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...

This article analyses the impact of a water allocation priority policy for a specific crop on farmers’ acreage allocation to different crops. To accomplish this, a system of crop acreage demands conditional on output yields, prices of variable inputs and levels of quasi-fixed inputs is...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

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...

In this paper we specify and estimate producers’ risk preference using farm data. We allow heterogeneous risk preference across individuals and propose a specification to model the heterogeneity. We base farmers’ decision making on a utility maximization framework and incorporate both market...

Soil quality has important implications for sustainable agricultural development and food self-sufficiency in many developing countries. A decrease in soil nutrient stocks, one of the components of soil quality, necessitates more inputs and greater management skills in order to compensate for...

An experimental store was created to evaluate initial demand for locally-produced and guaranteed tender steak products as a more realistic alternative to contingent valuation (CV) and dichotomous-choice experimental methods. Strengths of the approach are incentive compatibility, a realistic...

Based on household survey data, this paper investigates the impact on coffee and non-coffee households of the pronounced coffee price fluctuations in Uganda during the 1990s. As expected, the price boom of the early 1990s was associated with substantial poverty reduction for coffee farmers. More...

Price and income elasticities of fat from meats are estimated by decomposing composite demand for meat into the produ ct of total calories, the fraction of calories eat as fat, and a residual measure of quality. This demand-characteristic system provides estimates of the impact of prices and...