The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) has continued to be fiercely debated between North and South, particularly with respect to its provisions for the agricultural sector. Article 27.3(b) of the TRIPS Agreement requires WTO member countries to offer some...

China has embarked on a major program to modernise agricultural and agribusiness structures with far reaching implications for rural development, international competitiveness / trade and food safety. There are, however, few studies that examine in detail how the modernisation program has...

By contrasting the performance of clustered micro enterprises with that of dispersed ones in the handloom sector in Ethiopia, this study shows that clustering significantly increases profit. To correct for selection bias, we match clustered and dispersed micro enterprises that share similar...

The typical model of retail pricing for produce products assumes retailers set price equal to the farm price plus a certain markup. However, observations from scanner data indicate a large degree of price dispersion in the grocery retailing market. In addition to markup pricing behavior, we...

The objective of this paper is to describe different types of value chain, to capture value added activities of each chain, to discuss the organizational and institutional link in each value chain and its implications for the role of small farmers. We focus on two counties in Hebei and Zhejiang...

The purpose of this study is to assess the potential of clustering in the development of agriculture and rural communities in China. We shall examine in detail the food industry, which is the link in the food chain that propels the industrialization of agriculture, and identify instances of...

This article extends the Berry, Levinsohn, Pakes (1995) model to include retail services by Boston supermarkets in an equilibrium model of breakfast cereals and then tests alternative vertical pricing games between manufacturers and supermarkets to ascertain who’s got the pricing power....

This paper empirically investigates how information cost, as part of trade costs, affects the decision of an individual firm to export. We use cross section firm-level data to examine how the difficulty of obtaining information on technical regulations in the European Union (EU) and the United...