This thesis addresses 3 different aspects of food and poverty related problems in developing countries. The first essay presents a new operational concept of transaction costs that firstly allows assessing the magnitude and secondly recognizing the non homogeneity of food products. This is...

In China führten Reformen seit 1978 zu gewaltigen wirtschaftlichen Umwälzungen, doch die zunehmende Urbanisierung stellt das Land vor große Herausforderungen. Zunächst fehlt für die Produktivitätssteigerung der Industrie ein adäquates ländliches Bildungssystem. Zweitens verbleiben durch...

This paper proposes a finite mixture model (FMM) to model the behavioral transition of calorie consumption with an assumption that nutrition consumption is a mixture of two different behavioral stages: a poor stage and an affluent stage. Based on 387 calorie-income elasticities collected from 90...

Nutrition transition is driven by quantity increase and structural change in food consumption. Particularly, meat consumption plays an important role. This study proposes a simple but innovative method to empirically decompose the total income effect on nutrition improvement into direct income...

Investments in agricultural modernization have resulted in remarkable progress in food production over the last century. As a consequence, the global number and the proportion of undernourished people has fallen significantly. Despite this progress, providing sufficient and nutritiously diverse...

There is growing evidence that the current agri-food system is not sustainable, because major environmental and ethical issues challenge the global development. Against this complex background it becomes clear, that sustainable food is a global issue, relevant for individual consumers as well as...