The last two decades' reforms in Africa's agricultural marketing channels have taken place against a background of relative ignorance of how these markets work. Combining theory (with coverage of complex contractual arrangements like outgrower contracts), household surveys, and in-depth knowledge of local contexts, this masterful book provides the first systematic answer. In their characteristically careful approach, the authors use simulation analysis based on oligopoly theory to isolate and quantify the effect of policy shocks one by one and with synergies, yielding precise orders of magnitude where theory is usually silent. Written in a limpid style, this book is a must-read for academics and sophisticated policy analysts. It will be a reference for years to come --Olivier Cadot, Professor of International Economics and Director of the Institute of Applied Economics at the University of Lausanne
This is an innovative and important book. The authors explicitly model the institutions and industrial organization of global trade and commodity exchanges, which have major implications for the efficiency and surplus distribution among the participants in the chain. The combination of theory and empirical analysis across many developing countries is unique and yields important new insights.
--Jo Swinnen, Professor of Development Economics at K.U.Leuven, Director of LICOS-Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance at K.U.Leuven
Guido Porto is a Professor of Economics at the University of La Plata in Argentina. Before joining the University of La Plata, he was an economist in the Research Department of the World Bank. He has taught at Universidad and Instituto Di Tella in Argentina and at the University of Maryland as an invited lecturer. He received a BA in Economics from the University of La Plata in Argentina, a Master's degree in Economics from Instituto Di Tella in Argentina, and a PhD in Economics from Princeton University. His research focuses on the econometric estimation of the impacts of trade policies in developing countries, including impacts on poverty, household welfare, wages, and the distribution of income as well as on firm behavior. His latest work investigates how economic agents (households and firms) adjust to trade reform.
Nicolas Depetris Chauvin is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Dubai School of Government and a Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies in the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford. Previously he worked as a policy specialist in the Office of Development Studies at the United Nations Development Programme and as a consultant at the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Ministry of Economics of Argentina, among others. His fields of interest are international finance, development, macroeconomics, and resource-rich economies. During his doctoral studies at Princeton University he did research on debt-relief initiatives for highly indebted poor countries.
Marcelo Olarreaga is Professor of Economics at the University of Geneva and Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London. Before joining the University of Geneva he worked as an economist in the Research Department of the World Bank, as well as in the Economics Research Division of the World Trade Organization. He has also been an invited professor at INSEAD (France), Institute CLAEH (Uruguay), SciencePo-Paris (France), Universidad de la República (Uruguay), and the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He holds an MA from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in Economics from the University of Geneva. He is currently doing research on the political economy of trade policy and trade agreements, barriers to developing countries' exports, and distributional and poverty impacts of trade reforms.
