This paper examines the prospects for organic agriculture (OA) and the production of biofuels as strategies for rural development in Cambodia and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). Both agricultural activities are growing worldwide, although there are some questions as to how...

Sustainable management of non-timber forest products is a serious concern of many developing countries. This study documents an innovative undertaking involving the introduction of a market-based organic certification scheme to improve the resource management and processing of lemongrass in poor...

In developing countries markets for agri-food products are changing at a pace that is unparalleled in modern history. Markets are increasingly open and increasingly homogenized toward international tastes and requirements for levels of quality, packaging, safety, and even process attributes such...

From the farmer’s perspective, contract farming provides stable market access, credits, extension services, infrastructure and other benefits, but has drawbacks such as limiting the flexibility of farming and marketing. Based on a survey of rice contract farming for export in Cambodia, this...

There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross-country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot...

The complementarities of trade advantage and trade competitiveness measures for Hungarian agro-food trade with the European Union are analyzed. The stability and duration of the trade measures over time is investigated by the survival analysis using the nonparametric Kaplan-Meier product limit...

This paper attempts to understand the linkages between human capital and input choice in agricultural firms. The hypothesis to be tested is that better educated managers choose different input combinations than managers with a lower educational level. In particular, the hypothesis is that the...

Poverty is prevalent among small farms in transition economies such as the Lao PDR, where market failures prevail and subsistence production is the norm. Contract farming is emerging as a promising tool to facilitate market linkages and provide the necessary supports that enable small farms to...

This study adapts a relatively novel model of off-farm labor supply to the changing conditions of Bulgaria during the 1990s. The model's parameters are estimated separately for each of the three different waves of the Bulgarian Integrated Household Survey, each reflecting remarkably different...

There are alternative definitions of vulnerability to poverty. Most researchers prefer to define vulnerability as the probability of a household or individual falling into poverty in the future. Based on this definition and using household survey panel data from rural China, this paper attempt...