This paper presents preliminary evidence on the effect of crop insurance on fertilizer and chemical inputs in agriculture. Our estimates are based on two sources of identification that emerge from a policy change concerning insurance subsidies that approximately doubled total premiums and the...

Labor markets in all economies are subject to transaction costs associated with recruiting, monitoring and supervising workers. The level of transaction costs affects labor and land contract choices and family labor advantages. Rural labor markets in developing economies, where institutions such...

This study applies the concept of a dynamic dominant-firm oligopoly model to the international soybean market. It has been suggested that the international soybean market should be viewed as an oligopoly among exporting nations. Consistent with Gaskins (1971) dynamic dominant firm model, our...

The extent to which crop insurance programs have resulted in additional land being brought into production has been a topic of considerable debate. We extend a multi-equation structural model of crop acreage response, insurance participation, CRP enrollment, and input usage developed in Goodwin...

The paper presents preliminary results of the analysis of cost efficiency of peanut production in the South-Eastern region utilizing data from the 2001 Peanut Farm Costs and Returns Survey. Stochastic cost frontier analysis using both Cobb-Douglas and translog functional forms is used as the...

The article used the ATE estimation framework to derive consistent semi-parametric estimators of population adoption rates and their determinants of the NERICA (New Rice for Africa) rice varieties in Nigeria. Empirical evidence shows that the observed sample adoption rate does not consistently...

We investigate measurement of market integration of staple food markets in developing countries. The analysis takes the Parity Bound Model as starting point and modifies this model by parameterizing and estimating transaction costs. The specification of transaction costs takes account of...

This paper examines the market potential for fresh organic lettuce and water melon with arecently collected data on consumers from Kumasi metropolis of Ghana. Using a doubleboundeddichotomous choice contingent valuation technique, consumer’s willingness topay is estimated with a Tobit model to...

In Kenya, trade policy reforms in the cereals sector were initiated as a key componentof the economy-wide structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) during the mid 1980s.The SAPs were later strengthened and made irreversible by Kenya’s commitments atthe multilateral trade negotiations. However,...

Global biofuel production has risen substantially in recent years, driven primarily bygovernment support for biofuel industries. The stated motivations for these initiatives arenumerous and have varied over time. Soybeans are the only field crop produced in sufficientquantities in KwaZulu-Natal...