The lack of access to credit is a severe constraint for many farmers. Warehouse receipts are an important and effective tool for creating liquidity and easing access to agriculture credit. Such schemes also offer additional benefits such as providing storage to smoothe the supply and prices in...

Coffee is an important crop for the Dominican Republic, accounting for an average of 11 percent of total exports by value during 1982-84. But for the last 10 years, coffee yields have been low, and production and exports stagnant. If current policies for coffee continue, production and exports...

The authors examine the architecture, elements of market design, and the products traded in derivatives exchanges around the world. The core function of a derivatives exchange is to facilitate the transfer of risk among economic agents by providing mechanisms to enhance liquidity and facilitate...

The tropical timber market is characterized by multiple species, multiple products, and regional patterns of trade and production. In such a market, finding a representative price is a difficult and perhaps an irrelevant task. So Varangis conducted tests to see whether prices from different...

Cash prices for wheat in Poland are not closely related to futures prices in Chicago and London, for several reasons: differences in seasonality, fluctuations in exchange rate, poor dissemination of information in Poland, and most important the Polish government's intervention in wheat markets....

Liberalization of tropical agricultural markets has brought globalization, in the sense that all producers now face world rather than domestic prices. Producer prices have tended to rise as a share of fob prices as intermediation costs and tax has declined. However, in conjunction with inelastic...

In recent years, the role of investment funds has increased in most commodity markets. Investment funds, which traditionally deal with financial markets, have been shifting between financial markets and commodity futures markets, as well as among commodity futures markets. The popularity of...

Poor households in rural areas are particularly vulnerable to risks that reduce incomes and increase expenditures. Most past research has focused on risk-coping strategies for the rural poor, specially on micro-level and household actions. These are risks that can been shared within a community...