The rise of a western-style middle class in many successful emerging economies like China currently is inducing deep structural changes on agricultural world markets and within the global agri-food business. As a result of both higher incomes and concerns over product safety and quality the...

Based on a case study of two Moldovan regions, the paper challenges the favourable assessment of recently established peasant farms in a World Bank study by LERMAN et al. (1998). The main arguments in favour of a more critical view of the results of land privatisation and farm restructuring are...

The paper empirically investigates credit access and borrowing costs in Poland's rural financial market. We conduct an econometric analysis based on cross-sectional survey data including formal loans taken in the period 1997-1999. A hedonic regression of the effective interest rate, comprising...

On the basis of portfolio selection theory, this paper finds that whole-farm risk must be regarded as a major reason for the low level of credit flow to agriculture in North-western Kazakhstan. A quadratic programming model was used in order (a) to demonstrate the comparatively high overall risk...

The aim of this paper is to empirically analyse the effects of governmentally promoted credit access on the investment behaviour of credit rationed farmers. This is done by specifying an empirical investment equation which is estimated on a cross-sectional sample of Polish farm household data....

How to revitalise the cattle and dairy sectors under the WTO commitments has emerged as a major policy challenge for the Russian government. This article raises the question whether livestock recovery in East Germany does provide any insights that could be of value to current policy makers in...

Kazakhstan is now widely regarded as a key player on world agricultural markets, with considerable export potential in the wheat, beef and dairy sectors. Based on unique farm-level data covering all production systems currently relevant, we offer new insights into the constraints that hamper...

This article evaluates the recent evolution of farm structure in Kazakhstan's grain region against the reform objectives of the 1990s and the family farm theory that underpinned the latter. In the study region, super-large agroholdings, large-scale enterprises and smaller individual farms...

Because of its enormous land and yield potentials, the breadbasket of the East, i.e. Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan are increasingly important for world grain markets. However, counterproductive market and trade policies, continual farm-level productivity gaps and deficits in marketing...

Der Kornkammer des Ostens, namentlich Russland, der Ukraine und Kasachstan, wird aufgrund riesiger Flächen- und Ertragspotenziale eine zunehmende Bedeutung für die Weltgetreidemärkte zugesprochen. Allerdings blockieren widersinnige Markt- und Handelspolitiken, anhaltende betriebliche...