There are currently two contrasting approaches towards aid policy in Africa: that followed by the West is well known for its conditionality, selectivity and focus on direct financial support, while the approach adopted by China eschews conditionality and concentrates on infrastructure building....

The recognition that policies aimed at “getting prices right” in less developed countries werefailing due to incomplete markets has spurred a new wave of reforms, directed instead at“getting markets and institutions right”. Although previous studies have documented thepotentially crucial...

Recognition that policies aimed at ‘getting prices right’ in less-developed countries have not been successful due to incomplete markets has spurred a new wave of reforms aimed instead at ‘getting markets and institutions right’. Previous studies of this policy shift...

Moxey, White and Ozanne (1999) have shown how transfer payments coupled with input quotas can be used to design optimal truth-telling mechanisms for voluntary agri-environmental schemes under hidden information about compliance costs. Ozanne, Hogan and Colman (2001) adapted the Moxey et al....

The recognition that policies aimed at “getting prices right” in less developed countries were failing due to incomplete markets has spurred a new wave of reforms, directed instead at “getting markets and institutions right”. Although previous studies have documented the potentially...

This note analyses the design of agri-environmental schemes for risk-averse producers whose input usage is only observable by costly monitoring. The scheme penalises producers in proportion to input use in excess of a quota. A striking result is that if the scheme is designed in such a way that...

Interdependencies between commodity prices can arise from the impact of changing macroeconomic variables, from complementarities or substitutabilities between commodities, or from common responses by speculators. Malliaris and Urrutia (1996) found significant linkages between rollover prices of...

Payments for ecosystem service outputs have become a popular policy prescription for a range of agri-environmental schemes. The focus of this paper is on the choice of sets of instruments in an ecosystem service principal-agent model that addresses adverse selection and moral-hazard. Results...

The paper analyses the differences of technical, allocative, cost and scale efficiencies of irrigated and rain-fed rice farmers in Sri Lanka in two different perspectives; first, relative to a common metafrontier, defined as the boundary of an unrestricted technology set and second relative to...