Global retail companies ("supermarkets? have an increasing influence on developing countries, through foreign investments and/or through the imposition of their private standards. The impact on developing countries and poverty is often assessed as negative. In this paper we show the opposite,...

The rapid spread of modern supply chains in developing countries is profoundly changing the way food is produced and traded. In this paper we examine the gender implications in modern supply chains. We conceptualize the various mechanisms through which women are directly affected, we review...

The 2003 reform of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) under Commissioner Fischler was the most radical in the history of the CAP. This paper analyzes the causes and constraints of the reform. The paper argues that an unusual combination of pro-reform factors came together in...

Dramatic changes took place in agricultural policies in Europe in the 19th and 20th century. In the 1860s European nations agreed on a series of trade agreements which spread free trade across the continent. In the 1960s European nations concluded an international agreement which spread heavy...

The paper analyzes the political and institutional factors which are behind the dramatic changes in distortions to agricultural incentives in the transition countries in East Asia (China and Vietnam), Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, etc), the rest of the former Soviet Union, and in...

This paper presents a general political economy model of standards. We use the model to derive political and social optima of nutrition and health standards in food markets, and to identify under which cases “understandardization” or “over-standardization” will result. The paper analyses...

This paper analyses empirically the effect of "hold-ups" on capital investment in farms using a sample of 318 Hungarian enterprises, surveyed over 1997. A negative relationship arises between capital investment and the incidence of hold-up behaviour. This relationship is affected by farm's...