We investigate the incentive to provide goods of high quality in a vertically related market for different types of business organizations, a farmer-owned cooperative and an investor-owned firm. Contrary to the firm, the cooperative is characterized by decentralized decision making, which gives rise to overproduction and problems coordinating the quality decisions of its members (free riding). Comparing both manufacturers acting as monopolists we show that the cooperative will never supply final goods of higher quality than the firm, and that the problem of quality coordination is mitigated if the cooperative succeeds in preventing overproduction. When a cooperative faces competition of an investor-owned firm (mixed duopoly), it will - except in one limit case - never produce final goods of a higher quality than the firm and will deliver lower quality in a number of scenarios.

The thesis investigates the impact of a very specific state-led legislative institution of colonial lineage – the Agricultural Produce Markets Commission (APMC) Act & Rules – on uneven agricultural growth productivity and poverty outcomes across select fourteen Indian states over the post-independence period. It also studies political economy determinants of the APMC Act. This research offers the first most comprehensive empirical characterisation of agricultural marketing laws for the agriculture produce sector of the Indian economy. The thesis presents three substantive research outcomes. The first empirical chapter provides the construction of a composite multidimensional de jure time-varying index of the APMC Act & Rules for each state. The quantitative measure reveals the extent of variation in the form & trends of statutory clauses in the selected 14 Indian states from 1970-2008. Based on empirical analysis of nearly forty years of the regulatory framework of agricultural markets, the second empirical chapter demonstrates that variation in institutional market arrangements explain the marked differences in the use of modern farm inputs and growth patterns in agricultural productivity as well as rural poverty outcomes in the states of India. The results from 14 states show that states with improved regulatory arrangements in the agricultural markets have higher agricultural investment, productivity and fall in poverty. A difference of each one unit improvement in market regulations in a state is found to be associated with about 0.24 units average increase in the mean of agricultural yield productivity and an about 6.2 units average direct reduction in the mean of poverty incidence. Finally, the third chapter demonstrates presence of political economy activity in shaping of the differing APMC Act & Rules in Indian states. It suggests that ignoring potential influence of political economy factors in determining APMC Act can undermine the prospects of achieving desired policy objectives and may lead to miscalculated policy judgments. What the evidence in this thesis illustrates is that regulations matter in channelizing markets for efficiency effect on agricultural productivity and poverty reduction. It reveals that the APMC measure needs to be understood as a part of a wider political economy regulatory system and it cannot be viewed as a neutral tool which can be applied to produce predictable and consistent economic results. Agriculture growth and poverty reduction efforts would get a serious setback in states where effective institutional regulatory support was not provided as this assures vibrant market and remunerative price to farmers. The thesis’s fundamental finding is that efficient regulations encourage agricultural development which implies that any solution that looks to optimise the mechanisms around agricultural markets demands efficient and progressive evolution of the existing regulatory framework of the APMC Act. This challenges recent calls for complete dismantling of regulated markets, expressed by critics who view the current APMC Act as one of the main bottlenecks to managing food inflation and the national food security challenges in India. Given the heterogeneity of agrarian contexts, food systems and marketing dynamics being faced by the Indian farming community, well-regulated agricultural markets cannot be undermined for effective functioning of the domestic agricultural trade and development of farming community.

Thesis (MDF)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: There is substantial evidence supported by literature that many smallholder farmers can benefit from agricultural markets and commercialisation. This research examines the challenges and constraints that smallholder farmers have to deal with in the study area and what needs to be done to overcome the barriers to market access. An argument was made that identification of these barriers could lead to the necessary interventions and assist in institutional innovation to alleviate market constraints and challenges faced by smallholder farmers. The qualitative approach was deemed appropriate and entailed the face to face method in the collection of data through the use of structured questionnaires. Smallholder farmers in Tembisa, involved in the production and marketing of specific agricultural commodities were visited to investigate the challenges and constraints facing them. The Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality’s database of smallholder farmers was used to access the smallholder farmers involved in the production of selected vegetables in Tembisa. The study revealed that access to land, access to agricultural inputs, access to credit, market information, infrastructure and farmer support services were barriers to market participation. The lack or limited access to these resources will affect the manner in which smallholder farmers benefit from the opportunities available in the agricultural markets in respect of the quality and quantity of the agricultural produce. Whilst the fresh produce market and supermarkets in the area have extended a hand of cooperation and business relationship with smallholder farmers, there is currently no formal existing relationship since they are unable to exploit those opportunities due to their inability to comply with the required standards set by the market. Most of their produce is sold at the farm gate, local community and to the hawkers. It is expected that addressing such barriers may create enabling conditions that would encourage smallholder farmers to access and participate more effectively in markets. Such efforts could improve the ability of smallholder farmers to become part of the mainstream or commercial agricultural economy. Some barriers and constraints require direct intervention by government and policy makers have to institute agricultural policy reforms to incorporate smallholder farmers within large scale agriculture.

La sécurité alimentaire définie comme l’accès à tous à une nourriture saine et suffisante, comporte quatre dimensions : les disponibilités, l’accessibilité, l’utilisation et la stabilité. Soumis à l’ajustement structurel depuis la fin des années 1980, les pays en développement (PED) ont procédé à une libéralisation agricole et à une ouverture commerciale, tandis que les pays développés maintiennent leur protectionnisme agricole. Le premier objectif de la thèse est d’analyser les méfaits d’une libéralisation agricole mal menée et inadaptée à travers les bilans des réformes agricoles au Sénégal et de la crise alimentaire de 2008. Les causes profondes de cette crise sont la financiarisation des marchés agricoles, leur dérégulation, et l’inefficacité des politiques agricoles et alimentaires dans les PED. La sécurité alimentaire est un but affiché par tous les pays mais faudrait-il être en mesure de la quantifier? Notre seconde ambition est de construire un indice synthétique de sécurité alimentaire grâce à une analyse en composante principale sur un échantillon de 125 pays en 2005 et 2009. Le résultat principal est que le score des pays développés s’est amélioré durant cette période, alors que celui des pays à faible revenu et à déficit vivrier s’est dégradé. Ainsi, les inégalités alimentaires entre les pays développés et ceux pauvres se sont accrues. Une classification hiérarchique ascendante par la méthode de Ward a permis de distinguer quatre situations alimentaires : la satiété, la sécurité, l’équilibre, et l’insécurité alimentaire. Elle a montré que la dépendance aux importations et les prix alimentaires avaient plus d’impact sur l’insécurité alimentaire que les revenus. / Defined as access to all a healthy and sufficient food, food security has four components: availability, access, utilization and stability. Subjected to structural adjustment since the late 1980s, developing countries (DCs) have conducted an agricultural liberalization and trade opening, while developed countries maintain their agricultural protectionism (domestic support and export subsidies). The first objective is to analyze the misdeeds of agricultural liberalization poorly conducted and inadequate through the agricultural reforms in Senegal and the 2008 food crisis. The root causes of this crisis reside more in the financialization of agricultural markets, the deregulation and inefficient agricultural and food policies in developing countries. Food security is a stated goal for all countries, but would it be able to quantify it? Indeed, it was conceptualized but its multidimensional nature made it difficult to quantify. Our second goal is to build a composite indicator of food security through a principal component analysis (PCA) on a sample of 125 countries in 2005 and 2009. The main result is that the score of the developed countries has improved during this period, while that of low-income food deficit deteriorated. We can deduce that due to food crisis, food inequalities between developed and poor countries have increased. In addition, a hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) with Ward's method was also performed and showed four different food situations in our sample: food satiety, food security, food balance, food insecurity. It also highlighted the fact that the dependence on food imports and food prices had more impact on food insecurity as income.

Chapter 1 studies the electoral response to the Ghost Buildings program, a nationwide anti tax evasion policy in Italy which used innovative monitoring technologies to target buildings hidden from tax authorities. The difference-in-differences identification strategy exploits both variation across towns in the ex ante program scope to increase enforcement as well as administrative data on actual building registrations. Local incumbents experience an increase in their reelection likelihood as a consequence of the policy. In addition, these political returns are higher in areas with higher speed of public good provision and with lower tax evasion tolerance, implying complementarity among enforcement policies, government efficiency, and the underlying tax culture. Chapter 2 uses a road-level regression discontinuity design in Sierra Leone to study the impact of improvements in rural road infrastructure on agricultural markets. We show that the improved roads reduced the market prices of local crops. These price effects are stronger in markets that are further from major urban centers and in less productive areas. We also find that these price effects are reversed in areas with better cell phone penetration. We show that our empirical findings are consistent with a search cost framework a la Mortensen, but inconsistent with other models, such as Bertrand competition, bilateral bargaining, and Cournot oligopsony. Chapter 3 present results from a randomized controlled experiment designed to study the multiple margins through which value is passed from traders to agricultural producers in the presence of interlinked transactions. Consistent with other studies, we find limited price pass-through in response to an increase in the trader resale price. However, there is a large response in credit provision. We develop a model of interlinked transactions that highlights the substitutability of price and credit pass-through across markets, and verify its predictions empirically. Calibration suggests that to ignore margins of pass-through other than price has substantial implications for welfare analysis. / Economics

This thesis examines traders' strategies of accumulation in agricultural commodity markets in Pakistani Punjab. It contributes to the literature on markets as social and political institutions as well as to broader debates on patronage, informality, urbanization, and class formation in South Asia. The principal aim of the thesis is to identify the institutions and ideologies facilitating exchange and study how they function in the market. It also aims to account for the increased political importance of traders, understood as members of Pakistan's intermediate classes, and reflect on the nature of their political participation. Non-programmatic, functional alignments are shown to be the norm and compatible with both military and democratic regimes. Through a close look at activities in one agricultural commodity market - or mandi, as it is known in Punjab - the present work explores the practices and linkages traders cultivate to bolster their economic and political power. Plunging into everyday mandi life in small-town Punjab, it illustrates how customary institutions articulate with the state and capital to co-regulate economic activity and create conditions for durable domination. Enmeshment in patron-client relations, links with the local state, associational activity, ownership and control of capital, and thick social ties are demonstrated to be key means by which wealth and power are accumulated. Class is shown to articulate closely with caste and kinship while being irreducible to them, and the role of dominant social institutions is demonstrated to be highly variable across the many processes ongoing in the market.

Après avoir montré l’existence d’un impact inflationniste des biocarburants de première génération sur les prix agricoles via un renforcement du lien entre les prix agricoles et du pétrole, nous soulignons l’absence d’un réel effet positif de leur expansion sur les économies émergentes et en développement. De plus, la hausse des prix agricoles a contraint certains pays importateurs de ces produits agricoles à mettre en place des politiques de protection de leurs marchés domestiques. Ces résultats prouve qu’il s’avère impératif de développer une production de biocarburants ne nécessitant pas de matières premières à visée alimentaire. Or, nous mettons en évidence la préférence de la population française pour ces biocarburants de deuxième génération, d’autant plus pour une production issue de résidus agricoles. Enfin, nous établissons – en prenant l’exemple d’un marché américain – que la mise en place de marchés dérivés des biocarburants en Europe pourrait permettre aux industriels de se protéger efficacement face à la volatilité des prix. / Having shown the existence of an inflationary impact of first-generation biofuels on agricultural prices through a stronger link between agricultural and oil prices, we highlight the lack of a real positive effect of their expansion on the emerging and developing economies. In addition, the rise in agricultural prices has required some importing countries of these agricultural products to implement policy measures to protect their domestic markets. These results prove that it is imperative to develop a production of biofuels that do not use food crops. However, we highlight the preference of the French population for these second-generation biofuels, especially for a production based on agricultural residuals. Finally, we establish – using the example of the US market of ethanol – that the establishment of biofuel derivatives markets in Europe could enable industrials to protect themselves efficiently against price volatility.

This thesis contributes to the literature on making agricultural markets work for the poor, with specific reference to Ethiopia. It contains three substantive chapters, which may be read independently. The chapters use primary surveys with traders conducted in 2002 (chapters 2 and 3) and 2007 (all the chapters).Chapter 1 investigates Ethiopian traders’ decision on whether and how much to use brokers. Results shine light on how the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX), which recently formalized the brokerage functions, could be most beneficial for the functioning of agricultural markets. We show that the ECX could consider introducing new food crops in the trading system, offering warehouse receipt financing to its clients, and spreading the network of its warehouses throughout the country. Chapter 2 inquires whether the focus on technological and institutional upgrading is sufficient to make Ethiopian agricultural markets more efficient and if the existence of many small intermediaries causes market inefficiency. Findings suggest that, when transporters are used, transport costs could be reduced by avoiding trans-shipment, and reducing the number of times the transporter has to stop to allow for cargo loading and off-loading. No evidence is found for increasing returns to transaction size. Chapter 3 conceptualizes the notion of market integration as ‘tradability’ and analyses what determines the likelihood of market diversification among Ethiopian traders. The variables that are found to significantly impact on this probability are location (which is correlated with access to asphalt roads), availability of market information, traders’ educational level, access to commercial finance and storage capacity. Results indicate that market fundamentals affected the likelihood of market diversification more in 2007, when prices were rapidly surging, than in 2001 when prices were decreasing. The findings of this thesis support the ‘getting markets right’ school, in that incentives, infrastructure and institutions are essential for market development, and long-distance coordination of market exchange can be achieved through public-private cooperation.

Diploma thesis "New forms of distribution and sales of food with a focus on internet trading" aims to analyze the food market to recommend real realization of the new forms of food sales with the focus on the internet usage. The first part is focused on theoretical knowledge that explains the basic concepts related to the topic. In the second part, I focused on questioning and interviews. The aim was to find out if the customers buying food via Internet, whether they would welcome this form of selling and distributing food and the benefits of buying them over the Internet.

<p>This study identifies the determinants of sheep prices for small-scale sheep farming households in two districts of the Eastern Cape, namely Amathole and Ukhahlamba (Joe Xabe). Output prices that small farm households receive for their sheep affect their incomes from agriculture (knowing that revenue is a product of quantity and price), which, in turn, influence their living standards. The study isolates three sets of determinants of price formation in local agricultural markets - structural drivers, institutional factors and livelihood shocks - to account for the variations in prices that smallholder farmers receive. Data were collected from 134 households that were selected using purpose sampling and preceded by key informant and focus groups interviews with actors along the sheep value chain. A questionnaire consisting of both open-ended and quantitative questions was used. The relationship between output price formation and clusters of determinants is a typical hedonic pricing framework, which is fitted using a backward stepwise econometric technique that is a widely used experimental tool to identify significant determinants.</p>