Supermarkets, specialized wholesalers, processors, and agro-exporters are transforming the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low-income economies. We develop a conceptual framework with which to study contracting between smallholders and a commodity-processing...

Summary The inverse productivity-size relationship is one of the oldest puzzles in development economics. Two conventional explanations for the inverse relationship have emerged in the literature: (i) factor market imperfections that cause cross-sectional variation in household-specific shadow...

Does international trade make all parties better off? We study the relationship between food security and the international trade of fish and seafood between developing and developed countries. Specifically, we look at and discuss the evolution of trade flows – values, quantities, and prices...

Contract farming is widely perceived as a means of increasing welfare in developing countries. Because of smallholder self-selection in contract farming, however, it is not clear whether contract farming actually increases grower welfare. In an effort to improve upon existing estimates of the...

To date, no research has rigorously addressed the concern that local and regional procurement (LRP) of food aid could affect food prices and food price volatility in food aid source and recipient countries. We assemble spatially and temporally disaggregated data and estimate the relationship...

We compare the impacts across a range of criteria of local and regional procurement (LRP) relative to transoceanic shipment of food aid in Burkina Faso and Guatemala. We find that neither instrument dominates the other across all criteria in either country, although LRP commonly performs at...

Using survey data from natural experiments in three countries that simultaneously received food aid sourced locally and from the United States, we test the hypothesis that locally-sourced commodities are more culturally appropriate and thus preferred over traditional food aid commodities sourced...

The rise of new food assistance instruments, including local and regional procurement, cash, and vouchers, has surpassed increase in understanding of the tradeoffs among and impacts of these options relative to traditional food aid. Response choices rarely appear to result from systematic...

Summary A growing literature suggests that in low-income countries, households with few assets can be trapped in chronic poverty. This article reviews relevant threads of the poverty traps literature to motivate a description of the opportunities presented by innovative index-based risk transfer...