Книги

Cotton is one of the most important smallholder cash crops in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). How to ensure input supply, credit recovery and competition is a subject of intense policy debate. This paper examines the performance of cotton sector development policies in Mozambique and Zambia. Both countries face the challenge of organizing input supply to farmers in the absence of rural credit markets, and competing in international markets distorted by production subsidies in developed countries. Both countries privatized cotton ginning in the 1990s. Emerging from civil war, Mozambique established geographical monopolies to interlink input and output markets and facilitate credit recovery. In Zambia, the government completely liberalized the cotton sector, forcing the private sector to deal with the problem of input distribution and credit recovery by itself. Despite being landlocked, Zambia.s cotton sector has achieved better performance in terms of both value of cotton output per hectare and smallholder share of world market prices. An analysis of the institutional and technical factors behind the two countries. performance provides insights to guide the design of public/private partnerships relevant to many SSA countries.

The multifunctional character of agriculture is used as a main argument for agricultural support. This argument is theoretical analyzed in a model with decreasing marginal utility and it is shown that such a support must depend on the size of the agricultural sector. Consequently the argument is not valid for a common policy for very different countries as the EU-countries.

The technical and scale efficiency of Polish farms is analysed, using Data Envelopment Analysis. Efficiency differences are measured according to farm specialisation, in crop or livestock, at two points in time during transition, 1996 and 2000. The statistical variability of efficiency estimates is investigated. The efficiency results are reviewed in the light of confidence intervals provided by bootstrapping and of a summary measure introduced in this study ‘the coefficient of separation’. The inference analysis suggests that farms might be less efficient than revealed by the point estimates alone, and that they might not be clearly different from each other.

This paper places the problem of Chinese rural taxation in the context of government regulation and tries to present an integrated theoretical framework of rural development in China in the past two decades. Our theoretical framework can reconcile the stylized facts that the average level of rural taxation relative to rural net income after the 1990s did not increase very fast, but rural taxation became a very serious problem in this period. We found that this is in large part due to the increase of rural income disparity after 1990s and the uneven tax and fee distribution among different income groups. We argue that differentiated enforcement of the government regulations such as grain procurement and birth control play an important role in the rural taxation problem, and more generally, the problem of expanding local government size and rising rural income disparity. The empirical findings do support our hypothesis.

A questionnaire method has been used to collect the empirical data on the food processing enterprises. Data were collected for 36 out of 68 enterprises having ISO 9001 / 2 (April 2000). Value chain as a modeling power of competitive advantage, determinants of quality management system efficiency, participation of knowledge and skills in formation of firm competence were discussed.

This paper analyzes the situation of large scale farms, mostly former kolkhozes and sovkhozes, in the Russian transition period. A continuing, significant decline in land use, employment, production, productivity, liquidity and financial results since privatization in 1992 and after the considerable changes in economic and legal sphere in 1995-96 is documented.

The development of factor endowment, crop and livestock production, marketing and management failures rising from necessary adjustment to the changing economic environment and organization problems are elaborated. Finally the paper gives some policy recommendations for improving the economic setting in which Russia’s large scale farms have to operate.

Many development projects seek to reach the poorest in the provision of agricultural inputs, extension, credit, education, and many other services. However, low-cost and reliable methods for assessing whether a project reaches the poor are lacking at present.

In this paper, we present an operational method that was designed during a two-year research project from 1999-2001 with the support of an international donor- coordination office. The objective of the research was to develop and test a new method that could be later used by development practitioners to assess the poverty level of beneficiaries of development projects that target the poor in relation to the general population in the intervention area. The method constructs a poverty index using principle component analysis, and is based on a range of indicators that describes different dimensions of poverty and for which credible information can be quickly and inexpensively obtained. To ensure the method’s usefulness to a wide number of countries and projects, the method was tested in collaboration in rural and urban areas in four countries: Nicaragua (urban and rural), Kenya (urban and rural), Madagascar (rural), and India (rural). We present results from these studies. We conclude that the method has a promising potential for monitoring and evaluation purposes of development organizations. Since 2001, the method has been used in over 20 project assessments.

The paper analyzes the changes that have taken place in the nature of agriculture information and their consequences on the public role of related public services with specific regard to process undergoing in the European Union. Increased interest in food quality and food safety issues in a global consumer driven society, together with major attention to environmental and ethical issues related to food production, enlarge both the object of agricultural information and the audience of stakeholders in the food chain and in the general public. Information policy with regard to a multifunctional approach to agriculture, can be finalized to correct three main sources of market failures as access to information, quality and adverse selection and externalities and provision of public goods. The privatization of agricultural research and extension, although useful from the point of view of economic efficiency, poses a number of threats to the development of knowledge for sustainable agriculture. If the public sector decides to move away from the delivering of services, public action can still be relevant in orienting, targeting, regulating and funding in win-win solutions where the advantages of public extension, as open access and evaluation of social priorities, join efficiency and market orientation of the private sector.

The major objective of this paper is to discuss the development of rural labor markets in China during the past two decades and understand how it has affected women. Using household survey data that we collected in 2001, we examine the role of women in labor markets by examining employment and migration trends and changes in wages. According to the data of our nearly national representative sample, we find that there has been a sharp overall increase in off-farm participation, most of the increase has been driven by young migrants, and women, especially those in the youngest cohorts, have participated at rates equaling or surpassing those of their male counterparts. We also find that the wages of women have not been adversely affected by the emergence of liberalized labor markets and that when women, mostly middle-aged and older ones, are left in charge of farm work, the productivity of crop production does not fall.

China’s accession to the WTO poses great challenges to the Chinese agricultural sector, especially to the grain producers. Compared with major grain exporters in the world, most grain crops in China are high in production cost and weak in market competitiveness. This can be partly attributed to the fact that Chinese farmers are facing with poorer agricultural production infrastructures and inadequate public investment in agricultural research and extension, which leads to the lower efficiency in private inputs and thus higher private cost per unit of product. After China joining the WTO, protective and administrative measures conflicted with the URAA cannot be utilized as before. Alternative measures should be explored to provide help to farmers to improve competitiveness of their product. Public investment in agricultural research and other production infrastructures should be considered with high priority as one of the policy alternatives.

This paper examines the effects of public investment in agricultural research on the reduction of production cost of major grain crops in China by using crop-specific data for the past 20 year. It is concluded that, increasing public investment in agricultural research, which is well within the ‘green box’ policy framework and allowed by the WTO rules, is a plausible and effective measure to reduce grain producer’s private input and to enhance the competitiveness of grain products. It is also of great significance to sustained food security in China.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was founded in the 1950s with price support as the main policy instrument. Despite massive criticism from both within and outside the EU, price support remains the backbone of the CAP. This paper argues that the choice of price support was logical viewed in both historical and economical perspectives, and gives three reasons for this. First, even though talks on agricultural integration began immediately after the war, the CAP was a result of general economic integration in Europe rather than the reason for it. Second, the structure of the CAP was determined by the agricultural policies of the six founding countries. The third and last reason is related to the economic characteristics of running a price support system. The six countries together were net importers of agricultural products and could thereby benefit from import levies. Price support is paid for by the consumers, and European consumers had been paying high prices for food for a long time. This, together with a high level of economic growth in Europe in the 1960s, made it easier for the governments to choose this policy rather than a policy based on direct payments financed by taxpayers that would have put pressure on the national fiscal budgets of the six countries.

Competitiveness has been a subject of considerable attention in agricultural economics. In this paper we study the development of the international competitiveness of Ukrainian crop production between 1996 and 2001 using the concepts of Domestic Resource Cost and Private Cost Ratio. We distinguish between ‘average’ and ‘best’ farms to get a comprehensive picture of farm competitiveness in Ukraine. Our main conclusion is that agriculture responds quickly to incentives, and there are indications that Ukrainian agriculture has entered a phase of dynamic development. A shortage of human capital and physical bottlenecks in grain and oilseeds marketing could limit this development in coming years; if policy makers respond to these risks Ukraine could easily be a global player by the end of the current decade.