European Union (EU) retailers are setting global benchmarks for the production of fresh food, and are asking their suppliers for produce to be certified according to food safety and quality standards. Compliance to these standards for developing countries small-scale producers entail costly...

This paper considers supply decisions by firms in a dynamic setting with adjustment costsand compares the behavior of an optimal control model to that of a rule-based system whichrelaxes the assumption that agents are explicit optimizers. In our approach, the economicagent uses believably simple...

Agroforestry projects have the potential to help mitigate global warming by acting as sinks for greenhouse gasses. However, participation in carbon-sink projects may be constrained by high costs. This problem may be particularly severe for projects involving smallholders in developing countries....

In many African countries, governments are re-thinking the role of the state in centrally providing certain goods and services. The rights and responsibilities for providing various public goods are being decentralized to lower levels of government administration, and/or being devolved directly...

In this paper, we derive estimates for willingness to pay for rainfall-index based insurance contracts. Surveys were undertaken in four regions in Morocco, representing different mean and variability of rainfall conditions. Results indicate that respondents in the high variability regions...