The governance of food markets is a crucial element for efficiency and distributional effects. In this paper, we use a conceptual model to show that this governance itself is endogenous in an environment of weak contract enforcement and imperfect markets, and importantly depends on the value in...

This article shows that credit market imperfections have important implications for the distribution of policy rents. In a model with land as fixed factor and credit market imperfections, when an area payment is given, land rents go up by more than the subsidy. On aggregate farms may lose from...

This paper analyzes how imperfections of property rights affect allocation of assets and welfare, using micro-survey data from Bulgaria. Co-ownership of assets is widespread in many countries due to inheritance. Central and Eastern Europe offers an interesting natural experiment to assess the...

Food and agricultural commodity value chains in developing and transition countries have undergone tremendous changes in the past decades. Companies and property rights have been privatized, markets liberalized, and economies integrated into global food systems. The liberalization and...

Studies on efficiency changes in transition agriculture yield mixed results. This paper develops both a theoretical model and an empirical analysis of how distribution of efficiency scores changes with the various stages of transition. We use a unique set of representative farm survey data to...

Agricultural credit and rural finance problems are important constraints on restructuring, investment, and thus on recovery and growth in transition countries. In this paper we study agricultural investments and financing in Polish agriculture. Our empirical evidence is based on a 2001 survey of...

Important changes took place in agricultural policies in Europe in the 19th and 20th century. The dramatic nature of the changes are illustrated by two years, a century apart: 1860 and 1960. In the 1860s European nations agree on a series of trade agreements which spread free trade across the...

This paper analyses empirically the effect of "hold-ups" on capital investment in farms using a sample of 318 Hungarian enterprises, surveyed over 1997. A negative relationship arises between capital investment and the incidence of hold-up behaviour. This relationship is affected by farm's...

This paper uses data from a survey of more than 1,400 farming households in Hungary to identify a set of profiles of farming households, which are active in the rental market and to estimate econometrically the impact of household characteristics, such as social, physical, and human capital, as...

For transition countries, the food industry sector is a key industry in terms of output and employment shares. As a competitive sector that receives substantial foreign direct investments (FDI), it plays an important role as an element in the process of integration in the European and world...