"In the context of on-going market reform in developing countries, there is a need for an improvement in the existing methods of spatial market efficiency analysis in order to better inform the debate toward designing and implementing new grain marketing policies, institutions, and...

"This paper discusses a modeling approach that extends and improves the standard parity bounds model (PBM) of spatial market efficiency by analyzing the dynamic effects of marketing policy changes. The model facilitates an improved understanding of the patterns of adjustment in grain marketing...

This paper examines how market institutions can affect links between urban and rural areas with specific emphasis on goods market integration in the national context.Traditionally, development researchers and practitioners have focused either on rural market development or on urban market...

"Using detailed trader surveys in Benin, Madagascar, and Malawi, this paper investigates the presence of increasing returns in agricultural trade. After analyzing margins, costs, and value added, we find little evidence of returns to scale. Motorized transport is found more cost effective for...

Using survey data on traders and brokers in the Ethiopian foodgrain market, this paper reveals that the brokerage institution is critical to market performance in that it enables traders to circumvent the commitment problem of long-distance trade with unknown partners. In the absence of grain...

This paper addresses the conceptual issues around the negative price effects of technological change on agricultural producers, explores price policy options vis-à-vis this problem, and reviews and compares experiences across Asian countries as they transformed their rural economies. It then...

In most countries in sub-Saharan Africa at present, the majority of the population is engaged in agriculture, with economies in the very early stages of structural transformation - the process whereby a predominantly agrarian economy is transformed into a diversified and productive economy...

This paper examines the effect of transaction costs of search on the institution of grain brokers in Ethiopia. Primary data are used to derive traders' shadow opportunity costs of labor and of capital from IV estimation of net profits. A two-step Tobit model is used in which traders first choose...