In Africa, most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the African context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale—a premise supported by the often...

Innovations in futures, options, and derivative instruments permit active trading, speculating and hedging - linking markets for physical petroleum products with financial markets. These derivative markets continuously value petroleum delivered today and for future dates, providing a market...

This report is part of an attempt to model the global markets for primary commodities and to use these models for forecasting purposes as well as for policy analysis. In a free market, domestic prices on agricultural products could be expected to vary with world prices. But intervention is so...

Spatial disparity in incomes and productivity is apparent across and within countries. Most studies of the determinants of such differences focus on cross-country comparisons or location choice among firms. Less studied are the large differences in agricultural productivity within countries...

This study tested for the presence of risk premiums on crude oil and natural gas. The econometric analysis followed from a stochastic model in which the equilibrium value of inventories depends on a convenience yield and an option value related to price uncertainty. The empirical findings...

A dynamic trader problem under uncertain demand is presented and spatial and temporal arbitrage conditions derived from first‐order conditions. A time‐varying storage premium that explains backwardation and inverse carrying charges independent of risk‐aversion, stockouts, or convenience is...

Greenhouse gas emissions are largely determined by how energy is created and used, and policies designed to encourage mitigation efforts reflect this reality. However, an unintended consequence of an energy-focused strategy is that the set of policy instruments needed to tap mitigation...

In Africa, most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the African context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale -- a premise supported by the often...