Our purpose here is to challenge the big-bang approach to economic history in which some alleged institutional imposition - a deus machine - is claimed to launch a series of new economic behaviors. This so-called prime mover is then carried forward by the inexorable forces of path dependency to...

How to revitalise the agricultural sector under the commitments of membership in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has emerged as a major policy challenge for the Russian government. According to the current State Programme for the Development of Agriculture, a key support channel is via...

Forests are important resources for local livelihoods and the economy. Forest cover can be significantly affected by changes in institutional and political framework conditions such as induced by the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the war in Kosovo. This study analyzed the...

Die vorliegende Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit verschiedenen mikroökonomischen Konzepten zur Analyse der Flexibilität und wendet diese Konzepte in einer empirischen Analyse des polnischen Agrarsektors an. Der Schwerpunkt des theoretischen Teils der Arbeit liegt in der Messung der...

This paper investigates determinants of agricultural sector efficiency in ten new member states (NMS-10) of the European Union (EU) from Central and Eastern European countries by the non-parametric method Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and the panel data analysis. The agricultural sector...

Based on a national representative survey conducted in 2009, this study shows that the decision-making within Farmer Professional Cooperatives (FPCs) in China is decentralized to individual farmers. However, there is a trend that the decision rights of farming are decomposed to marketing,...

Wheat price forecasts are very important for traders, farmers and politicians as well. However, only quite accurate price predictions can guide these groups towards making the best decisions. Therefore the well-known wheat price projections of both the OECD and the FAPRI from 1996 on are tested...

This paper investigates whether political competition plays an important role in determining the level of agricultural protection. In order to do so, we exploit variation in political and economic data from 74 developing and developed countries for the post-war period. Our results robustly show...

In this paper we present an empirical analysis of farmers' contracting choice in the Hungarian milk sector using 2005 milk producer survey data, employing transaction cost economics. We focus on analysing some key determinants of farmers' contracting choices: type of contracts, duration, number...

Over the past three decades the globalization in agri-food sector has been accompanied by a dramatic restructuring, liberalization and privatization of markets often with serious adverse consequences for small farmers in developing and transition countries. Consequently, governments and the...