The object of this essay is to describe and analyse contractual relations in two villages in North-east Bihar at a time when the so-called ‘green revolution' promised much and the region had just started to benefit from canal irrigation. It is against this historical background that I will...

The object of this essay is to describe and analyse contractual relations in two villages in North-east Bihar at a time when the so-called ‘green revolution’ promised much and the region had just started to benefit from canal irrigation. It is against this historical background that I will...

In many contracts that deal with the division of future quantities, there is a tension between risk-sharing aspects and incentive aspects. Over the last twenty-five there has been relatively more attention paid to these incentive aspects, particularly moral hazard. In this paper, we point out...

Urbanisation in China has long been held back by various restrictions on land and internal migration but has taken off since the 1990s, as these impediments started to be gradually relaxed. People have moved in large numbers to richer cities, where productivity is higher and has increased...

The paper draws three lessons from a review of the literature. It supports more empirical research. Regulation should:* support activities that reinforce locally embedded natural ecologies and social relations, rather than import industrial modes of production, * constitute markets that develop...

There is an important literature on the causal relationship flowing from the quality of institutions to economic performance. This paper studies this relationship at the micro level by looking at the productivity impacts of land rights. Whereas previous studies used proxies for soil quality and...

Property rights are powerful. They fundamentally shape both the physical world and our social relations within it. Property choices impact how land and other resources are used (or conserved) and who has access to those resources (or who is excluded). At the same time, cultural discourses about...

In this paper we examine the role of the interaction between labour productivity and the use of factors in explaining the recent (1998-2007) 11% decline in wheat production in China. We employ a non-neutral stochastic production frontier approach that enables us to identify the interaction and...

The nineties' agricultural reform in China that was aimed at deregulating the agricultural market eventually resulted in a huge drop in agricultural production and a high rate of inflation in agricultural prices; this apparently motivated the government to take over the control of agricultural...

Following the rural reform in 1978 a series of agricultural reforms were introduced in China. The main aim of these reforms was to create incentives for the farmers to produce more. The nineties' price reform that was aimed at deregulating the agricultural market eventually resulted in a huge...