Global retail companies (quot;supermarketsquot;) have an increasing influence on developing countries, through foreign investments and/or through the imposition of their private standards. The impact on developing countries and poverty is often assessed as negative. In this paper we show the...

The combination of transition and globalization since the early 1990s has caused dramatic changes in supply chains globally. This paper uses survey evidence from several Eastern European countries (Albania, Bulgaria, Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Russia) on how these forces affect the dairy...

This article analyses how credit market imperfections affect the impacts of subsidies by analyzing the effects of agricultural subsidies in the new Eastern Member States of the European Union with a partial equilibrium model which integrates credit and land market imperfections. We show that...

This paper analyzes how imperfections of property rights affect allocation of assets and welfare, using micro-survey data from Bulgaria. Co-ownership of assets is widespread in many countries due to inheritance. Central and Eastern Europe offers an interesting natural experiment to assess the...

In the course of the 2004 accession negotiations, candidate countries requested the possibility to maintain existing national provisions restricting the acquisition of agricultural land or forests by foreigners. They considered these derogations necessary in order to protect the socio-economic...

This paper aims to provide empirical evidence relating to the importance of contract enforcement for development. Survey data on Hungarian farms are used to estimate the impact of contract hold-ups on investment. We find that investment is affected by a variety of factors. Contract breaches in...

Formalizing land rights has been promoted as a way to encourage agricultural investment and stimulate land markets, yet little is known about the benefits of such policies in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the preconditions for success are less favorable. The analysis uses a large sample of plots...

During the past decades the global food system changed dramatically with increased trade in high-value food products, increased exports from developing countries, increased consolidation and dominance of large multinational food companies, and increased proliferation of public and private food...

<title>A<sc>bstract</sc> </title> There is a vigorous debate on the liberalisation of heavily regulated agricultural markets in India. A crucial institutional characteristic is the role of state regulated brokers in wholesale markets. Relying on data from a unique survey in Uttarakhand, a state in North India, we find...

While some argue that trade liberalization has raised incomes and led to environmental protection in developing countries, others claim that it generates neither poverty reduction nor sustainability. The detailed case studies in this book demonstrate that neither interpretation is universally...