Transaction costs and poor asset endowments appear to be major impediments to small scale agricultural development in Uganda. Reasons for the lack of commercialisation of agriculture, and the barriers to increasing the value of banana crop sales and banana production are the focus of this paper....

The results of a three-year study of the implications of China's accession to the WTO for its agricultural sector and policy options to maximise the benefits of the trade reforms are reported. The most important message from the study is that macro-economic and other non-agriculture specific...

More than ten years after the departure of the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) towards market economy and democracy now it seems to be possible as well as necessary to analyse the present settings, the developments so far, and relevant problems faced during the transition. The main...

The goal of this study is to assess householdsâ labor allocation in the wake of Chinaâs efforts to develop the rural labor market in a manner that is conductive to its transition to a market economy. Applying the agricultural household model as the theoretical framework, we help to understand...

Improving smallholder welfare in the rural sectors of developing countries requires improving access to both input and product markets. Success, however, in developing sustainable and mutually beneficial links between smallholders and agribusiness has been variable. Two recent ACIAR studies...

The relationship between poverty incidence and road development is analyzed in this paper, in the context of rural Laos. The results indicate that improving road access is an effective way of reducing rural poverty. Between 1997-98 and 2002-03, rural poverty incidence in Laos declined by almost...

During the transition of the Vietnamese economy, adaptation of the financial system was one of the most challenging reforms. A major task of this reform was to expand the financial systemâs outreach to the newly emerging private sector and household economies, especially in rural areas....

Since the beginning of the 1990s a new rural development policy, which has later been called the "new rural paradigm" by the OECD, has received increasing attention in the European Union (EU) and elsewhere. It is expected that these policy measures attenuate social and economic problems in rural...

Much contemporary socio-economic environmental policy evaluation is undertaken using decision utility based approaches such as choice modelling and contingent valuation. In this paper we describe an investigation into the use of the contrasting “experienced utility” concept to assess changes...