Vertical coordination, rent distribution, and development

Vertical coordination has grown strongly in global supply chains. Local suppliers in developing countries engage in complex contracting with companies selling into high-income markets - either domestically or internationally. These contracts not only specify conditions for delivery and production processes, but also include the provision of inputs, technology, management advice etc. This paper analyzes how weak contract enforcement institutions and imperfect factor markets are affecting vertical coordination in development, and what the implications are for income creation and rent distribution

Land Rental Markets and Household Farms in Transition: Theory and Evidence from Hungary

This paper analyses the detfirminants of household firms?participation in land rental markets in transition countries and what affects their access to land through rental markets. We derive several theoretical hypotheses on the impact of households?management ability, land endowment, land quality and prices, transaction costs in the land market, rural credit and labour market constraints. We test the hypotheses combining a representative dataset on land rental activities of more than 1,400 Hungarian household firms with data from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office. We find that land rental markets reallocate land to households with better firm management capacities and less endowed with land. Households combine buying and renting of land to extend their firms. The continued domination of large firm organizations in some regions restricts household's access to land. Rural credit and labour market imperfections have an important impact on land rental markets

On the Political Economy of Land Reforms in the Former Soviet Union

This paper provides a set of hypotheses to explain differences in the procedures and progress of land refirms among FSU countries. The first factor is the historical legacy of the countries and their institutions. Demand for land privatization was weak except in countries and regions where collectivization was imposed only after the second World War. Another factor is technology: countries with labor-intensive agricultural systems are characterized by more radical land refirms and decollectivization. The domination of nomadic pastoral grazing systems in Central Asia reinforces the technology factor. The last factor is politics: further political refirms may be needed as a prerequisite for progress in land refirms in the countries lagging far behind in land refirms

Rational Ignorance and Negative News in the Information Market

While the availability of infirmation has increased rapidly, the public is still considered poorly infirmed. This paper contributes to the emerging field of media economics by studying how the demand side of the media market affects news production and consumption. We show that consumers are likely to remain imperfectly infirmed on most issues and that negative news coverage is likely to dominate positive news stories because of demand side effects

Gender and Modern Supply Chains in Developing Countries

The rapid spread of modern supply chains in developing countries is profoundly changing the way food is produced and traded. In this paper we examine the gender implications in modern supply chains. We conceptualize the various mechanisms through which women are directly affected, we review existing empirical evidence and add new survey-based evidence. Empirical findings from our own survey suggest that modern supply chains may be associated with reduced gender inequalities in rural areas. We find that women benefit more and more directly from large-scale estate production and agro-industrial processing, and the creation of employment in these modern agro-industries than from smallholder contract-firming

Liberalization with Endogenous Institutions: A Comparative Analysis of Agricultural Reform in Africa, Asia, and Europe

Thirty years ago, a vast share of the poor and middle income countries were heavily state-controlled. The effects of the liberalizations in the 1980s and 1990s differed strongly between regions in Africa, Asia and Europe. This paper first documents these differences in refirm effects in a comparative framework and then develops a model to firmally analyze how liberalization affects production and income distribution when institutions that govern production and exchange are also affected. We derive hypotheses on how the endogenous institutional adjustments affect the supply response to the liberalizations. We use these insights to forward a series of explanations on the differences in perfirmance across countries following liberalization

The Impact of Media and Monotoring on Corruptin in Decentralized Public Programs: Evidence from Madagascar

Local capture of public expenditures is an important problem for service delivery and poverty reduction in developing countries. Standard anticorruption institutions may not be effective, as these tend often to be corrupt themselves. This paper analyses the impact of monitoring and infirmation distribution through the mass media on local capture of public expenditures on education in Madagascar in 2002-2003. We use survey data to assess capture in both cash and in-kind programs, at district and at school level. We find that local capture can be successfully constrained through a combination of monitoring and media programs. In addition to monitoring by the beneficiaries ('from below?, central monitoring ('from above? is important. More transparent funding mechanisms and access to mass media reduce capture. However, the impact of the media is conditional on the characteristics of the population. In communes characterized by high illiteracy, the impact of newspaper and poster campaigns is limited, and radios are more important to reduce capture

Regulations, brokers, and interlinkages: The institutional organization of wholesale markets in India

There is a vigorous debate on the liberalization of heavily regulated agricultural markets in India. A crucial institutional characteristic is the role of state regulated brokers in wholesale markets. Relying on data from a unique survey in Uttarakhand, a state in North-India, we find that regulations on margins are ineffective as most brokers charge rates that significantly exceed the regulated ones. We also find that a majority of firmers self-select into long-tfirm relationships with brokers. These relationships allow some of the firmers to interlink credit and insurance markets to the agricultural output market. This interlinkage does however not appear to be an instrument for firmer exploitation (as it does not lead to worse inputs, high interest rates, or lower implicit output prices), but is seemingly an extra service by brokers as to establish firmer loyalty to him and thus to ensure future supplies

The Political Economy of Policy Instrument Choice: Theory and Evidence from Agricultural Policies

We study the political economy of instrument choice in agricultural and food policies. After a review of the historical evolution of European agricultural price and trade policy instruments since 1880, we develop a political economy model of instrument choice. The key predictions of the model suggest a rational explanation of instrument choice patterns, based on the trade-off between the different cost components of the policies, and internal and external political constraints. An empirical analysis supports the main predictions of the theoretical model. We find that the GATT/WTO agreement had a significant impact

Cultural Differences, Assimilation and Behavior: Player Nationality and Penalties in Football

We examine the impact of a different cultural background on individual behavior, focusing on violence on the football field of southern European and nothern European football players in the English Premier League. We find that southern European football players collect on average more football penalties than their nothern European colleagues. We also find that the initially higher number of football penalties incurred by southern European players converges towards the local average, the longer their experience in the Premier League