In the 1980s and early 1990s, wheat imports accounted for about four-fifths of China's import of cereals, and imported wheat accounts for about 30 percent of wheat supply. As a result of the many recent developments in Chinese government’s policy on wheat production and marketing as well as...

Feed grains researchers have abundant technical opportunities to select various options for improvement of nutritional characteristics of feed grains. Choosing between those opportunities is a difficult issue for research funding organisations. In this paper, efforts to address the relative...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

Ecological, evolutionary and economic issues involved in introducing genetically modified organisms (GMOs), mainly in agriculture, are discussed. The ecological and evolutionary impacts identified hamper (economic) valuation of GMOs and their biosafety regulation and creates difficulties for...

In this paper, we generalize the rational addiction model to include three addictive goods: cigarettes, alcohol and coffee. We use a pseudo-panel data approach which has many advantages compared to aggregate and panel data. While cigarette and coffee demands fit well with the rational addiction...

We conducted a natural field experiment in an artisanal sit-down ice-cream shop in Italy to investigate whether consumer choices are affected by information regarding locally grown products. Two aspects of locally grown products are investigated: (i) quality due to terroir (i.e., quality with a...

When quality is not observable by prospective buyers, theory predicts that the quality of marketed goods will suffer, and the volume of trade will be depressed. Using data from more than 2,000 maize samples collected in four Kenyan provinces, we show that the presence of aflatoxin, an invisible...

To date there is limited knowledge on the role that post-harvest storage protectants, chemical or otherwise, play in a smallholder farmer’s decision to adopt of high-yielding improved maize varieties. This is a key issue because higher yielding varieties are often more susceptible to storage...