The Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) is an inter-governmental organization comprising Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and several countries of the Commonwealth of Independent states (CIS) including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The...

Recent academic discussion regarding crop insurance in developing and transition countries has focused on weather index insurance. But empirical analyses of such schemes based on farm level data cannot be found in the literature, though this insurance type shows clear advantages compared to...

Kazakhstanâs agricultural sector plays an important role in the country's economy. Not only does it function as an economic output producer, it also serves as a social buffer in times of transition to a market economy. The restructuring process had a strong impact on the economic performance of...

Since the late 1980s, agriculture in Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) has been under considerable adjustment pressure due to changing political, economic and institutional environments. These changes have been linked to the transition process, as well as the ongoing integration...

This discussion paper considers insurance as a possible instrument of farm income stabilization and compares several crop insurance products with respect to their applicability in a transition economy using the case of Kazakhstan. The analysis is based on a qualitative evaluation as well a...

This Discussion Paper contains the greater part of the contributions to the Young Scientists Workshop on Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe (IAMO, September 4-5, 2006). After last years' positive response, the workshop has been organized for the fourth time and has a solid...

We conduct an examination of the climate effect to analyze the historical dependence of grain production on temperatures and precipitation levels, and project this dependence to estimate the productivity of different grain types in the mid- and long-terms, given four greenhouse gas concentration...

We hypothesize a reciprocal causation between crop insurance use and the economic performance of farms in an environment characterized by imperfect financial markets and farms' budget constraints. To test our hypothesis, we apply a system of simultaneous equations consisting of economic...

The paper evaluates the effectiveness ofseveral index-based crop insurance schemes bycomparing results from two alternative evaluationapproaches. We apply the common ex post approachfrom the literature by specifying and evaluatinginsurance contracts by means of the data for the samehistorical...