Madagascar has a tradition of agricultural trade (coffee, vanilla, cloves). In the 90s, the country started developing non-traditional exports, such as lychees, to the European Union (EU), thereby generating substantial cash revenues for small producers. In 2005, access to the EU market became...

Purpose: French wine cooperatives show differences of corporate objectives, but also common ones with private wine merchants, as they face a common economic environment. The traditional controlling and financial models do not seem adequate to measure ‘sustainable social economy’ performances...

Rising consumer interest for ethical and/or responsible products and the growing interweaving of social and environmental issues question the ability of scientific methods to correctly assess social impacts. To this day however, no consensus has yet been reached on relevant indicators to assess...

Sustainability standards are flooding global agricultural markets. Standards however, are not recent: standards for the exchange of grain and tropical products emerged in the 19th century. The objective of this article is to analyze, in a historical perspective, the implications of the...

We carry out a comparative study of four farm sectors in Costa Rica, based on a dynamic analysis of behaviors regarding institutional changes occurring during the liberalization process. We highlight organizations' capacities to adapt and contribute to institutional changes by implementing...

There is a growing consensus among economists that extending shop opening hours createsjobs. While this is probably true in deregulating industries, this paper argues there are somedeficiencies in the existing hypotheses about how exactly deregulation affects employment.First, this paper...

A startling fact of firm level productivity analysis is the large and persistent differences in both labour productivity and total factor productivity (TFP) between firms in narrowly defined sectoral classes. The competitiveness of an industry is potentially an important factor explaining this...