The wine industry is one of the oldest commercial activities in South Africa. The South Africanwine grape industry annually produces more than a million tonnes of grapes, making the countrythe ninth largest producer in the world. The total area under wine grape production is divided intoeight...

According to Karl Popper, economics and agricultural economics should be deemed scientificif the theories (hypotheses) are subject to strict tests. The testing of agro-economic theories goes back 50 years in the USA, Canada, Europe, and Japan, and these methods are becoming increasingly part of...

Market liberalization at the domestic level and at the boarder level has been a dominant feature of market reforms in most developing countries including Bangladesh during the last two decades. A pre-requisite for producers and consumers to benefit from this new and changing market environment...

This dissertation studies the role of the collective action sector for rural development. A combination of formal modeling, historical and institutional analysis, and econometric methods is used in this research. I develop microeconomic models to analyze the determinants of peasants' decisions...

Contingent valuation (CV) is a surveying technique used to estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) by individuals for non-market goods (goods for which no market of exchange exists). Many CV studies have shown the existence of hypothetical bias which occurs when individuals are asked a...

This research examines groundwater protection programs as a case study of investments to address long-term environmental health risks. The value individuals place on reducing their risk of exposure to chemical contaminants is estimated using stated preference methodology, accounting for the...

As progress has been made on tariff reduction by recent trade agreements, barriers to freer international trade arising from nontariff sources have become more prominent. Regulation of product quality and in particular food safety can be a major source of such barriers. Lowering them requires...

The three essays in this dissertation address issues pertinent to hypothetical bias in the contingent valuation (CV) mechanism. Empirical evidence gathered through several experiments conducted at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is used to provide a better understanding of the cause...

This dissertation explores the interconnection between land ownership inequality and functioning of rural factor markets in Turkey. It investigates the effectiveness and efficiency of land and labor markets in generating and distributing economic opportunities within agriculture and, thereby, in...

Protection of the environment is among the most pressing public policy challenges and will continue to be so long into the future. Pollution, specifically, has played a pivotal and substantial role in the degradation of the environment. Although numerous analytical techniques and computational...