The present study investigates the analysis of poverty persistence of Chinese farm households in the well-off Zhejiang province in the southeast. We firstly apply an ordered probit model examining household, farm, and regional characteristics affecting the probability that households are...

This study analyses the impact of the liberalization on the intensification of maize production in Kenya. It first analyses the impact of liberalization on input and output prices, followed by an analysis of farmer practices comparing two major farmer surveys, from 1992 and 2002. The results...

This paper discusses traceability as part of information management in fruit supply chains of Emilia-Romagna, Italy. A review of the rules in use for traceability distinguishes between a proper traceability and a traceability plus (T+), embedded of many value attributes. Elements of competitive...

This paper analyzes the effect of intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes on the plant breeding sector in developing countries. Most of these countries have implemented a system of plant variety protection (PVP), or are in the process of doing so, generally as part of their obligations under...

In this paper we price a precipitation option based on empirical weather data from Germany using different pricing methods, among them Burn Analysis, Index Value Simulation and Daily Simulation. For that purpose we develop a daily precipitation model. Moreover, a decorrelation analysis is...

This paper uses a stochastic frontier and inefficiency model to test the efficiency of grape production in the Western Cape. The data covers two panels of wine grape farms (34 in Robertson and 36 in Worcester) for 2003 and 2004 and 37 table grape farms in De Doorns for 2004 only. Tests show that...

This study employs a stochastic frontier approach to examine profit efficiency of small scale rice farmers in Nigeria using farm-level survey data collected from 200 farmers in the study area. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and standard profit function. The result shows that...

Controlling for spatial effects in micro-economic studies of consumer and producer behavior necessitates a range of analytical modifications ranging from modest changes in data collection and the definition of variables to dramatic changes in the modeling of consumer and producer...

Replaced with revised version of paper 02/08/07.

This paper determines the effect of market reform and price decontrol on the size of maize milling/retail margins in South Africa. Regression models of monthly milling/retail margins are run over the period May 1976 to September 2003. To assess the robustness of our findings, we estimate several...