Supermarkets are gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on productivity and efficiency have hardly been studied. We use a meta-frontier approach and combine this with propensity...

In many developing countries, supermarkets are expanding rapidly. This also affects farmers’ marketing options. Previous studies have analyzed welfare effects for smallholders with crosssection data. Here, we use panel data and a differencing approach to study supply chain dynamics and better...

Mobile phone based money services have spread rapidly in many developing countries. We analyze micro level impacts using panel data from smallholder farmers in Kenya. Mobile money use has a large positive net impact on household income. One important pathway is through remittances, which...

In low potential agricultural areas like the Honduran hillsides characterized by soil degradation and erosion, organic agriculture can provide a means to break the downward spiral of resource degradation and poverty. We use original survey data to analyze the factors influencing the decision to...

Modern technologies are often not widely adopted among smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. Several adoption constraints have been discussed in the literature, including limited access to information. Using survey data from farmers in Tanzania and the average treatment effect framework, we...

We study the effect of alleviating information asymmetry regarding product quality that is widespread in developing-country agricultural markets. Opportunistic buyers may underreport quality levels back to farmers to reduce the price they have to pay. In response, farmers may curb investment,...

Since the early 1990s, liberalization of the seed market in Tanzania has attracted several foreign companies that now market maize hybrids in the country. In this article, we analyze the impacts of proprietary hybrids on maize yields, production, and household living standards. We build on a...

In emerging markets for high-value food products in developing countries, processing companies search for efficient ways to source raw material of consistent quality. One widely embraced approach is contract farming. But relatively little is known about the appropriate design of contracts,...

We model the economic incentives surrounding opium crop production in Afghanistan. Specifically, we examine the impact of eradication policies when opium is used as a means of obtaining credit, and when the crops are produced in sharecropping arrangements. The analysis suggests that when perfect...

There is an emerging body of literature analyzing how smallholder farmers in developing countries can be linked to modern supply chains. However, most of the available studies concentrate on farm and farmer characteristics, failing to capture details of institutional arrangements between farmers...