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

why is china different from eastern europe perspectives from organization theory we draw from recent work in organization theory to explain the differences in reform strategies between china and eastern europe an experimentation approach was adopted in china whereas a big bang approach was more favored in eastern europe the explanation is based on differences in the organizational structure of central planning u form in eastern europe and m form in china the m form is more flexible because it makes local experiments possible contrary to the u form where this would give rise to major complications in coordination

structural factors in the economic reforms of china eastern europe and the former soviet union reform in china and russia jeffrey sachs and wing thye woo china s experience does not show that gradual reform is superior to the shock therapy undertaken in eastern europe and the former soviet union eefsu differing performance primarily reflects different economic structures prior to reform china was a peasant agricultural society eefsu was urban and overindustrialized in both jobs in state enterprises were so heavily subsidized that workers refused to move to new industries elsewhere even when productivity in the latter was much higher in eefsu the large state sector impeded structural adjustment curtailing subsidies would have produced many losers who used their power to resist this outcome failure to curtail subsidies then cut off the potential supply of labour and other factors to new emerging firms china s state enterprises have not performed as well as the rest of the chinese economy and do not explain its success rapid growth was possible because the large agricultural sector contained vast surplus labour and did not enjoy subsidies and soft budget constraints once constraints on migration across regions and jobs were removed this labour was available to fuel expansion in new industries unlike the distributional conflict in eefsu in china reallocation of labour allowed all groups to gain in both partial liberalization also unleashed macroeconomic pressures manageable in china because of rapid growth and adequate monetary policy but explosive in much of eefsu because of deeper structural problems and gross monetary mismanagement

immiserized growth in liberalized agriculture abstract this paper offers a simple model that reconciles rivalrous claims about liberalization s impact on low income agrarian economies growth can accompany smallholder welfare reduction the model developed here reverses the causality of bhagwati s immiserizing growth model price shocks cause welfare effects that drive output response rather than output shocks causing price shocks and then welfare effects as in the trade theoretic original immiserized growth seems a plausible explanation for some important cases e g the malagasay case considered here in which liberalization appears to have engendered both real agricultural growth and heightened food security stress among smallholder food producers

political economy of public policies insights from distortions to agricultural and food markets the agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational while others have been gradual but persistent this paper reviews and synthesizes the literature on trends and fluctuations in market distortions and the political economy explanations that have been advanced based on a rich global data set covering a half century of evidence on commodities countries and policy instruments the paper identifies hypotheses that have been explored in the literature on the extent of market distortions and the conditions under which reform may be feasible

technological change rediscovering the engine of productivity growth in china s rural economy abstract this paper focuses on measuring the relative importance of the role of technology versus that of institutional innovation in china s rural economy a six equation rice sector model explaining provincial level technology adoption yield and factor demand are econometrically estimated using data from china s 13 rice growing provinces for the period 1975 1990 growth decomposition analysis identifies technology adoption as the most important determinant of rice yield growth during 1978 1984 accounting for nearly 40 percent the change institutional reform accounted for 35 percent of the growth in 1985 1990 technology accounts for all of the increase in rice yields the study demonstrates earlier studies may have over estimated the impact of decollectivization

the creation and spread of technology and total factor productivity in china s agriculture the overall goal of this study is to create a framework for assessing the trends of china s national and international investment in agricultural research and to measure its impact on total factor productivity the main methodological contribution is to provide more convincing measures of crop specific technologies from china s national research program and of those imported from the international agricultural research system our results find that from 1980 to 1995 china s total factor productivity for rice wheat and maize grew rapidly and new technology accounts for most of the productivity growth

circumstance and choice the role of initial conditions and policies in transition economies the experience of countries in transition from a planned to a market oriented economy has varied greatly the clearest differences are between the east asian countries china and vietnam and the countries of central and eastern europe cee and the former soviet union fsu china and vietnam have contained inflation and benefited from continued high growth in gdp since the beginning of their reforms while all cee and fsu countries have experienced large declines in output and most have experienced hyperinflation but even in cee and the fsu differences are marked some countries have lost over half of their gdp and growth performance in a number of countries is still poor while others are growing strongly some are still suffering from high inflation while others have successfully reduced annual inflation what determines this divergence of outcomes across transition countries no study so far has analyzed the interaction of all factors including initial conditions political change and reforms in a unified framework including cee the fsu china and vietnam the authors examine these broader interactions but focus first on the role of initial conditions such as initial macroeconomic distortions and differences in economic structure and institutions which have been emphasized less in the literature they find that initial conditions and economic policy jointly determine the large differences in economic performance among the 28 transition economies in the sample initial conditions dominate in explaining inflation but economic liberalization is the most important factor determining differences in growth but reform policy choices are not exogenous they depend in turn on both initial conditions and political reform with political reform the most important determinant of the speed and comprehensiveness of economic liberalization other findings provide additional insight into these relationships results show that liberalization has a negative contemporaneous impact but a stronger positive effect on performance over time the results also show that macroeconomic and structural distortions are negatively related to both policy and performance regarding the former unfavorable initial conditions discourage policy reforms but do not diminish their effectiveness once they are implemented the authors find some evidence that the influence of initial conditions diminishes over time this is in part because many of the initial conditions are themselves modified in the course of transition monetary overhangs are dissipated through inflation industrial overhang is eroded as plants shut down and market memory returns through experience

how private contract enforcement mechanisms can succeed where public institutions fail the case of juhocukor a s the enforcement of contracts is necessary for efficient exchange and investment in economic activities contracts can be enforced through a variety of mechanisms both public and private however in many developing and transitional countries these public institutions are either absent or ineffective in ensuring contract enforcement under such conditions private enforcement mechanisms may provide a suitable replacement for public enforcement institutions this may be done externally through a third party or internally through self enforcing agreements this paper analyzes the use of self enforcing arrangements or internal private enforcement mechanisms using a case study of an agri business in a transition economy juhocukor a s a slovakian sugar processor we show that the use of internal private contract enforcement mechanisms can have a significant positive effect on output and efficiency for both partners to the exchange transaction in an environment characterized by the absence or ineffectiveness of public enforcement institutions 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

contract farming in staple food chains the case of rice in benin abstract in this paper we analyze the impact of smallholder participation in a contract farming scheme in the rice sector in benin we use data from a cross sectional farm household survey and different propensity score matching estimations to reveal how participation in a contract farming scheme affects smallholder rice production we find that contract farming results in expansion of the rice area intensification of rice production increased commercialization of rice and higher farm gate prices and ultimately contributes to rice output growth and increased income our findings imply that contract farming can contribute to upgrading the rice supply chain and the development of the rice sector in benin promoting and supporting the spread of contract farming schemes in the sector might be an effective way to contribute to reaching the government goals of expanding rice production to become self sufficient and improving rice quality to compete with imported rice while there is a large empirical literature on contract farming in high value and commodity export sectors studies on contract farming in staple food sectors are very scarce our results document that contract farming for staple food crops can be sustainable and benefit smallholder farmers which is against theoretical expectations that contracting for staple food crops is not feasible because of contract enforcement problems that stem from a low value of produce low storage and transport costs and a larger number of buyers in the chain our study contributes to understanding the role that contract farming might play in the much needed upgrading of domestic and staple food crop sectors in developing countries

allocation of transmission losses to bilateral contracts in a competitive environment under open access market driven transactions have become the new independent decision variables defining the behavior of the power system understanding the impact of bilateral transactions on system losses is important to be able to allocate a loss component to each individual transaction and improve economic efficiency the theory presented here is based on the argument that it is always possible to compute the exact loss allocation corresponding to an infinitesimal bilateral transaction this leads to a set of governing differential equations whose solution yields the loss allocation for contracts of any size several examples illustrate the properties of both the proposed allocation equations and other methods the dependence of the proposed solution on the path of integration and a number of implementation issues

the political economy of targeting one of the most widely used method of targeting is to reduce welfare benefits as income rises although the need for such targeting is clear enough it also entails two important difficulties firstly the prospect for the recipients of losing part of their benefits if they were to earn more can be a deterrent to work harder secondly by reducing the number of recipients targeting reduces the political support for taxation and redistribution the purpose of this paper is to study the voting equilibrium of the degree of targeting and the level of taxation in an economy where labour supply is variable the analysis reveals that targeting may be fatal for redistribution even though it rejects strictly less than the richest half of the population and that it is not possible for a coalition of the extremes to form and reject the middle income group from the welfare system moreover because targeting affects labour supply we find that pareto improvements are possible when targeting is either too low or too high we also find that voting simultaneously over taxation and targeting is favourable to the poor in the sense that they can converge to their most preferred policy by successively forming a majority coalition with the rich to increase targeting and with the middle to increase taxation

a pricing method for transmission loss based on sensitivity analysis this paper presents a method to evaluate the economic value of transmission loss based on the share proportion principle and the sensitivity analysis we first formulate an optimal power flow problem to derive the operation conditions the nodal prices of each bus and the transmission prices between two buses and then trace the transmission loss during operation based on the share proportion principle of the graph theory the sensitivity analysis has been used to identify the wheeling path from each generator to any load and the value of transmission loss is also evaluated the proposed method is applied to the ieee 30 bus standard system which confirms our theoretical results the proposed method can be used not only to improve the efficient usage of the power grid and congestion management but also to provide valuable economic signals for the generation or transmission investment

mind the gap please the changing nature of entry jobs in britain we examine wages in jobs taken by those out of work entry jobs and the characteristics of the individuals who fill them there are large entry wage gaps relative to other jobs more importantly real entry wages have fallen by around 20 log points relative to all other jobs since 1979 one quarter of this decline is accounted for by differences in individual and job characteristics and around 40 from an unexplained fall in the position of entry jobs in the wage distribution that entry wages differ from the stock of all wages should be incorporated into labour supply modelling

production and productivity growth in chinese agriculture new measurement and evidence abstract this study uses a more appropriate approach to measure growth in output input and total factor productivity for chinese agriculture using newly estimated production and productivity growth indexes the impact of rural reforms have been reassessed the conventional approach would overestimate the impact of the rural reforms on both production and productivity growth nevertheless both production and productivity still grew at respectable rates during the reform period the study also found that in order to promote the long term production and productivity growth which is much needed to feed the chinese population in the future it is imperative for the government to increase its investment in agriculture as the effects of recent institutional changes have been largely exhausted

revisiting the cotton problem a comparative analysis of cotton reforms in sub saharan africa summary the cotton sector has been among the most regulated in sub saharan africa ssa and still largely is in west and central africa wca despite repeated reform recommendations by international donors on the other hand orthodox reforms in east and southern africa esa have not always yielded the expected results this paper uses a stylized contracting model to investigate the link between market structure and equity and efficiency in ssa cotton sectors explain the outcomes of reforms in esa and analyze the potential consequences of reforms in wca we illustrate our arguments with empirical observations on cotton sector performance

antidumping law as a collusive device in the united states many antidumping petitions are withdrawn before the investigations are completed prusa 1992 argues that petitions are used by domestic industries to induce foreign industries into collusive agreements in his model all antidumping petitions should be withdrawn which is not the case this paper provides a model in which only some petitions are withdrawn withdrawal depends on two key parameters coordination cost and bargaining power of domestic and foreign industries a new data set is constructed to test the model on the u s experience for the period 1980 97 the econometric analysis supports the theoretical conclusions of the model

components of nodal prices for electric power systems a method is presented to provide a detailed description of each nodal price for electric power systems by breaking down each nodal price into a variety of parts corresponding to the concerned factors such as generations transmission congestion voltage limitations and other constraints or elements this complete information for nodal prices can be used not only to improve the efficient usage of power grid and congestion management but also to design a reasonable pricing structure of power systems or to provide economic signals for generation or transmission investment several numerical examples demonstrate this approach

limitations of contract farming as a pro poor strategy the case of maize outgrower schemes in upper west ghana summary contract farming cf arrangements have the potential to address market failures and improve technology adoption productivity and welfare in ghana government and donors use cf as a strategy for increasing adoption of new agricultural technologies and developing value chains yet to date there has not been a rigorous assessment of these cf schemes the focus in this paper is on different maize based cf schemes in the poorest and most remote region in ghana it assesses the profitability and potential impact of these cf schemes utilizing a unique plot level dataset that covers two periods of data and two maize plots scheme and non scheme per household and employing matching techniques and an instrumental variable approach to address selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity across farmers these are complemented by a community level survey in depth interviews with scheme operators and a series of key informant interviews results show that these schemes led to improved technology adoption and yield increases in addition a subset of maize farmers with high yield improvements due to cf participation have high profits maize cf schemes also enabled market coordination and consistent supply of quality maize to downstream industries however on average the impact of the cf schemes on profitability is negative even when input diversion is accounted for yield increases are not high enough to compensate for higher input requirements and the cost of capital under the schemes despite higher yields the costs to produce one metric tonne of maize under cf schemes are higher than on maize farms without cf schemes twice that of several countries in africa and more than seven times higher than that of major maize exporting countries the united states brazil and argentina sustainability of these cf schemes will largely depend on developing and promoting much improved varieties and technologies that boost yields in order to compensate for the high input and credit costs

benefits and the labour supply of women married to unemployed men this paper seeks to explain the low labor force participation rates of women married to unemployed men in the reducing the net increment to household income that would result from the wife s employment simple probit models of the participation and part time full time decisions are estimated using a large cross sectional data set the results confirm the importance of severe disincentive effects controlling for labor market conditions income related benefits are found to create worse problems than national insurance benefits both types impede part time work in particular copyright 1990 by royal economic society

globalization privatization and vertical coordination in food value chains in developing and transition countries food and agricultural commodity value chains in developing and transition countries have undergone tremendous changes in the past decades companies and property rights have been privatized markets liberalized and economies integrated into global food systems the liberalization and privatization initially caused the collapse of state controlled vertical coordination more recently private vertical coordination systems have emerged and are growing rapidly as a response to consumer demand for food quality and safety on the one hand and the farms production constraints caused by factor market imperfections in this article we 1 demonstrate the importance of these changes 2 discuss the implications for efficiency and equity and 3 provide empirical evidence on the effects in several developing and transition countries

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

the elusive quest for supply response to cash crop market reforms in sub saharan africa the case of cotton little cross cutting conclusions emerge from comparative studies on the impact of structural adjustment on sub saharan african agricultural performance this paper aims to illuminate this long standing debate by adopting a novel quantitative sectoral and long term approach controlling for country specific determinants it incorporates detailed information on the pace of reforms and the nature of post reform market structure pre reform policies and weather conditions at the cultivation zone level the cotton sector is the focus of this paper because of its particularly interesting institutional history the authors find that the changes in market structure brought about by reforms have had very different impacts in francophone west and central africa and in the rest of sub saharan africa in the former region production has been higher but productivity lower on average in regulated markets than in monopolistic markets conversely in the liberalized markets of the rest of sub saharan africa productivity has been higher in than in monopolistic markets but highly competitive markets seem to have produced less than monopolistic sectors

social security policy in a changing labour market conditions in the uk labour market of the 1990s are markedly different from those which prevailed in the post war period when the modern welfare state was created the main differences include a growth in long term unemployment in female part time employment and in low paid employment and self employment in some respects social security policy has adapted to reflect these new patterns the clearest example of this is the introduction and enhancement of in work benefits such as family credit however two of the main strands of benefit policy in recent decades greater reliance on family based means testing and an increased role for private insurance do not fit so well with labour market trends in the case of the privatization of mortgage insurance the result is likely to be further redistribution away from those in insecure or low paid employment copyright 1995 by oxford university press

a penalty scheme for reducing electricity price volatility the deregulation of electric power systems in many parts of the world has changed the mechanism of electricity pricing unlike the fixed price in conventional power systems electricity price varies with time and location in the new deregulated environment electricity prices in a restructured power system can be highly volatile due to the random nature of system failures and demands it is therefore very difficult for the independent system operator iso to control the price and associated risk the high prices beyond control have resulted in significant impacts on customers as well as on system operation this paper proposes a penalty scheme for reducing electricity price volatility caused by failures in generation companies gencos or transmission companies transcos in this scheme gencos and transcos will be penalized if their equipment failures result in unexpected price changes the price decomposition technique is used to evaluate the price components caused by random failures the penalty can be calculated based on the difference of electricity price components between the normal state and the contingency states moreover a simplified schema which is based on profit analysis is also proposed in this paper the proposed penalty scheme not only gives the gencos and transcos an incentive to improve their reliabilities but also provides a flexible tool for the iso to control the system price risk the possible shortcomings of the proposed schema are also specified in the paper the ieee rts is analyzed to illustrate the technique

the design of reform packages under uncertainty the authors present a model of large scale economic reforms modeled on the transition process in eastern europe with aggregate and individual uncertainty concerning the outcome of reforms the government is assumed to choose the speed and sequencing of reforms the authors compare big bang strategies with gradualist reform packages they show that gradualist reform packages may be easier to get started optimal sequencing of reforms should aim at creating constituencies for further reforms and gradualism may generate a higher investment response because of a lower option value of waiting than would a big bang approach copyright 1995 by american economic association

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

transmission management for congested power system a review of concepts technical challenges and development of a new methodology transmission networks have some constraints that should be addressed in order to ensure sufficient control to maintain the security level of a power system while maximising market efficiency the most obvious drawback of transmission constraints is a congestion problem that becomes an obstacle to perfect competition among the market participants since it can influence spot market pricing as the power flow violates transmission constraints redispatching generating units is required and this will cause the price at every node to vary this manuscript presents concepts technical challenges and methodology for investigating an alternative solution to the redispatch mechanism and then formulates lmp scheme using an optimisation technique that may well control congestion as the main issue the lmp scheme are varied and improved to take into account the energy price congestion revenue cost of losses as well as the transmission usage tariff by utilising shift factor based optimal power flow sf opf which is derived from the well known dc optimal power flow dc opf model

food marketing liberalization and trader entry evidence from madagascar abstract food marketing liberalization was expected to induce massive trader entry and competitive markets in africa despite evidence of trader entry enterprise expansion remains difficult and many claim market power persists though perhaps in different hands this paper confronts this puzzle of substantial market entry that might not foster competition data from madagascar reveal distinct groups within rural food marketing channels separated by intraindustry mobility barriers that limit entry to a few niches moreover individuals place within the rural marketing network is defined largely by a priori social identity so the experience of food marketing liberalization varies across socially distinct subpopulations

trade standards and poverty evidence from senegal summary in the debate on trade and poverty it is argued that standards act as trade barriers and cause marginalization of the poor this paper quantifies income and poverty effects of high standards trade and integrates labor market effects by using company and household survey data from the vegetable export chain in senegal we find that exports grew sharply despite increasing standards contributing importantly to rural incomes and poverty reduction tightening standards induced a shift from smallholder contract farming to integrated estate production altering the mechanism through which poor households benefit through labor markets instead of product markets

changing coalitions in value chains and the political economy of agricultural and food policy within this issue of the oxford review of economic policy which focuses on the growing divergence between the agriculture sector and the food sector this paper focuses on how this changing divergence affects the political economy of agricultural and food policies

liberalization endogenous institutions and growth a comparative analysis of agricultural reforms in africa asia and europe thirty years ago a vast share of low and middle income countries was heavily state controlled the liberalizations of the 1980s and 1990s had greatly different effects on growth in countries in africa asia and europe a comparative framework is used to document these differences and a model is developed to formally analyze how liberalization affects production and income distribution when the institutions that govern production and exchange are also affected hypotheses are derived for how endogenous institutional adjustments affect the growth response to liberalization these insights motivate a series of explanations for the differences in performance across regions and commodities following liberalization

the social performance and distributional consequences of contract farming an equilibrium analysis of the arachide de bouche program in senegal abstract this paper is an empirical analysis of the impact of a contract farming program in senegal we examine the access of poorer community members to contracts and the effect of the program on the income of participants the program performs very well on both counts participants and nonparticipants are indistinguishable by wealth measures and farmers increase their income substantially by participating in the program we attribute the former to the program s mobilization of local information through its use of village intermediaries permitting the substitution of social collateral for physical collateral and making the program more accessible to the poor

success and failure of reform insights from the transition of agriculture this paper analyzes the linkages between the reform strategies in transition countries and economic performance the authors focus on agriculture because of the sharpness of the policy changes fundamental differences among countries and relative simplicity of agricultural relationships the authors document post reform performance in the transition countries of asia and europe the authors show how a pricing reform and subsidy reductions b land rights reform and policies that affect farm restructuring and c the presence institutions that facilitate exchange either markets or market substitutes affect output and productivity the paper ends with general lessons on reforms and transition

a short history of labour turnover job tenure and job security 1975 93 how extensive is labour turnover and how does it vary by gender skill and over time using survey data from britain between 1975 and 1993 this study documents these features and discovers evidence of widening inequalities in job stability and security for the majority still in full time employment average job durations are little changed from those of twenty years ago for those seeking employment however current patterns of job creation mean that entry jobs are now of shorter duration more unstable and relatively less well paid nor do entry jobs offer sufficient access into stable jobs as a result entry jobs are increasingly taken by those with a partner in work polarising the distribution of employment and thereby disenfranchising around one fifth of working age households from regular access to earned incomes copyright 1995 by oxford university press

transition and agricultural labor reforms have strongly affected agricultural employment in transition countries but in remarkably different ways we present a theoretical model and an empirical analysis to explain differences in labor adjustment during transition we show that the differences are due to a combination of variations in initial conditions and differences in reform policies and effects the removal of price distortions and subsidies caused wage and price adjustments during transition and a reduction in labor demand in agriculture surplus labor outflow from agriculture was further stimulated by the privatization of the farm assets as they improve incentives and remove constraints for optimal factor allocation and structural adjustment the shift to individual farms which was especially strong in labor intensive production systems with low labor productivity in agriculture has reduced the outflow of labor from agriculture by improving farm governance and labor efficiency although this effect was mitigated by losses in scale economies due to disruptions and market imperfections in transition in general labor outflow was considerably lower on individual farms than on corporate farms due to a combination of factors related to human capital access to finance and physical capital in the last section of the article we present a general framework for understanding labor adjustments in transition countries specifically we show that there are several patterns of labor transition in one pattern followed by e g the czech republic and hungary there is initially a strong survival of the restructured large scale corporate farms that have laid off many workers in the second phase of transition gradually the importance of individual farms increases in other countries such as romania the opposite has happened in these countries there is an immediate strong shift to individual farms while labor use increases on average in agriculture after this initial phase the shift to individual farms continues albeit more slowly and labor use in agriculture starts to decline finally our analysis shows that in countries such as russia and ukraine much of the surplus labor is still employed by little reformed former collective and state farms major adjustments await more progress in agricultural and general reforms

moneylenders and bankers price increasing subsidies in a monopolistically competitive market abstract in many areas of the world a significant part of the cost of obtaining a good or service is the cost of enforcing the contracts entailed in its provision we present models of markets with endogenous enforcement costs motivated by studies of rural credit markets we show that subsidies may have perverse effects under monopolistic competition increasing prices or inducing exit higher prices interest rates result from the loss of scale economies or from negative externalities among suppliers the models are consistent with the puzzling evidence that infusions of government subsidized formal credit have not improved the terms offered by moneylenders

false promise or false premise the experience of food and input market reform in eastern and southern africa abstract the literature on the effects of agricultural market reform in africa is sharply divided and inconsistent this article attempts to reconcile opposing viewpoints on the effects of food and input market policy reform in eastern and southern africa drawing from studies of ethiopia kenya malawi zambia and zimbabwe we argue that a major source of the controversy stems from assumptions that countries have actually moved to a liberalized market environment we find that many of the most fundamental elements of the reform programs either remain unimplemented were reversed within several years or were implemented in such a way as to negate private sector investment incentives a framework is developed for explaining why some countries have been able to liberalize their food and fertilizer markets while others have not these findings have implications for how donor assistance and policy oriented research can more constructively contribute to an improved policy environment

agricultural incentives in developing countries measuring the effect of sectoral and economywide policies the impact of sector specific direct and economywide indirect policies on agricultural incentives for 18 developing countries for the period 1975 84 are estimated the direct effect is measured by the proportional difference between the producer price and the border price adjusting for distribution storage transport and other marketing costs the indirect effect has two components 1 the impact of the unsustainable portion of the current account deficit and of industrial protection policies on the real exchange rate and thus on the price of agricultural commodities relative to nonagricultural nontradables and 2 the impact of industrial protection policies on the relative price of agricultural commodities to that of nonagricultural tradable goods the authors found that a in almost all cases the direct effect is equivalent to a tax on exportable goods and to a subsidy for importables b the indirect effect also taxes agriculture and dominates the direct effect and c the direct policies for both importables and exportables stabilize domestic producer prices

the labour market and economic risk friend or foe this paper examines the twofold role of the labour market in household economic risk management as a source of household consumption risk and as an instrument for insuring consumption against contingencies it outlines a framework for analysing this twofold role of the labour market and uses data from the british household panel survey 1991 1996 to explore this empirically it identifies the relative importance of the labour market and other factors in producing changes in the financial situation of individuals it also implements full insurance tests of whether unemployment and other external shocks to the household are correlated with consumption growth it concludes that labour market factors are a dominant source of change in individuals financial situation with a predominantly positive effect on the financial situation of the better off and a predominantly negative impact on the financial situation of the less well off it also finds that households are unable to fully insure their consumpti

the impact of interfirm relationships on investment evidence from the polish dairy sector abstract financial constraints and credit market imperfections are a major constraint on investment growth and poverty reduction in transition and developing countries this paper analyses the impact on investments of financial assistance programs as part of interfirm relationships our empirical evidence is based on a two stage survey methodology qualitative evidence on dairy companies assistance programs was gathered in the first stage through in depth interviews at the level of the dairy companies quantitative data on 290 milk producing rural households in poland was collected through a random survey in the second stage the empirical analysis shows that dairy companies have played an important role in financial assistance in particular for dairy specific investments in addition they had an important indirect impact on farm activities and investments through feed supply and loan guarantee programs

institutional reform and labor reallocation during transition theory evidence from polish agriculture abstract reallocation of agricultural labor during transition differs widely between regions and countries our analysis shows that agricultural labor reallocation in poland is determined by a the dramatic adjustment of prices and production costs caused by price liberalization and subsidy cuts b regional differences in farm organization and the impact of institutional reforms on these organizations c structural problems constraining intersectoral mobility the latter limit the benefits from the institutional reforms long term efficiency gains and sustainable rural development are conditional upon reducing such structural constraints and improving the functioning of the labor market

contracts hold up and exports textiles and opium in colonial india trade and export it is argued spur economic growth this paper studies the microeco nomics of exporting we build a heuristic model of transactions between exporters and producers and relate it to east india company operations in colonial bengal our model and the historical record stress two difficulties the exporter and its agents might not uphold payment agreements and producers might not honor sales contracts the model shows when procurement succeeds or fails highlighting the tension between these two hold up problems we analyze several cases including the east india company s cotton textile venture the famous opium monopoly and present day contract farming

responsiveness flexibility and market liberalization in china s agriculture been at most only limited gains from market liberalization if one were to take the findings of this admittedly scant literature seriously it would appear as if there is at most only a relatively small impact from market reforms in china we believe there are three possible but only one plausible explanations for the findings first if market liberalization actually contributes little to no growth or increases in output or incomes this would of course in part explain why economies that lead reform with market liberalization do not experience significant gains theory and the experiences of other economies in other settings however would argue against such an interpretation second it could be that china s agricultural market liberalization has just proceeded so slowly that it is still too early for output to have been positively affected by market liberalization however as seen above the record on the market expansion and the observations of many researchers would not support this view