Do Ideas Matter in Strategic Choices Made by Organizations? An Empirical Work on the Participation of Agricultural Organizations to the Political Making Process in Costa Rica

The new institutional economics has recently developed the idea that the institutional environment can have an impact on economic actors' mental perceptions, and reciprocally, that these perceptions can impact on the institutional environment. This latter point seems particularly relevant in the field of economic organisations participation in the political making process. Nevertheless the empirical description of this role of mental perceptions in the political behaviour had not been made clearly. To contribute to this empirical description we lead a comparative study of 4 farm sectors in Costa Rica, based on a dynamic approach of mental perceptions in relation with the institutional change occurring during the liberalisation process. We carry out a statistical analysis of mental perceptions through a textual analysis of actors perceptions of the institutional change, leading to two main conclusions. Firstly we provide an empirical confirmation that mental models are influenced by specific institutional environments and lead to different strategies regarding the participation to the political making process. Secondly, we show that when an exogenous change occurs in the institutional environment, the mental models existing before the change can persist and lead to inefficient behaviours. This can partly explain part of the difficulties some sectors to lead efficient political activity that ensures their survival in a liberalized environment.Political Economy, D7, N5, Z0,

The potential role for collective preferences in determining the rules of the international trading system

En ligne : http://www.iddri.org/Publications/Collections/Analyses/An_0804.CollectivePreferences.pd

Is a public regulation of food price volatility feasible in Africa? An arch approach in Kenya

International audienceThe 2007-2008 food crisis and current food price swings led economists to re-evaluate the potential for policy instruments to manage food price volatility. Many developing countries recently pursued price regulation policies, but the difficulties of these policies in promoting price stability is not fully understood. In particular, the ability of a stabilization policy to lower food price volatility does not depend on the nature of the policy instrument only, but also on the institutional conditions of its implementation. Kenya is a particularly interesting case as it is characterized by a rather long tradition of public intervention, and by the persistence of highly volatile prices. The consistency of the policy use appears to be key factor influencing the degree of price volatility. Applied to trade policies, this consistency is defined by the temporal relationship between the tariff level and the international price changes. To test the influence of policy consistency on price volatility, we develop an autoregressive conditionally heteroskedastic model of price determination in which prices and prices volatility are jointly estimated, using monthly data over the 1994-2009 period in Kenya