Over fifteen years have elapsed since the transition from the centrally planned economic system started in the early 1990âs. During this time agricultural and rural areas of Central and Eastern Europe have undergone profound structural changes with wide variations in the degree of...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

We take a qualitative snapshot of rural entrepreneurs in Bulgaria aiming to shed light opportunities and barriers they face in post communist rural communities. Utilising ethnographical methodology, we capture the complex interplay with the institutional environment. Rural entrepreneurship may...

The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) has continued to be fiercely debated between North and South, particularly with respect to its provisions for the agricultural sector. Article 27.3(b) of the TRIPS Agreement requires WTO member countries to offer some...

A changing world of increasing complexity, fluctuating prices, high energy costs and limited data necessitate creative blending of economic theory and available empirical statistics to understand the welfare impacts in a specific market. In this paper, a programming approach is used in tandem...

China has embarked on a major program to modernise agricultural and agribusiness structures with far reaching implications for rural development, international competitiveness / trade and food safety. There are, however, few studies that examine in detail how the modernisation program has...

By contrasting the performance of clustered micro enterprises with that of dispersed ones in the handloom sector in Ethiopia, this study shows that clustering significantly increases profit. To correct for selection bias, we match clustered and dispersed micro enterprises that share similar...

The typical model of retail pricing for produce products assumes retailers set price equal to the farm price plus a certain markup. However, observations from scanner data indicate a large degree of price dispersion in the grocery retailing market. In addition to markup pricing behavior, we...

The objective of this paper is to describe different types of value chain, to capture value added activities of each chain, to discuss the organizational and institutional link in each value chain and its implications for the role of small farmers. We focus on two counties in Hebei and Zhejiang...

The paper investigates the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies on farm total factor productivity (TFP) in the European Union (EU). We employ a structural semi-parametric estimation algorithm directly incorporating the effect of subsidies into a model of unobserved...