During the 1960s, Uganda was the largest cotton producer in sub-Saharan Africa. Attempts to revive the sector following its demise in the 1970s were unsuccessful in the 1980s and more effective in the 1990s. However, there is a sense that it still lags behind its full potential. Low quality of...

After experiencing a boom during the mid-1990s, the performance of Uganda's coffee industry has been disappointing. Most existing analysis sees the sector's problems as quality deterioration, a poor marketing position in the global market, a weak regulatory framework, and poor infrastructure....

This paper reviews the literature of price linkages and examines the degree to which cotton prices are linked; it also tests whether such linkages have improved over the last decade. It concludes that the degree of linkage has improved over the last decade while the main source of this improvement...

Tea, one of Tanzania's major export crops, contributes about $30 million to the country's export earnings and provides employment to some 50 000 families. Despite the sector's early success, nationalisation of two estates along with neglect of the smallholder sector made it clear that only...

Although age is not supposed to be a criterion for the award of the Nobel Prize, it is commonly believed that it does play a role. Indeed, econometric evidence in this paper also suggests such a role. However, the paper finds that, if there is a preference for older Nobel candidates, this is...

During the past decade, cotton prices remained considerably below other agricultural prices (although they recovered toward the end of 2010). Yet, between 2000-04 and 2005-09 world cotton production increased 13 percent. This paper conjectures that biotechnology-induced productivity improvements...

This note re-examines the energy/nonenergy price link. Using annual data from the period 1960 to 2008, it finds that the pass-through of energy price changes to the overall nonenergy commodity index is 0.28. At a more disaggregated level, the fertilizer index exhibited the largest pass-through...