THE FOOD AND DRINK INDUSTRIES AND THE SECOND PRICE COMMISSION (1977–1979)

This paper is a second one on the subject of price controls in the late 1970s, the previous one being that presented by Ivor Lightman to the April 1978 conference of the Agricultural Economics Society held at the University of Manchester (Lightman, 1978). That paper traced the development of price controls in the UK over the period between 1973 and 1978. Lightman explained how under the terms of the 1977 Price Commission Act the reconstituted Price Commission (PC) had been given the task of appraising notifications of price increases by large companies and of investigating cases in detail at its discretion. The present paper firstly discusses the problems that make it difficult to assess the impact of the reconstituted PC. It then offers an interim assessment of the PC arising from a project based at Loughborough University financed by the Economic and Social Research Council. The project involved a programme of interviews between the two researchers, Dr. M. C. Fleming and myself, and senior management of companies that were the subject of investigation by the PC.     

Well‐off small‐scale tobacco growers and farm workers in the Mexican agrarian reform (1972–1990)

In this article, I study small‐scale growers of blonde tobacco varieties from the state of Nayarit in Mexico who had contract farming arrangements with the state‐owned company Tabamex (1972–1990). I refer to them as “well‐off small‐scale tobacco growers” given that in the 1960s, 1970s, and the 1980s, they became one of the subaltern social groups that benefited the most from the Mexican Agrarian Reform. I want to set this research apart from the ones carried out on tobacco growers in Nayarit, which have almost exclusively understood this group as agricultural producers and have perceived as secondary, and even as anecdotal, the impact of the high levels of wage labour hired in the region. I argue that in order to have a better understanding of the social relations at play, it is important to take into account that Nayarit tobacco growers have also been employers of farm workers. Hence in my analysis, I have also included the seasonal farm workers hired by these small‐scale tobacco growers because of their importance in the labour force. More specifically, I have looked into the vulnerability and invisibility of these workers both within this branch of agricultural activity and state institutions.     

The Great Chinese Famine (1959–1961) and farm households’ adoption of technology: evidence from China*

The diffusion of new technology is an important driver of agricultural development, especially in the developing world. In this research, we follow the persistence of major historical events, employing a difference-in-differences method to carefully examine the long-term effect of China’s 1959–1961 famine on farm households’ current decisions to adopt technology. Further, we combine a mediating regression procedure with a bootstrap method to explore the mechanism of impact in this relationship. Overall, this study provides strong empirical evidence that the Great Famine attenuated technology adoption; moreover, a 1% increase in exposure to famine in childhood and adolescence resulted in a 0.137% decrease in the probability of technology adoption when controlling for village dummies. An analysis of mediating effects reveals that risk preferences account for the channel of famine persistence.     

Six Decades of Total Factor Productivity Change and Sources of Growth in Bangladesh Agriculture (1948–2008)

This study applies the Färe–Primont index to calculate total factor productivity (TFP) indices for agriculture in 17 regions of Bangladesh covering a 61‐year period (1948–2008). It decomposes the TFP index into six finer components (technical change, technical‐, scale‐ and mix‐efficiency changes, residual scale‐ and residual mix‐efficiency changes). Results reveal that TFP grew at an average rate of 0.57% p.a. led by the Chittagong, Rajshahi, Rangpur, Dinajpur and Noakhali regions. TFP growth is largely powered by technological progress estimated at 0.74% p.a. Technical efficiency improvement is negligible (0.01% p.a.) due to stagnant efficiency in most of the regions. Decline in scale efficiency is also negligible (0.01% p.a.), but the decline in mix efficiency is high at 0.19% p.a. Decomposition of the components of TFP changes into finer measures of efficiency corrects the existing literature’s blame of a decline in technical efficiency as the main cause of poor TFP growth in Bangladesh. Among the sources, farm size, R&D investment, extension expenditure and crop specialisation positively influenced TFP growth, whereas the literacy rate had a negative influence on growth. Policy implications include encouraging investment in R&D and extension, land reform measures to increase average farm size, promotion of Green Revolution technology and crop diversification.