Since the late 1980s, agriculture in Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) has been under considerable adjustment pressure due to changing political, economic and institutional environments. These changes have been linked to the transition process, as well as the ongoing integration...

Since the seminal work of Adam Smith, markets have been considered an efficient tool for co-ordinating the behaviour of economic agents. The basic characteristic of a market economy is that the complex system of interaction among individuals is not centrally coordinated. Under the assumption of...

The rise of a western-style middle class in many successful emerging economies like China currently is inducing deep structural changes on agricultural world markets and within the global agri-food business. As a result of both higher incomes and concerns over product safety and quality the...

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Preface; Gertrud Buchenrieder and Tom Dufhues. Issues and evidence of social networks in boosting rural households' welfare; Gertrud Buchenrieder. Open issues and implications for measuring individual social capital in developing countries; Tom Dufhues and Gertrud Buchenrieder. What...

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....

Although interest in the structure and relational features of social capital and its underlying networks has grown since the early 1990s, the terms do not embody any ideas that are really new to sociologists, but are indeed rather new to economists. Until the 1950s, land, labour, and financial...