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Abstract:
An emerging literature on standards, global supply chains, and development argues that enhanced quality and safety standards are major trade barriers for developing country exports and cause the marginalization of small businesses and poor households in developing countries. This paper is the first to quantify income and poverty effects of such high-standards trade and to integrate labor market effects, by using company and household survey data from the vegetable export chain in Senegal. First, horticultural exports from Senegal to the EU have grown sharply over the past decade, despite strongly increasing food standards in the EU. Second, these exports have strong positive effects on poor households' income. We estimate that these exports reduced regional poverty by around 12 percentage points and reduced extreme poverty by half. Third, tightening food standards induced structural changes in the supply chain including a shift from smallholder contract-based farming to large-scale integrated estate production. However, these changes mainly altered the mechanism through which poor households benefit: through labor markets instead of product markets. Moreover, the impact on poverty reduction is stronger as the poorest benefit relatively more from working on large-scale farms than from contract farming. These findings challenge several basic arguments in this research field.

Abstract:
This paper uses new poverty data based on household level surveys to analyze changes in rural poverty and rural-urban poverty differences in 23 transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. The paper presents a series of hypotheses to explain differences across countries and changes over time.

Rural poverty, Transition, Eastern Europe, Former Soviet Union

Abstract:
In an effort to stimulate a more exciting and entertaining style of play, the National Hockey Association (NHL) changed the rewards associated with the results of overtime games. Under the new rules, teams tied at the end of regulation both receive a single point regardless of the outcome in overtime. A team scoring in the sudden-death 5-minute overtime period would earn an additional point. Prior to the rule change in the 1999-2000 season, the team losing in overtime would receive no points while the winning team earned 2 points. This paper presents a theoretical model to explain the effect of the rule change on the strategy of play during both the overtime period and the regulation time game.

The results suggest that under the new overtime format equally powerful teams will play more offensively in overtime resulting in more games decided by a sudden-death goal. The results also suggest that while increasing the likelihood of attacking in overtime, the rule change would have a perverse effect on the style of play during regulation by causing them to play conservatively for the tie. Empirical data confrm the theoretical results. The paper also shows that increasing the rewards to a win in regulation time would prevent teams from playing defensively during regular time.

Ice Hockey, Game Theory, NHL Overtime Rule

Abstract:
This paper analyses the efficiency effects of the farm restructuring process in Central and Eastern Europe. We develop a theoretical model on how reforms, which are typically implemented in the process of the transition of a communist system to a market economy, would affect production efficiency in agriculture and we use a unique set of representative farm survey data to assess efficiency changes during transition. The theoretical model is used to simulate how the distribution of farm efficiencies would change during transition and efficiency changes are correlated with reforms in the countries.

Transition agriculture, production efficiency, reforms

Abstract:
Consumers have increasing demands for product standards. This has important implications for development. While there has been increasing attention to empirical work in this area, it is often grounded in a poor conceptual base. To overcome this shortcoming, this paper develops a formal theory of the process of the introduction of high product standards in developing countries and identifies the implications of the emergence of high product standards. The model endogenizes the introduction of high standards and the choices of the actors - firms and producers - who make up the supply chain. Initial differences in income, the nature of capital constraints, transaction costs, the efficiency of traditional marketing channels and policies and institutions are shown to affect the likelihood of and the speed with which the high standards economy emerges. Initial differences in some of these same factors - as well as inter-country differences in the distribution of the sizes of farmers - are also shown to determine who begins to produce and sell high standards commodities in the early stages of the growth process. We also use the model to analyze the welfare effects of the introduction of high standards production systems.

Abstract:
This paper analyzes how imperfections of property rights affect allocation of assets and welfare, using micro-survey data from Bulgaria. Co-ownership of assets is widespread in many countries due to inheritance. Central and Eastern Europe offers an interesting natural experiment to assess the effects of such rights imperfections because of the asset restitution process in the 1990s. Bulgaria is particularly interesting because of the prominence of the co-ownership problem (about half of all land plots are co-owned), because of the strong fragmentation of land, and because of legislation providing an instrument to separate out chosen (endogenous) versus forced (exogenous) forms of co-ownership. We find that land in co-ownership is much more likely to be used by less efficient farm organizations or to be left abandoned, and that it leads to significant welfare losses.

Abstract:
This paper analyses the distributional effects of decoupled Single Farm Payments in the European Union. In a static world the SFP benefit only farmers, irrespective of the implemented SFP model and irrespective of whether entitlements are tradable or not, except when the size of the allocated entitlements is larger than the eligible area and/or if entrants are eligible for the SFP. Then the SFP gets either partially or fully capitalized into land values and landowners benefit. In a dynamic world the effects depend on the nature of structural change, on the tradability of entitlements, and on the implementation model.

Land market, agricultural policy rents, decoupled subsidies, land capitalization

Abstract:
During the past decades the global food system changed dramatically with increased trade in high-value food products, increased exports from developing countries, increased consolidation and dominance of large multinational food companies, and increased proliferation of public and private food standards. As a consequence, global food trade is increasingly organised around vertically coordinated supply chains rather than around spot market transactions. While there is consensus that these structural changes are profoundly changing the way food is produced and traded, there is no consensus on the overall welfare implications of increased high-value food exports and supply chain restructuring in poor countries. In this paper we discuss the income and poverty implications of expanded horticulture exports and changing supply chain structures for rural households in Sub-Saharan African exporting countries. We put together the economic arguments; distinguish different channels through which rural households are affected; provide evidence from three comparative case-studies on high-value horticulture exports; and derive implications for policy makers, private investors, and the development aid community.

trade, poverty, modern supply chains, Africa

Abstract:
During the past decades the global food system changed dramatically with increased trade in high-value food products, increased exports from developing countries, increased consolidation and dominance of large multinational food companies, and increased proliferation of public and private food standards. As a consequence, global food trade is increasingly organised around vertically coordinated supply chains rather than around spot market transactions. While there is consensus that these structural changes are profoundly changing the way food is produced and traded, there is no consensus on the overall welfare implications of increased high-value food exports and supply chain restructuring in poor countries. In this paper we discuss the income and poverty implications of expanded horticulture exports and changing supply chain structures for rural households in Sub-Saharan African exporting countries. We put together the economic arguments; distinguish different channels through which rural households are affected; provide evidence from three comparative case-studies on high-value horticulture exports; and derive implications for policy makers, private investors, and the development aid community.

trade, poverty, modern supply chains, Africa

Abstract:
Thirty years ago, a vast share of the poor and middle income countries were heavily statecontrolled. The effects of the liberalizations in the 1980s and 1990s differed strongly between regions in Africa, Asia and Europe. This paper first documents these differences in reform effects in a comparative framework and then develops a model to formally analyze how liberalization affects production and income distribution when institutions that govern production and exchange are also affected. We derive hypotheses on how the endogenous institutional adjustments affect the supply response to the liberalizations. We use these insights to forward a series of explanations on the differences in performance across countries following liberalization.

Abstract:
Transition countries provide a natural experiment to study the development of land markets. This paper provides survey-evidence of the variation in the development of land markets, identifies a series of patterns, and provides a set of hypotheses to explain these variations in land market development.