This paper calls attention to the instrumental role of democracy and press freedom in combating corruption. As opposed to an autocracy with no or limited press freedom, a free press in a democracy can inform voters about the corruption of political representatives, and voters in turn can punish...

In this paper, we focused on whether investments in ICTs could cause any increases in a firm's performance. We constructed a data set for two East African countries-Kenya and Tanzania for small and medium scale enterprises and focused on three performance indicators-internal rate of return,...

This paper reviews the causes of the emergence of modern retailing and the vertical relationships in the Indonesian food value chain, and the consequences of these changes on market organization and value distribution. The findings of this paper suggest that there are both demand- and...

This paper assesses the impact of access to information on farm household's factor market participation. The paper tries to answer two questions. First, does use of telephone have any impact on farm household's factor market participation decision? Second, correcting for market participation,...

In this paper we assess (a) consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for a recently developed variety of maize that is high in provitamin A in the context of a public health intervention and (b) the performance of three elicitation mechanisms in estimating WTP in a field experiment in Ghana....

Vitamin A deficiency is a major health problem in Africa and in many other developing countries. Biofortified staple crops that are high in pro vitamins A and adapted to local growing environment have the potential to reduce the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency. One such example is the...

This paper examines changes in the allocation of public funds between production related public goods (PRPGs) and labour augmenting public goods (LAPGs) once elected village leaders replaced an appointment system. We derive a two-period theoretical model in which the interest of appointed...

The nature of the collective ownership may make it easier for the local governments to purse private benefits from the return of the public investments on the collective operation. This may lead to disproportionate allocation of public funds to favour collective-owned operation as opposed to...

This paper examines the impact of spatial connectivity development on household income growth and non-agriculture labor supply, combining household panel data and village census in Indonesia. Empirical results show that the impacts of the improvement of local road quality in the area (positively...