the ambivalent impact of coffee certification on farmers welfare a matched panel approach for cooperatives in central kenya certification is promoted to improve rural welfare through better market access and improved agricultural practices we compare net effects of fairtrade and utz certified coffee production in central kenya using a matched panel from 218 farm households that belong to three cooperatives and were visited twice in 2009 and 2013 we distinguish between effects at field farm household cooperative community and market levels both certification regimes improved coffee returns but fairtrade was more effective in coffee processing whereas utz contributed to productivity under stagnating coffee prices fairtrade farmers increased their coffee specialization while utz farmers reduced coffee areas but increased yield

two stage optimal control problems with an explicit switch point dependence optimality criteria and an example of delivery lags and investment abstract this paper provides necessary conditions for the solution of two stage optimal control problems where the switch point is a choice variable and where the switch point appears as an argument of the integrands in each integral which comprise the criterion index to be maximized problems of this variety have arisen in the exhaustible resource and neoclassical investment literature using the conditions necessary for the solution of these problems we analyze an example of optimal investment in the presence of delivery lags and show how the optimal switch point delivery lag responds to shifts in exogenous parameters

the impact of fair trade certification for coffee farmers in peru smallholder farmers producing for fair trade market outlets are usually considered to benefit from better prices and stable market outlets however many empirical studies verifying this impact suffer from strong selection bias this study uses a balanced sample of fair trade farmers and likewise nonfair trade producers of organic and conventional coffee from peru to compare the net effects on production income and expenditures wealth and investments and attitudes and perceptions after careful matching we find only modest direct income and production effects but significant changes in organization input use wealth and assets and risk attitudes moreover important differences between farmers with early and more recent ft affiliation are registered

private food safety and quality standards for fresh produce exporters the case of hortico agrisystems zimbabwe abstract there is evidence that the challenges of complying with stricter food safety and quality standards are acting to exclude small scale producers from export supply chains for high value agricultural products the case of hortico agrisystems illustrates the considerable challenges and costs faced by supermarket suppliers in sourcing from a broad base of small scale producers in the context of evolving food safety and quality standards while small scale producers are able to achieve levels of compliance at least equal to those of large scale producers multi tiered and dynamic systems of control are required to maintain control these need to include measures that facilitate compliance incentives to reward good performance and penalties to punish non compliance in establishing a sustainable supply system in this context both exporters and small scale producers face a steep learning curve in adjusting to new requirements further emphasising the need for supply chains to be responsive to change

ingredients of famine analysis availability and entitlements famines often take place in situations of moderate to good food availability without any significant decline of food supply per head the paper presents an alternative approach to famines which does not concentrate on availability but on people s ability to command food through legal means available in the society including the use of production possibilities trade opportunities entitlements vis a vis the state etc the approach is explained focusing on exchange entitlement mappings fluctuations in which can lead to big shifts in the intergroup distribution of food command the approach is then applied to the bengal famine of 1943 the ethiopian famine in wollo in 1973 and the bangladesh famine in 1974 and some general conclusions are drawn about the nature and classes of famines

profits and poverty certification s troubled link for nicaragua s organic and fairtrade coffee producers abstract governments donors and ngos have promoted environmental and social certification schemes for coffee producers as certified market channels are assumed to offer higher prices and better incomes additionally it is presumed that these certifications contribute to poverty reduction of smallholders yet gross margins profits and poverty levels of certified smallholder coffee producers have not yet been quantitatively analyzed applying random sampling techniques our quantitative household survey of 327 randomly selected members of conventional organic and organic fairtrade certified cooperatives in nicaragua is complemented by over a hundred qualitative in depth interviews the results show that although farm gate prices of certified coffees are higher than of conventional coffees the profitability of certified coffee production and its subsequent effect on poverty levels is not clear cut per capita net coffee incomes are insufficient to cover basic needs of all coffee producing households certified producers are more often found below the absolute poverty line than conventional producers over a period of ten years our analysis shows that organic and organic fairtrade farmers have become poorer relative to conventional producers we conclude that coffee yield levels profitability and efficiency need to be increased because prices for certified coffee cannot compensate for low productivity land or labor constraints

the economics of smallholder organic contract farming in tropical africa summary the paper examines the revenue effects of certified organic contract farming for smallholders and of adoption of organic agricultural farming methods in a tropical african context the comparison in both cases is with farming systems that are organic by default survey data from a large organic coffee contract farming scheme in uganda are reported and analyzed using a standard ols regression and a full information maximum likelihood fiml estimate of the heckman selection model the analysis finds that controlling for a range of factors there are positive revenue effects both from participation in the scheme and more modestly from applying organic farming techniques

do farmers benefit from participating in specialty markets and cooperatives the case of coffee marketing in costa rica1 historically low prices in the conventional coffee market have caused financial and social hardship among coffee farmers in the face of this crisis specialty markets have attracted the attention of the international donor community these market segments have shown consistent growth over the last decade and exhibit price premiums in international markets therefore if higher prices are passed on to farmers access to specialty markets could help to alleviate the crisis brought on by low prices in the conventional sector the present study attempts to identify the factors that determine farmers participation in specialized markets and whether participation in these markets leads to higher prices for farmers a two stage model is used to analyze farmers marketing decisions and their effect on the prices received this procedure allows us to control for the endogeneity bias introduced by the marketing choice our results indicate that farmers participating in the specialty coffee segment do in fact receive higher prices than those participating in conventional channels additionally we find that participation in cooperatives has a positive impact on the probability that a farmer chooses to grow specialty coffee and analogously on the prices that they receive based on these results it seems that efforts to increase participation in the specialty coffee segment and in cooperatives would help to lessen some of the hardships brought on by low prices in the conventional coffee sector

agrifood supply chain private sector standards and farmers health evidence from kenya this article evaluates the impact of adoption of european union eu private sector standards on farmers health in rural kenya the study utilizes cross sectional farm household level data collected in 2006 from a randomly selected sample of 439 small scale export farmers we estimate the casual impact by utilizing a two stage poisson regression model two stage standard treatment effect model as well as by regression based on propensity score to assess the robustness of the results using these techniques we demonstrate that the pesticide ascribed incidence of acute illness symptoms and the associated cost of illness significantly decrease with the adoption of standards ceteris paribus farmers who adopt standards experience 70 lesser incidence of acute illness and spent about 50 60 less on restoring their health than nonadopters although standards can potentially prevent resource poor smallholders from maintaining their position in lucrative export markets they can also result in positive changes in the health of those farmers who do adopt them as shown by these results this implies that if adopted on a large scale standards may reduce production externalities corroborating the view that they may serve as a catalyst to transform production systems in developing countries

necessary conditions for infinite horizon discounted two stage optimal control problems abstract in many situations in economics one would like to analyse the optimal timing of switching between alternative and consecutive regimes a natural framework for such an analysis seems to be one of multi stage optimal control problems where the switching instants between regimes are endogenously determined the existing literature considers only the case of two stage optimal control problems with finite horizon however in many cases it seems more appropriate to consider a problem with an infinite horizon by deriving the appropriate necessary conditions for such a problem we generalise the methodology in analysing endogenous regime switches

credibility of propensity score matching estimates an example from fair trade certification of coffee producers abstractpropensity score matching psm is an increasingly popular method for evaluation studies in agricultural and development economics however statisticians and econometricians have stressed that results rely on untestable assumptions and therefore guidelines for researchers on how to improve credibility have been developed we follow one of these guidelines with a data set analysed by other authors to evaluate the impact of fair trade certification on the income of coffee producers we provide thereby a best practice example of how to evaluate the credibility of psm estimates we find that a thorough assessment of the assumptions made renders the data we use not suitable for a credible psm estimation of the effects of treatment we conclude that the debate about the impact of fair trade certification would greatly benefit from a detailed reporting of credibility checking

certification and access to export markets adoption and return on investment of organic certified pineapple farming in ghana summary global food markets demand adherence to food standards by farmers in developing countries such as globalgap and organic certifications this paper analyzes the adoption and profitability of certified farming using farm level data of 386 ghanaian small scale pineapple farmers we employ an endogenous switching regression model to examine the adoption and impact of organic certification on the return on investment roi in pineapple farming the empirical results indicate that both organic and globalgap certification achieve a positive roi however organic certified farming yields a significantly higher roi than globalgap certified farmers mainly due to the price premium on the organic market

tracking the quality premium of certified coffee evidence from ethiopia summary certification of voluntary sustainability standards vss is rapidly increasing in global value chains while consumers mostly in developed countries are willing to pay significant premiums for the certification of such standards it is not well understood how effectively these incentives are transmitted to producing countries we study vss more in particular fair trade and organic certification in ethiopia s coffee sector the country s most important export commodity using a unique census of transaction data at the export level and large scale data at the production level we find that transmission of export quality premiums to coffee producers is limited with only less than one third of this premium being passed on and we find limited evidence of effects due to communal investments moreover as quality premiums are small and average production levels in these settings are low we estimate that these premiums would only lead to an increased income for coffee farmers of 22 usd per year even with a perfect transmission scenario and therefore would have little impact on the welfare of the average coffee farmer given that the vss studied are characterized by the highest premiums among vss schemes it can be assumed that even lower benefits from other vss certification schemes trickle down to producers

selling at the farmgate or traveling to market using detailed survey data from uganda this article examines whether coffee producers sell to itinerant traders or directly to markets where they can get a higher price but must incur a transport cost we find that selling to the market is more likely when the quantity sold is large and the market is close by wealthy farmers are less likely to sell to the market possibly because the shadow value of their time is higher but if they have a large quantity of coffee for sale they are more likely to sell it to the market they are also more likely to travel to a distant market these findings are consistent with their better ability to pay for public transportation we find no evidence that the decision to sell at the farmgate is driven by a self control motive

the dynamics of political bureaucratic adaptation through the 1980s political science research produced a more dynamic view of how bureaucracies respond to changing political conditions however much of this research ignored the complex stimulus environment within which bureaucracies operate as well as the potentially rich bureaucratic response dynamic that can exist we extend our previous work on the dynamics of political control of the bureaucracy by developing a model of political bureaucratic adaptation themodel is tested with output data from four environmental protection agency programs between 1979 and 1988 the results show that politicalbureaucratic adaptation is indeed a more complex phenomenon than suggested by earlier research stimuli to bureaucratic behavior include discrete events event progressions and tonal shifts in the policy environment bureaucratic responses can be immediate delayed or distributed through time in probabilistic fashion substantively the results offer new insights on how political institutions affect bureaucratic behavior they also suggest how why and to what bureaucracy responds

food standards are good for middle class farmers we estimate the causal effect of food standards on vietnamese pangasius farmers wellbeing measured by per capita consumption expenditure we estimate both the average effects and the local average treatment effects on poorer and richer farmers by instrumental variable quantile regression our results indicate that large returns can be accrued from food standards but only for the upper middle class farmers i e those between the 50 and 85 quantiles of the expenditure distribution overall our result points to an exclusionary impact of standards for the poorest farmers while the richest do not apply standards because the added gain is too small

administrative procedures and political control of the bureaucracy administrative procedure the notice and comment process in the context of medicare physician payment reform a fundamental restructuring of the way in which the medicare program pays for physician services i find contrary to the deck stacking thesis that the health care financing administration hcfa was more responsive to physicians expecting reductions in fees than to the intended beneficiaries of the new payment system although these results do not necessarily imply that congress exerted little influence over hcfa decision making they suggest that certain administrative procedures do not operate as instruments of political control d elegation of policymaking authority from elected officials to unelected bureaucrats is a fact of contemporary american politics it does not however necessarily imply abdication as officeholders possess instruments that potentially limit bureaucratic discretion presidents for example fill many high level agency posts with appointees whose preferences closely resemble those of the chief executive members of congress regularly conduct oversight hearings which are proceedings designed to monitor and if necessary redirect agency activity the presence

comparing the profitability of organic and conventional production in family farming empirical evidence from brazil abstract several studies have compared the profitability of organic and conventional producers but present very conflicting results although in the majority of these papers selection bias due to observables is accounted for the possibility of selection based on unobservables has been largely overlooked in this paper we compare these two types of producers using a large and unique data of about 4 2 million family farmers in brazil standard propensity score matching techniques are used together with the procedure recently developed by oster forthcoming to address concerns about omitted variables our results confirm the working hypothesis that organic producer s profits are lower than conventional ones

linking smallholders to markets determinants and impacts of farmer collective action in kenya summary this article investigates determinants and impacts of cooperative organization using the example of smallholder banana farmers in kenya farmer groups are inclusive of the poor although wealthier households are more likely to join employing propensity score matching we find positive income effects for active group members yet price advantages of collective marketing are small and high value market potentials have not yet been tapped beyond prices farmer groups function as important catalysts for innovation adoption through promoting efficient information flows we discuss the conditions under which collective action is useful and through what mechanisms the potential benefits emerge

adaptive signal processing hierarchy and budgetary control in federal regulation control over agency budgets is a critical tool of political influence in regulatory decision making yet the causal mechanism of budgetary control is unclear do budgetary manipulations influence agencies by imposing resource constraints or by transmitting powerful signals to the agency i advance and test a stochastic process model of adaptive signal processing by a hierarchical agency to address this question the principal findings of the paper are two first presidents and congressional committees achieve budgetary control over agencies not by manipulating aggregate resource constraints but by transmitting powerful signals through budget shifts second bureaucratic hierarchy increases the agency s response time in processing budgetary signals limiting the efficacy of the budget as a device of political control i also show that the magnitude of agency response to budgetary signals increased for executive branch agencies after 1970 due to executive oversight reforms i conclude by discussing the limits of budgetary manipulations as a device of political control and the response of elected authorities to adaptive signal processing by agencies

farmer participation in supermarket channels production technology and efficiency the case of vegetables in kenya supermarkets are gaining ground in agrifood systems of many developing countries while recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector impacts on productivity and efficiency have hardly been studied we use a meta frontier approach and combine this with propensity score matching to estimate treatment effects among vegetable farmers in kenya participation in supermarket channels increases farm productivity in terms of meta technology ratios by 45 we also find positive and significant impacts on technical efficiency and scale efficiency supermarket expansion therefore presents opportunities for agricultural growth in the small farm sector which is crucial for poverty reduction in africa copyright 2012 oxford university press

bureaucratic discretion or congressional control regulatory policymaking by the federal trade commission this paper extends stigler and peltzman s approach to regulation by incorporating a legislature the model yields comparative statics results and hence testable implications the paper then tests between two opposing approaches about regulatory agency behavior the first assumes agencies operate independently of the legislature and hence exercise discretion the second assumes that congress controls agency decisions the recent behavior of the federal trade commission provides the empirical setting substantial evidence is found for the specific predictions of the model including the hypothesis of systematic congressional influence over ftc decisions

the latte revolution regulation markets and consumption in the global coffee chain abstract coffee is a truly global commodity and a major foreign exchange earner in many developing countries the global coffee chain has changed dramatically as a result of deregulation new consumption patterns and evolving corporate strategies from a balanced contest between producing and consuming countries within the politics of international coffee agreements power relations shifted to the advantage of transnational corporations a relatively stable institutional environment where proportions of generated income were fairly distributed between producing and consuming countries turned into one that is more informal unstable and unequal through the lenses of global commodity chain analysis this paper examines how these transformations affect developing countries and what policy instruments are available to address the emerging imbalances

general equilibrium treatment effects a study of tuition policy this paper defines and estimates general equilibrium treatment effects the conventional approach in the literature on treatment effects ignores interactions among individuals induced by the policy interventions being studied focusing on the impact of tuition policy and using estimates from our dynamic overlapping generations general equilibrium model of capital and human capital formation we find that general equilibrium impacts of tuition on college enrollment are an order of magnitude smaller than those reported in the literature on microeconomic treatment effects the assumptions used to justify the late parameter in a partial equilibrium setting do not hold in a general equilibrium setting policy changes induce two way flows we extend the late concept to a general equilibrium setting we present a more comprehensive evaluation to program evaluation by considering both the tax and benefit consequences of the program being evaluated and placing the analysis in a market setting this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

organic agriculture and fair trade a happy marriage a case study of certified smallholder black pepper farmers in india summary this study examines whether the joint adoption of organic and fair trade systems adds additional benefits to smallholders in developing countries we use panel data collected from 300 smallholder rural black pepper growers in kerala india to assess household welfare impacts we apply a multinomial endogenous switching regression model along with a counterfactual analysis to estimate certification effects results show that both certification systems have a significant impact on income compared to conventional black pepper farming however membership in fair trade marketing systems does not increase income of organic farmers but has positive effects on asset accumulation of smallholder farmers

governance of global value chains in response to food safety and certification standards the case of shrimp from vietnam summary we use global value chain gvc theory to understand governance of vietnam s shrimp farming industry we describe this gvc as buyer driven with important food safety standards imposed by governments of importing countries and new certification systems promoted by nongovernmental organizations ngos governance relations are clear between governments in importing countries and vietnam and between importers and ngos governance relations become more fragmented further down the chain where large numbers of small scale producers and traders operate this fragmentation may adversely affect access to the most lucrative markets and have the unanticipated effect of marginalizing small scale farmers and traders

fair trade organic coffee production in nicaragua sustainable development or a poverty trap abstract this article assesses the impact of fair trade organic coffee production on the well being of small scale farmers in nicaragua studying the results of organic management is crucial for evaluating the advantages of fair trade because approximately half of all fair trade coffee is also organically certified a wide range of farmers representatives of cooperatives and export companies in nicaragua were interviewed during seven months of field work between 2005 and 2008 fair trade organic production raises farmer income when low intensity organic farming is an alternative to low intensity conventional farming however low intensity farming produces very little coffee in the case of the most marginalized farmers keeping these farmers in poverty with higher intensities of management the economic advantages of fair trade organic production largely depend on prices in the mainstream market

fair trade organic coffee rural livelihoods and the agrarian question southern mexican coffee families in transition summary we use a random sample of coffee producing households in southern mexico to compare opportunities associated with government subsidies and migration to the role of fair trade organic coffee in household livelihoods although land and labor returns among fair trade organic coffee growers are higher than for conventional growers differences in yields are more important than price premiums moreover investment in education and labor opportunities outside coffee dominate those in fair trade organic coffee the results highlight the value of an integrated approach to the agrarian question that improves productivity and prices and supports other pathways for improving incomes

a dynamic model of open source vs proprietary r d abstract we propose a dynamic model in which firms compete to produce sequential and cumulative innovations and in which the more firms do research in one sector the more likely it is that one of them innovates firms choose research effort and whether to patent innovations or to use an open source license like the general public license we show that i patents generate a larger stationary reward but foreclose research within a sector and that ii open source generates a smaller stationary reward but allows everyone to use the technology and therefore by attracting firms to the sector it induces a faster pace of innovation we characterize all the equilibria of the model and show that in equilibrium an open source sector appears only after a proprietary sector we also find conditions under which the model has a unique equilibrium in which a proprietary and an open source sector coexist and compete in the short run but the open source sector dominates the industry in the long run we use our model to study whether patents are inefficient and to explain firms behavior in the software and the biomedical industry

some dynamic aspects of food standards food standards have existed since the beginning of trade and exchange but have increased and expanded in recent years affecting global and local value chains this has triggered vigorous debates on the impacts on trade and development standards may simultaneously enhance economic efficiency and redistribute rents complicating policy analysis and implying that the economics and the politics of standards are often hard to separate while substantial research has contributed important insights dynamic aspects of standards have not received much attention i present a framework to illustrate some dynamic economic and political aspects of standards in closed and open economies this framework integrates changes over time in preferences implementation costs and protectionist pressures as determinants of standards and suggests explanations for persistent differences in food standards across countries hysteresis in standards can persist due to protectionist motives even if the initial standards were not introduced for protectionist reasons i use some historical cases to document both the persistence and adjustment of standards over time and with international integration

the institutional dynamics of policy administration bureaucratic influence over securities regulation theory a dynamic systems model of administrative politics that 1 relaxes restrictive causal assumptions among the president congress and an administrative agency 2 emphasizes aggregate institutional behavior and 3 analyzes both anticipated and unanticipated policy behavior is set forth as a more general means to investigate agency political relationships hypotheses the main set of hypotheses focus on the aggregate institutional relationships among the president congress and administrative agency these four possible hypotheses include bureaucratic influence bureaucratic autonomy mutual influence and political influence the purpose here is to assess the relative merits of competing explanations for bureaucratic behavior securities regulation is a perfect area of inquiry to investigate these competing perspectives since the findings of existing research on this topic are disparate methods vector autoregressive time series statistical methods are used to empirically test the dynamic systems model of administrative politics by examining three empirical models of sec enforcement behavior in relation to presidential and congressional budgetary preference signals for the 1949 92 annual period results the sec sends potent signals of their own via their changes in regulatory outputs that will affect the budgetary preferences of its political principles however the sec s administrative outputs are shown to be somewhat less sensitive to political budgetary preference signals than what one would expect presidential and congressional budgetary preference signals with respect to the sec are interdependent to a sizeable extent thus raising doubts about the separate independent effect democratic institutions have over the bureaucracy the implications of this study suggest that conventional theories of agency political relations serve as an oversimplified way to study administrative behavior future research on this topic

globalization and smallholders the adoption diffusion and welfare impact of non traditional export crops in guatemala summary this paper uses a duration analysis based on adoption data spanning 25 years from six communities in the central highlands of guatemala to explore how household characteristics and external trends play into both the adoption and diffusion processes of non traditional exports ntx among smallholders based on the analysis ntx production appeared to have delivered less prosperity to adopters than initially promised smallholders may lack capacity to overcome difficulties that inevitably arise in complex types of cultivations and in highly variable global agricultural markets governmental and non governmental organizations can attempt to mitigate these difficulties but market forces may overwhelm these efforts

do farmers choose to be inefficient evidence from bicol abstract farming households that differ in their ability or willingness to take on risks are likely to allocate resources and effort among income producing activities differently with consequences for productivity in this paper we measure voluntary and involuntary departures from efficiency for rice producing households in the bicol region of the philippines we take advantage of a panel of observations on households from 1978 1983 and 1994 available monthly weather data and survey information on planting times allows us to create household specific measures of weather shocks which we use in our analysis we find evidence that diversification and input choices do affect efficiency outcomes among farmers although these effects are not dominant accumulated wealth past decisions to invest favorable market conditions and propitious weather are also important determinants of efficiency outcomes among bicol rice farmers our findings suggest that the costs of incomplete formal and informal insurance markets are higher for poorer farmers

walk the talk private sustainability standards in the ugandan coffee sector abstractwe investigate the welfare and productivity implications of private sustainability standards in the coffee sector in uganda we use cross sectional household survey data and an instrumental variable method with instruments that pass weak identification and over identification restrictions we find that triple utz rainforest alliance 4c certification increases income and land and labour productivity and reduces poverty double fairtrade organic certification is found to be associated with higher producer prices but results in lower land and labour productivity and thereby fails to increase producer income and contribute to poverty reduction we conclude that private sustainability standards do not always live up the expectations they create towards consumers

do sanitary phytosanitary and quality related standards affect international trade evidence from chilean fruit exports summary increasing awareness of food safety issues has led to intensive use of sanitary phytosanitary and quality related regulations and standards imposing a burden on exporting countries worldwide this study assesses the impact of such regulations and standards estimating a gravity model for chilean fresh fruit exports that incorporates a stringency perception index that comprises different dimensions of trade requirements our results suggest that an increase in stringency has a negative and substantial effect on exported volumes and the reduction is higher if stringency increases in developed countries results also showed that different dimensions have different effects on trade

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

supermarkets wholesalers and tomato growers in guatemala the article shows the asset related determinants and the impacts of the participation of small farmers in supermarkets versus traditional market channels in guatemala compared to farmers selling only to the traditional market channels farmers selling to supermarket channels are larger but are in the upper tier of the small farmer category have more capital and are much more specialized in commercial horticulture in general and in tomatoes in particular while they have higher yields they also have higher input use including use of chemicals in fact they severely overuse pesticides and fungicides moreover these greater input expenditures mean that their profit rates are roughly similar to those of farmers in the traditional market channel supermarket channel farmers prefer the more demanding wholesale supermarket channel because it offers lower risks and lower transaction costs to market a variety of quality grades of tomatoes all year long in turn the supermarkets who do not buy direct but rather source from a few specialized dedicated wholesalers rely on this year round supply lower transaction costs and consistency of quality

the impact of coffee certification on small scale producers livelihoods a case study from the jimma zone ethiopia what is the impact of product certification on small scale farmers livelihoods to what extent does the participation of ethiopian small scale coffee farmers in certified local cooperative structures improve their socioeconomic situation to answer these questions this article employs household data of 249 coffee farmers from six different cooperatives collected in the jimma zone of southwestern ethiopia in 2009 findings show that the certification of coffee cooperatives has in total a low impact on small scale coffee producers livelihoods mainly due to 1 low productivity 2 insignificant price premium and 3 poor access to credit and information from the cooperative differences in production and organizational capacities between the local cooperatives are mirrored in the extent of the certification benefits for the smallholders good cooperatives have reaped the benefits of certification whereas bad ones did not fare well in this regard the cooperative effect overlies the certification effect

the economic sustainability of certified coffee recent evidence from mexico and peru consumers increasingly act on preferences for a more just and sustainable world by purchasing certified agricultural products using survey data from coffee growers in mexico and peru we explore the economic sustainability of certified coffee looking at conventional fair trade organic and rainforest alliance certified growers the analysis reveals that yields rather than price premiums are most important for increasing net cash returns for coffee growing households given the link between net returns and producer participation in certified coffee schemes the findings suggest that certification norms that permit improving yields are essential for improving grower welfare and attracting and maintaining growers

public private partnerships and collective action in high value fruit and vegetable supply chains accessing developed country food markets entails meeting stringent food safety requirements food retailers impose protocols relating to pesticide residues field and pack house operations and traceability to enable smallholders to remain competitive in such a system new institutional arrangements are required in particular public private partnerships can play a key role in creating farm to fork linkages that can satisfy market demands for food safety while retaining smallholders in the supply chain furthermore organized producer groups monitoring their own food safety standards through collective action often become attractive to buyers who are looking for ways to ensure traceability and reduce transaction costs this paper compares the ways in which small producers of fruits and vegetables in kenya and india have coped with increased demands for food safety from their main export markets

sustainability standards gender and nutrition among smallholder farmers in uganda abstractsustainability standards are gaining in importance in global markets for high value foods while previous research has shown that participating farmers in developing countries may benefit through income gains nutrition impacts have hardly been analysed we use survey data from smallholder coffee farmers in uganda certified under fairtrade organic and utz to analyse impacts on food security and dietary quality estimates of instrumental variable models and simultaneous equation systems show that certification increases calorie and micronutrient consumption mainly through higher incomes and improved gender equity in certified households women have greater control of coffee production and monetary revenues from sales

when to make proprietary software open source abstract software can be distributed closed source proprietary or open source developed collaboratively while a firm cannot sell open source software and so loses potential sales revenue the open source software development process can have a substantial positive impact on the quality of a software its diffusion and consequently the demand for a complementary product from which the firm does profit previous papers have considered the firm s option to release software under a closed or open source license as a simple once and for all binary choice we extend this research by allowing for the possibility of keeping software proprietary for some optimally determined finite time period before making it open source furthermore we study the impact of switching costs we show that in case of high in house r d costs the firm always makes the software open source at some point unless switching itself is too expensive the timing however depends on the initial software quality on the other hand when r d is inexpensive the firm opens the source code only when the initial level of software quality is low for intermediate r d costs the firm might have the choice between opening the code immediately opening it at some subsequent and optimally determined time or keeping it closed forever finally we find that whereas high switching costs might prevent firms from adopting an open source business model low switching costs mainly affect the timing of the opening of the source code

a microeconometric evaluation of the active labour market policy in switzerland in the second part of the 1990 s switzerland conducted an ambitious active labour market policy almp encompassing a wide variety of programmes we evaluate the effects of these programmes on the individual employment probability of potential participants our econometric analysis uses unusually informative data origi nating from administrative unemployment and social security records we apply a matching es timator adapted for the case of multiple programmes we find substantial positive effects for one particular programme that is a unique feature of the swiss almp it consists of a wage subsidy for temporary jobs in the regular labour market that would otherwise not be taken up by the unemployed we also find large negative effects for traditional employment programmes oper ated in sheltered labour markets for training courses the results are mixed doi 10 1111 1468 0297 00072 download internet appendix pdf 2 590 kb

fairtrade and labour markets in ethiopia and uganda abstractdrawing on four years of fieldwork in ethiopia and uganda this paper addresses gaps in knowledge about the mechanisms linking agricultural exports with poverty reduction the functioning of rural labour markets and the relevance to the lives of the poorest people of fairtrade statistical analysis of survey evidence complemented by qualitative research highlights the relatively poor payment and non pay working conditions of those employed in research sites dominated by fairtrade producer organisations we conclude that fairtrade is not an effective way to improve the welfare of the poorest rural people

the food system transformation in developing countries a disaggregate demand analysis for fruits and vegetables in vietnam abstract food systems in developing countries are currently undergoing a rapid transformation towards high value products and modern supply chains while supply side aspects of this transformation have been analyzed previously issues of consumer demand have received much less attention this article analyses demand patterns for fresh fruits and vegetables in vietnam using household survey data and a demand systems approach demand for products from modern supply chains particularly supermarkets and non traditional imports is highly income elastic and the income effect is stronger than the impact of prices and supermarket penetration this highlights the importance of considering demand side aspects when projecting future trends our results imply a continued restructuring of the food sector in the further process of economic development

trading off nutrition and education a panel data analysis of the dissimilar welfare effects of organic and fairtrade standards millions of smallholder farmers in developing countries participate in different types of sustainability standards a growing body of literature has analyzed the welfare effects with mixed results yet there are important knowledge gaps first most existing studies have looked at the effects of one standard in one country when comparing between studies it is unclear whether dissimilar outcomes are the result of different standards or different local conditions second most studies have used cross section data so that selectivity issues remain a challenge third existing work has primarily analyzed effects in terms of purely economic indicators such as prices and income ignoring other dimensions of household welfare we address these shortcomings using panel data from small scale coffee producers in uganda and comparing the effects of two of the most popular sustainability standards namely organic and fairtrade welfare effects are analyzed in terms of household expenditures child education and nutrition results show that organic and fairtrade both have positive effects on total consumption expenditures however notable differences are observed in terms of the other outcomes organic contributes to improved nutrition but has no effect on education for fairtrade it is exactly the other way around we explore the mechanisms behind these differences

food standards certification and poverty among coffee farmers in uganda summary voluntary standards are gaining in importance in global markets for high value foods we analyze and compare impacts of three sustainability oriented standards fairtrade organic and utz on the livelihoods of smallholder coffee farmers in uganda using survey data and propensity score matching with multiple treatments we find that fairtrade certification increases household living standards by 30 and reduces the prevalence and depth of poverty for the other two certification schemes no significant impacts are found several factors that can explain differential impacts are discussed overly general statements about the effects of sustainability standards on smallholder livelihoods may be misleading

agrifood industry transformation and small farmers in developing countries summary this article introduces this special issue on the rapid transformation of the agrifood industry in developing countries and its effects on small farmers we review the literature from the late 1980s to the present and find evidence first of food processing then retail transformation and mixed evidence of impacts on small farmers both inclusion particularly with resource providing contracts and exclusion sometimes from scale constraint sometimes from inadequate non land assets the special issue papers contribute to the debate by confirming the mix of cases of inclusion and exclusion the cases are main in horticulture and dairy key hopes for smallholder development

supermarkets farm household income and poverty insights from kenya summary the expansion of supermarkets in developing countries may have important implications for poverty and rural development while previous studies have compared farm profits between participants and non participants in supermarket channels wider income effects have hardly been analyzed moreover most existing studies do not account for structural differences between the two groups we address these issues by using endogenous switching regression and building on a survey of vegetable farmers in kenya participation in supermarket channels is associated with a 48 gain in average household income which also contributes to poverty reduction to realize these benefits on a larger scale will require institutional support

confronting the coffee crisis can fair trade organic and specialty coffees reduce small scale farmer vulnerability in northern nicaragua summary this paper links changing global coffee markets to opportunities and vulnerabilities for sustaining small scale farmer livelihoods in northern nicaragua changing governance structures corporate concentration oversupply interchangeable commodity grade beans and low farm gate prices characterize the crisis in conventional coffee markets in contrast certified fair trade and organic are two alternative forms of specialty coffee trade and production that may offer opportunities for small scale producers a research team surveyed 228 farmers to measure the impact of sales on organic and fair trade markets the results suggest that participation in organic and fair trade networks reduces farmers livelihood vulnerability 2004 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

optimal control of interacting systems with dnss property the case of illicit drug use abstract in this paper we generalize a one dimensional optimal control problem with dnss property to a two dimensional optimal control problem this is done by taking the direct product of the model with itself i e we combine two similar system dynamics under a joint objective functional that is separable in both states and controls this framework can be applied to the construction of various optimal control problems such as optimal marketing of related products optimal growth of separate but interacting economies or optimal control of two related capital stocks we study such a system for a particular case drawn from the domain of drug control the main result of this paper is that in this domain even a modest amount of interaction can sometimes make a very big difference hence drawing conclusions by simplifying the real world into two independent one dimensional models may be problematic methodologically the combination of two systems with dnss property leads to a fascinating series of situations with multiple optimal steady states and associated threshold behavior these instances reflect some important recent developments in optimal dynamic control theory