The authors estimate the potential commercial benefits that tropical timber producing countries could enjoy by adopting timber certification schemes. Such benefits are crucial for encouraging the supply of certified timber. Timber certification is a reality: various countries and organizations...

Derivatives exchanges can offer emerging market economies certain important benefits, including risk transfer, price discovery, and more public information. But they are not a substitute for reform of financial, capital, and commodity markets.Tsetsekos and Varangis examine the architecture,...

Over the past dozen years, policymakers have largely abandoned long-standing popular approaches for addressing risk in agriculture without fully resolving the question of how best to manage the negative consequences of volatile agricultural markets. The article reviews the transition from past...

Fully liberalizing Cote d'Ivoire's export marketing system is expected to improve producers' incomes and marketing efficiency. And the benefits from liberalization should outweigh the costs from eliminating fixed producer prices and public forward sales.Cote d'Ivoire has historically taxed cocoa...

About 20 percent of the total production of tropical timber is traded internationally. But for Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and some countries in West-Central Africa, tropical timber trade accounts for more than 50 percent of production. Although the tropical timber trade has often...