We analyze the effects of high standards food chains on household welfare taking into account general equilibrium effects and market imperfections. To measure structural production changes and welfare effects on rural and urban households, our model has two types of agents, five kinds of...

During the past decades the global food system changed dramatically with increased trade in high-value food products, increased exports from developing countries, increased consolidation and dominance of large multinational food companies, and increased proliferation of public and private food...

Transition countries provide a natural experiment to study the development of land markets. This paper provides survey-evidence of the variation in the development of land markets, identifies a series of patterns, and provides a set of hypotheses to explain these variations in land market...

In 2008, the EU voted to liberalize its system of planting rights which has strictly regulated vine plantings in the EU. However, after an intense lobbying campaign the liberalization of the planting right system was overturned in 2013 and new regulations created an even more restrictive system....

The creation of optimal land institutions attracted renewed attention in the 1990s because of its central role in the transition process in former Communist countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and more recently because of largescale land investments in developing countries....

The indirect effects of biofuels are mostly considered negative. In this paper, we argue that there may be a positive indirect effect of biofuels on food security and poverty. Our analysis shows that the introduction of castor production for biofuel in a poor country as Ethiopia can...

In this article we study the political process that governs the creation and size of new Geographical Indications (GIs). Producers can choose to apply for a GI and subsequently go through a bargaining process with the government. We derive the optimal GI area from the point of view of consumers,...

Despite the growing importance of geographical indications (GI), relatively little attention has been devoted to studying the optimal size of a GI region, as well as how lobbying by interest groups may affect the actual size. We develop a political economy model of the size of geographical...

This paper reviews the situation in the agricultural sector and food security in Cuba and in particular the transformations that have (not) taken place since 1990. We compare the Cuban transition with transitions in other "transition countries" and show that Cuba does not fit easily in one of...

This paper addresses to what extent governments have traded off price distortions for reduced volatility in intervening in agricultural and food markets during the recent food price spikes. We develop a model to derive how much distortions a government would introduce when it cares about...