This article reviews the evidence on agricultural service cooperatives in two countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—Ukraine and Kazakhstan—and considers the reasons for their lack of development compared to the countries of North America and Western Europe. Only one farm...

Tajikistan is judged to be highly vulnerable to risk, including food insecurity risks and climate change risks. By some vulnerability measures it is the most vulnerable among all 28 countries in the World Bank’s Europe and Central Asia Region – ECA (World Bank 2009). The rural population,...

The rural sector in nearly all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) has undergone a shift from predominantly collective to more individualized agriculture. At the same time, most of the land in the region has shifted from state to...

farm size inequality is a natural outcome of farm specialization and the advantages of scale economies for more successful farmers, but it could weaken the common interests among farmers and thus their political power. This is especially true for farms that are organized in cooperatives, such as...

Replaced with revised version of paper Jan. 11, 2012

Like many other African countries in the 1980s, Burkina Faso was urged to engage in a far-reaching liberalization of its state-led cotton sector. Yet unlike most of its neighbors, the Burkinabè government rejected both the status quo and wholesale liberalization, and instead embarked on a more...

The cotton boom in Burkina Faso consisted of a growth in cotton land shares together with an overall increase in total cultivated land. This paper examines the impact of institutional changes in the cotton sector on the evolution of smallholders’ land-use decisions. The empirical analysis is...

The income inequality implications of land reform are examined for the case of Georgia using regression-based inequality decomposition techniques. An egalitarian land redistribution is likely to equalize per-capita income among farm households, implying that continuing the land reform process in...

This paper deals with structural changes that are observed in farm sectors in many developed economies: the increase in farm size and in farm specialization. Using panel data on Israeli farm communities for the years 1992-2001, we estimate a system of simultaneous equations in which these...