There has been a rapid transformation of food supply chains in India over the past two decades. Modern retail sales are growing at 49 percent per year and quickly penetrating urban food markets and even rural markets. The food-processing sector is growing quickly while also concentrating and...

"The Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) was invited by the Indian Ministry of Commerce and Industry to conduct a study titled “The Impact of Organized Retailing on the Unorganized Retail Sector.” Because organized retail in India is still in its infancy,...

"A “supermarket revolution” has been underway in developing countries since the early 1990s. Supermarkets (here referring to all modern retail, which includes chain stores of various formats such as supermarkets, hypermarkets, and convenience and neighborhood stores) have now gone well...

Recent food safety events have raised concerns about food traceability in both developed and developing countries. In this paper we study the decision to adopt a traceability system in a supply chain with repeated upstream and downstream moral hazard and imperfect consumer monitoring. In...

Rapidly increasing mobile phone coverage, cheaper technology, and an open platform that allows for the development of applications that extend the use of mobile devices provide new ways to reach farmers in isolated places. We investigate the impact of an intervention that uses information and...

This brief is based on Information and Communication Technologies for Development and Poverty Reduction: The Potential of Telecommunications, ed. Maximo Torero and Joachim von Braun (Johns Hopkins University Press and IFPRI, 2006) "The variety of views about ICTs reveals that their role in...

The variety of views about ICTs reveals that their role in development is unclear, especially without convincing evidence of their impact-and little research has been conducted on the direct and indirect links between ICTs and poverty reduction. This book, addresses several pressing questions...

Many people in the vast rural areas of Africa lack access to financial services, and most commercial banks are not interested in moving into these areas due to their low income levels, lack of scale economies, and poor infrastructure. Also, few banks actually understand the most common economic...