Mobile phone coverage has expanded considerably throughout the developing world, particularly within sub-Saharan Africa. Existing evidence suggests that increased access to information technology has improved agricultural market efficiency for consumer markets and certain commodities, but there...

After 2005, commodity prices experienced their longest and broadest boom since World War II. Agricultural prices have now come down considerably since their 2011 peak, but are still 40 percent higher in real terms than their 2000 lows. This paper briefly addresses the main arguments on the...

This paper assesses the impact of a change in the price of cashew received by exporters in general -- and by FUNPI, a fund to promote the industrialization of agricultural products, in particular -- on farmgate prices and poverty in Guinea-Bissau. The analysis builds a theoretical model of...

To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa's slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy induced distortions to relative...

For individual countries, variable trade barriers can be used to reduce the volatility of domestic relative to world prices. If this is done by countries accounting for a large share of the market, its effect is offset by increases in world price volatility. This study shows the nature of the...

Trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming agriculture in developing countries, yet global trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods. Those distortions reduce some forms of poverty and inequality but...

Trade negotiators and policy advisors are keen to know the relative contribution of different farm policy instruments to international trade and economic welfare. Nominal rates of assistance or producer support estimates are incomplete indicators, especially when (especially in developing...

For decades, agricultural price and trade policies in Sub-Saharan Africa have hampered farmers? contributions to economic growth and poverty reduction. Although there has been much policy reform over the past two decades, the injections of agricultural development funding, together with ongoing...

This paper estimates the impact of a change in procurement strategy of a private buyer in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Beginning in October 2000, internet kiosks and warehouses were established that provide wholesale price information and an alternative marketing channel to soy...

Earlier research showed that during the 1980s and 1990s most of the global agricultural trade expansion took place among the industrial countries and among countries within trade blocs. These were also periods of declining agricultural prices. These prices increased during the 2000s, there were...