The recent adoption of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs, namely mobile phones and radios) in rural areas of Sub- Saharan Africa has brought new evidence that an updated and reliable flow of information can have direct benefits for farmers' welfare. However, if correct market...

Relatively little evidence is available on the importance of information and the role of Information Communication Technologies (mobiles and radios) in the key aspects of marketing behaviours of developing country farmers. We included the concept of proportional and fixed transactions costs...

The member countries of the World Health Organization (WHO) have recently endorsed its Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health. The strategy emphasizes the need to limit the consumption of saturated fats and trans fatty acids, salt and sugars, and to increase consumption of fruits...

Under the TRIPs Agreement, all member-countries of the World Trade Organization are required to provide an "effective" system of plant variety protection within a specific time frame. In many developing countries this has led to a divisive debate about the fundamental desirability of extending...

We estimate the effects of the 2005 ban on vending machines in French schools using the 1998 and 2006 INCA nutrition surveys. These surveys contain no information on the presence of vending machines in schools attended by respondents, but the adoption of a Difference-in-Difference design, and a...

We investigate the comparative static effects of environmental and agricultural policies on pesticide and fertilizer use. Since such effects depend on technology and risk preference parameters, we estimate these from a panel data set of Illinois farms. Generalized method of moments is used on a...

This paper fits a translog stochastic production frontier with inefficiency effects to a panel of 693 UK dairy farms for the period from 1982 to 1997. The Cobb Douglas is rejected as inadequate relative to the less restrictive translog functional form and the frontier model is statistically...

Starting with a brief overview of trends in plant variety protection (PVP) in the UK since inception of PVP legislation, this paper assesses the strength of incentives for innovation provided by the PVP regime. We modify and extend models from the patent literature that attempt to infer the...

The member countries of the World Health Organization (WHO) have recently endorsed its Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health in an effort to combat the growing burden of non-communicable diseases. We assess the potential consumption impacts of these norms in the United States...

This paper attempts an empirical assessment of the incentive effects of plant variety protection regimes in the generation of crop variety innovations. A duration model of plant variety protection certificates is used to infer the private appropriability of returns from agricultural crop variety...