support in developed and developing countries according to the reform proposals of the doha development agenda we base our analysis on the july framework scenario which considers a tiered formula that adopts a harbinson approach plus sensitive and special product provisions the results indicate that while the world prices of the major exportable commodities of the region will fall those of their imports will rise subsequently consumers of nearly all of the commodities analysed encounter potential welfare losses while almost all producers of these commodities experience potential welfare gains consumers are expected to encounter an aggregate loss of about 591 93 million while a net producer surplus of about 423 78 million is expected to be generated however because the gains by producers are insufficient to compensate consumers losses the fifteen west african nations considered in the analysis are expected to experience a net welfare loss of about 168 16 million on the contrary large developing countries such as brazil india and china as well as developed nations like the eu and japan are expected to enjoy net welfare gains the net losses accrued to the region imply more poverty and heightened food insecurity as all west african countries faced severe hunger situation in 2010 however even though these findings conform to other research results indicating net food importing countries will become losers from agricultural trade reform while net food exporters experience welfare gains concerns of data quality and reliability that are usually associated with macrolevel analysis render these results more indicative than definitive

behavioural and material determinants of production relations in agriculture in this essay we develop a framework for analysing the major institutions governing the production and exchange of output and the primary factors of production in rural areas the analysis incorporates general considerations of risk and information constraints jointly with the principal material attributes of agriculture and of agricultural production factors the framework is used to analyse barriers to the existence of the major intertemporal and factor markets it is applied specifically to land scarce environments for which it provides an internally consistent explanation for many of the well documented institutional features of such settings in addition the analysis provides new implications for among other phenomena the inter relationships among ownership holdings operational scale family size and factor productivity for the scarcity of animal rental markets and use of animals as collateral for the renting out of land by small landowners and for the existence of plantations for certain crops

a selectivity model of household food marketing behavior in sub saharan africa the agricultural household s discrete decision of whether to participate in coarse grain markets is separated here from the continuous decision of how much to sell or buy conditional on participation failure to participate in markets results from high fixed transactions costs a selectivity model endogenously switches households into alternative market participation states correcting for bias caused by the exclusion of unobservable variables affecting both discrete and continuous decisions improved market information increases the probability of participation by sellers while access to cereals processing technology increases quantities transacted by both sellers and buyers conditional on participation

testing market integration a model of spatial price differentials for a tradable good is proposed which avoids the inferential dangers of received methods using static price correlations the proposed method also extracts more information on the causes of price differentials from the same data the method is illustrated using monthly rice price data for postindependence bangladesh including the very substantial regional price shocks during the 1974 famine impediments to market integration are indicated

equilibrium credit rationing of small farm agriculture it is often argued that externally imposed contractual restrictions lead to inequitable credit rationing this paper argues that unrestricted laissez faire markets may also inequitably ration credit a formal model which grants borrowers autonomy in credit application and use demonstrates that adverse incentive and selection effects may cause banks to endogenously impose interest rate restrictions and ration small farms out of the credit market consequently liberalization of financial markets may be insufficient to guarantee small farms access to credit

agricultural technology productivity and poverty in madagascar summary this paper uses a unique spatially explicit dataset to study the link between agricultural performance and rural poverty in madagascar we show that controlling for geographical and physical characteristics communes that have higher rates of adoption of improved agricultural technologies and consequently higher crop yields enjoy lower food prices higher real wages for unskilled workers and better welfare indicators the empirical evidence strongly favors support for improved agricultural production as an important part of any strategy to reduce the high poverty and food insecurity rates currently prevalent in rural madagascar

financial market efficiency in an agrarian economy microeconometric analysis of the pakistani punjab the shadow price of capital in production is a useful indicator of the efficacy of the rural financial system using data on participants and non participants in a small farm credit programme from the pakistani punjab this article estimates the shadow price of capital endogenous switching regressions techniques are employed to control for the likely heterogeneity of borrowers versus non borrowers results indicate that an individual selected at random from the population of small farmers would experience a 200 per cent rate of return on the first rupee borrowed from the small farm credit programme indicating a high shadow price of capital and a prima facie case for small farm credit programmes

the relation between farm size and farm productivity the role of family labor supervision and credit constraints abstract the paper shows that if the performance of hired farmhands is affected by supervision from family members and if the availability of credit is dependent on the amount of land owned then a systematic positive or negative relationship between per acre yields and farm size will prevail a model with no supervision effects on labor productivity would predict that yields are unaffected by farm size the paper also investigates the relation between land utilization and owned holding size when land rental possibilities are limited results are shown to be compatible with various observed patterns in ldcs