Prices on commodity markets are often correlated because they react to similar cycles in the economy. This is especially true for commodities which are inputs into the same products. And even more so for commodities which are considered here as partial substitutes. Prices of such commodities are...

Improvement in the performance of agricultural markets was the ultimate goal of market liberalisation. In this paper, firm (trader) size distribution as a factor influencing market performance is analyzed using maize and fertilizer traders from Kenya. Firm size distribution was assessed by...

Export taxes can provide additional welfare to large exporters, an argument for interventions in manyprimary commodity exporting countries. We investigate the benefits of export taxation for Côted'Ivoire, the dominant exporter of cocoa. Where many applications treat the formula for...

International commodity Organizations can play a role in reducing transaction costs between producer and consumer. The current organisations do this partly through statistics and collecting and disseminating market information, undertaking projects and convening meetings. Of a traditional focus...

Small-scale industries in Indonesia provide more than 65% of total manufacturing employment. Sixty-three percent of small-scale firm employment is in firms that are clustered. A cluster is defined statistically in Indonesia as at least 20 firms in a village. For some agro-processing industries,...

This paper evaluates how efficiently farm households allocate labor between farm and off-farm activities. It estimates farm and off-farm labor supply functions to determine the factorsthat influence labor allocation. Both the shadow wage and the off-farm wage rate are includedas regressors in...

Farmers face monopsonist/oligopsonist structures in agricultural or forest products markets because of the limited choice of traders/buyers. As a consequence, these farmers and traders alike, in successive transactions along the supply chain, may get lower prices in selling their products. This...

International commodity Organizations can play a role in reducing transaction costs between producer and consumer. The current organisations do this partly through statistics and collecting and disseminating market information, undertaking projects and convening meetings. Of a traditional focus...

We use experimental and survey data from two natural-hazard prone countries in Latin America to test the hypothesis that natural hazards affect risk aversion. We use two methods to measure risk aversion: simple questions on the willingness to pay for a hypothetical lottery and more complicated...