Monopoly Power and Distribution in Fragmented Markets: The Case of Groundwater

This paper examines monopoly power in the market for groundwater (irrigation water extracted by private tubewells), a market characterized by barriers to entry and spatial fragmentation. In Pakistan's Punjab region, groundwater and tenancy contracts are often interlinked, with share-tenants gaining access to water through the use of their landlord's tubewell. An analysis of groundwater transactions shows that tenants of tubewell owners are charged lower prices than other customers. Tubewell owners and their tenants also use considerably more groundwater on their plots than other farmers. Using detailed price and quantity data, the efficiency and distributional implications of this monopoly power are explored.     

Buyer and Seller Concentration in Global Commodity Markets

In recent years there has been an increased incidence of export restrictions applied by developing countries to commodities and raw materials. Commodity markets may be characterized by concentration on the buyer side, with a small number of transnational intermediary firms purchasing from supplying countries and distributing to the market, and recent work has suggested that export taxes may be an optimal policy to recapture monopsony rent. However, in many commodity markets there are also a limited number of large supplying countries. This paper considers a situation where an oligopsonistic intermediary industry purchases from a small number of supplying countries, the governments of which act strategically in their policy choices both with respect to the intermediaries and any competing suppliers. In the resulting two‐stage game, the paper shows that an export subsidy, rather than an export tax, may arise as the optimal intervention.     

引才、育才助力贫困地区脱贫与乡村振兴——以国家级贫困县P县为例

人才短缺与流失是限制乡村脱贫与振兴的主要原因。目前,我国农村地区处在脱贫攻坚与实现振兴的关键时期,人才是“关键中的关键”。本研究以国家级贫困县P县为例,归纳总结其在人才引进、新型农民培育方面的经验,即政府调控和市场行为相结合。依托“第一书记”政策引才到村,提升“抢人大战”的市场竞争力,发挥基层乡村社会能动性,培育新型农民。引才和育才措施有效地助力了脱贫攻坚和乡村振兴。进一步分析了实施过程中存在的问题,并在此基础上对人才促进贫困地区脱贫与发展提出政策建议。     

Do farmers get a greater return from selling their agricultural products through e-commerce?

E-commerce allows farmers to cut out intermediaries and sell agricultural products to consumers directly. This raises the question of whether farmers get a greater return when they use e-commerce to sell their products than when they use conventional marketing channels (i.e., intermediaries). To answer this question, we collected rural household data on sales of agricultural products from Zhejiang and Shandong provinces, in which we selected pairs of villages where e-commerce was advanced and villages where e-commerce was less advanced and households in each village that used or did not use e-commerce. We employed a fixed effects model to investigate the impacts of e-commerce on the selling prices and marketing costs of agricultural products. The model results revealed that compared with the conventional marketing channel through intermediaries, the marketing costs through the e-commerce channel significantly increased, but the selling price increases much more, which results in increases in gross returns for farmers. The increases in selling prices and marketing costs using e-commerce varied among agricultural products and between different qualities of the same product. It has important policy implications for improving farmers’ incomes and agricultural marketing channels in developing countries.     

农村经济组织形态的演变与创新——山东省莱阳市农业产业化调查报告

农业产业化的进程也是一个农村经济组织演变和创新的过程。作者在对山东省莱阳市调研的基础上描述和分析了这一历史过程。在农业产业化之初 ,农村的主要经济组织形式是合作社和“龙头企业 +农户”。但是 ,这两种组织形式都存在着一些缺陷。前者主要是受制于资金不足和缺乏抵押性资产 ;后者主要是契约不能对当事人构成有效约束。为了克服这些缺陷 ,有必要引入组织中介 ,形成新的组织形式———“龙头企业+合作社 +农户”或“龙头企业 +大户 +农户”。这种组织变革在一定程度上弥补了原有制度缺陷 ,从而在实践中日益发展成为农业产业化的主要组织形态。但是 ,由于契约是不完全的 ,合作社和大户抵押性资产不足 ,这两种组织形式也面临着一些新问题 ,本文探索了组织改善和组织创新的路径。     

Competition And Its Regulation: Key Issues

This article examines the role of competition policy in developing countries. The leading international development agencies, such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, have proclaimed their support for private sector–led development as the best strategy for reducing poverty. The benefits of private sector development are dependent on ensuring competitive market conditions, which are often absent in developing countries. However, theoretical notions of competition and the ways in which it is perceived to work vary widely and have implications for the type of competition policy that is to be implemented. Competition laws are widespread in industrialized countries but are only just beginning to be introduced in developing countries. The article examines some of the implications of applying competition policy in developing countries when account is taken of different theoretical perspectives, and of the structural and institutional differences between industrialized and developing countries.     

Interlinking and Collusion

In this paper, we suggest a new rationale for the existence of interlinked contracts in the agrarian economies of developing countries. Using the framework of an infinitely repeated game with discounting, we show that interlinked contracts can help the dominant parties to collude, in cases where collusion is not possible with noninterlinked contracts. This occurs because either interlinkage pools incentive constraints across markets, or it affects the incentives of agents to accept deviating contracts. We illustrate these mechanisms by considering the case of interlinkage between markets for credit and share tenancy. The model that is used to formalize the second mechanism is characterized by frictions in the tenancy market, which we model using the standard framework of search and matching.     

民族地区巩固拓展脱贫成果的困境及路径选择——来自宁夏的实证分析

民族地区、生态脆弱地区和深度贫困地区高度耦合,这是巩固拓展脱贫攻坚成果的最大制约瓶颈。以宁夏为例,构建熵值TOPSIS与耦合协调度等模型,结合贫困性分析,从时空视角探讨了农户居住环境脆弱性与其贫困间的耦合协调的关联。结果显示：从时序看,农户居住环境脆弱性与其贫困间的耦合协调度总体呈下降趋势,受政策调整等因素影响历经了中度耦合协调贫困滞后、高度耦合协调同步发展2种阶段和4种发展类型。从空间分布看,宁夏北部川区至南部山区的农户居住环境脆弱性与其贫困间的耦合协调度整体呈上升趋势,耦合协调发展类型亦从协调发展型向过度调和型转变。这意味着新时期的脱贫成果巩固拓展要与乡村振兴相结合,走绿色可持续的高质量发展之路。     

Endogenous vertical restraints in international trade

This paper examines interbrand competition between a domestic and a foreign manufacturer who market their products through intermediaries. The contracts manufacturers offer these intermediaries are endogenous. In equilibrium contracts may specify exclusive territories (ET), depending on the degree of substitutability between products and the level and degree of transparency of trade barriers. Trade liberalization, through lower or more transparent barriers, may lead manufacturers to use ET, thereby substituting private anti-competitive arrangements for government-imposed barriers. This substitution may decrease competition and welfare, and thus create a role for competition policy in a freer trade environment.     

试论“三农”伙伴关系安排的实践架构及其经验总结

近年来农产品特别是蔬菜价格大涨大跌现象凸显了农产品市场一体化的问题,更说明了其中的利益分配问题。试着探索实现以具有资源、地缘和产业特征的项目为基础的"三农"伙伴关系安排的机制,在转变政府职能的过程中,通过政府干预的经济内生性的力量,达成一种类似纵向的合约,以解决农产品产前卖方垄断和产后买方垄断等市场失灵问题,促进"三农"生产要素的优化配置和农业产业化、系统化和市场(一体)化发展,同时这也有利于兼顾公平和效率,有利于加强政策协调和和谐社会的构建。     

Is green growth relevant for poor economies?

To be relevant to developing countries, green growth must be reconciled with the two key structural features of natural resource use and poverty in these countries. First, primary products account for the majority of their export earnings, and they are unable to diversify from primary production. Second, many economies have a substantial share of their rural population located on less favored agricultural land and in remote areas, thus encouraging “geographic” poverty traps. If green growth is to be a catalyst for economy-wide transformation and poverty alleviation in developing countries, then it must be accompanied by policies aimed directly at overcoming these two structural features. Policies and reforms should foster forward and backward linkages of primary production, enhance its integration with the rest of the economy, and improve opportunities for innovation and knowledge spillovers. Rural poverty, especially the persistent concentration of the rural poor on less favored agricultural lands and in remote areas, needs to be addressed by additional targeted policies and investments, and where necessary, policies to promote rural-urban migration.     

Rural labour market policies in Croatia,FYR of Macedonia and Turkey

Considerable differences are found among countries regarding the importance of the agricultural labour force, between rural and urban labour, and in poverty and living conditions in rural areas. Declines in the agricultural labour force and rural population are foreseen for each of the countries, but with significant variations between them. Showing different patterns over time, labour market developments in the sector and in rural areas have been shaped by the overall labour market institutions, conditions and factors in each country, such as the legal basis, educational attainment and migration flows, and the presence of non-agricultural activities in rural areas.     

Impact of cooperative membership on market performance of Nepali goat farmers

In developing countries, agricultural cooperatives are increasingly used by farmers as a mechanism to gain market power in input and output markets. To assess the impact of cooperative membership on market channel selection and pricing outcomes, we conducted a survey of 661 Nepali goat farmers in 2019–20 and applied an endogenous switching probit model to analyze the data. Our findings indicate that cooperative membership had a significant and positive influence on farmers choosing cooperatives as their market channel. Additionally, farmers who sold their goats through cooperatives received significantly higher prices than those who sold through local markets or to goat collectors. We also observed that farmers who had access to price information were able to obtain better prices for their goats. Overall, our study highlights the potential benefits of promoting cooperative membership and marketing through cooperatives, as these efforts can help farmers improve the returns on their agricultural investments.     

Farmers,Middlemen and Exporters: A Model of Market Power,Pricing and Welfare in a Vertical Supply Chain

Markets for cash‐crops in developing countries are typically characterized by a concentration of buyer power at different levels of the supply chain. For instance, small‐scale coffee farmers sell their produce to a middleman, who in turn sells the coffee onward to an exporter, often a foreign multinational, with monopsony power in the hands of the purchasers at both levels. We analyze pricing behavior and welfare with different assumptions regarding market power. In particular, we show that a more powerful exporter is likely to benefit the producers and may even lead to higher welfare for the producer country as a whole.     

Risk preference interactions between individual farmers and small farmer groups: Experimental evidence from rural Ethiopia

The understanding of risk preference interactions among poor farmers in developing countries has important policy implications, as many programs that aim to alleviate poverty and address risk constraints are provided on a collective basis. We conduct a randomized field experiment in the drought-prone parts of Northern Ethiopia and elicit from poor, vulnerable farmers their hypothetical willingness to pay using individual and group lottery games. Analyzing the certainty equivalent ratios (CERs), we find that farmer groups are more risk averse than individual farmers. When the risk of the lottery is high, the group CER is primarily determined by the most-risk-averse farmer of the group, and to a lesser extent, by the least. The median farmer contributes to the group CER only when the lottery risk is moderate. After participating in the group elicitation, individual farmers also become as risk averse as the group on average. Specifically, the median and the least-risk-averse farmers become significantly more risk averse while the most-risk-averse farmer is unaffected. Our results show that policymakers should carefully consider how social interactions in rural communities affect individual and group risk preference and whether social interactions also affect the participation and effectiveness of development programs.     

科技创业扶贫研究回顾与未来展望

建立在科技驱动及创业导向基础之上的科技创业扶贫已成为发展中国家缓解和消除贫困并实现高质量发展的有效途径。系统梳理科技创业扶贫研究相关文献,从科技创业与扶贫、科技与创业扶贫、科技扶贫与创业三者关系视角界定科技创业扶贫内涵,阐述“三农”语境下科技创业扶贫的重要意义,总结科技创业扶贫工具,归纳科技创业扶贫的多种模式,揭示科技创业扶贫内生和外生影响因素,展望其未来研究方向。     

Is increased agricultural protection beneficial for South Africa?

Using a top down computable general equilibrium microsimulation model of South Africa, this paper explores the impact on household well being of an increase in agricultural protection. This issue is of broader relevance to developing countries that may be contemplating the use of World Trade Organisation permissible trade barriers so as to achieve a domestic policy objective. The model predicts that gross domestic product would be unaffected while real private consumption falls. The real exchange rate appreciates while unemployment levels are unaffected. Food, other manufactures, trade and hotels are the clear losers. All other industries experience small positive gains or no impact on their output. The impact on households depends on their factor endowments and their consumption patterns. The impacts on poverty reduction are very small. Poverty indicators increase more in urban areas than in rural areas. Poverty increases slightly more among Asian households, followed by White and then Coloured households. African households experience small declines in poverty.     

技术中介在技术交易服务中是否存在下沉倾向——基于买方选择视角的验证

技术要素转移与交易对技术中介有较强的依赖性，而技术中介的存在能够有效降低交易过程中的信息失衡，为买方交易提供必要支持，技术中介服务直接影响技术交易效率。当代技术中介服务已经形成较大规模，提供服务的种类也较为全面，整体上适应了技术市场发展需要。但是，由技术中介参与的大量交易都存在低端化倾向，据此提出中介服务下沉化假设，并构建选择影响因素模型。通过对买方企业数据的采集与回归，发现无论是全样本还是分类样本均有效验证了主要假设变量。因此，为保障技术中介合理发展，从政策层面应重点关注如何提升服务质量，使其服务于中高端技术交易需求。     

政府与农村市场中介组织间关系的比较分析

我国农村市场中介组织是农村经济发展的内生需求与政府这一外生因素共同作用的结果,政府在农村市场中介组织产生与发展中起着重要作用.我国政府应根据农村市场中介组织的不同发展阶段和不同产业间的关系制定出相应的促使两者和谐发展的新政策.     

集体建设用地直接入市流转相关利益者博弈分析

农村集体组织和用地企业是集体建设用地直接入市流转交易的积极推动者,地方政府是集体建设用地能否直接流转交易的关键决定者。在集体建设用地直接入市流转行为不能根本杜绝的现实基础上,地方政府应变堵为疏,规范交易双方行为,调整市场秩序,建立中介组织,降低交易费用。