This thesis addresses 3 different aspects of food and poverty related problems in developing countries. The first essay presents a new operational concept of transaction costs that firstly allows assessing the magnitude and secondly recognizing the non homogeneity of food products. This is...

Over the past four decades, China has made fruitful achievements in agricultural development, which attracted a great deal of attention within the academy. Meanwhile, Chinese agriculture has also undergone dramatic and continuing structural changes (Chen et al. 2009; Cao and Birchenall 2013),...

[...] Die Einführung von Direktzahlungen zur Kompensation von Interventionspreissenkungen war ursprünglich eine wichtige Voraussetzung für die fundamentalen Reformen der GAP seit 1992, auch um Bestandsschutz für die im Vertrauen auf das politische Versprechen hoher Agrarpreise getätigten...

The Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union (CAP) has a long tradition. After World War II, agricultural and food production in Europe was substantially weakened and unable to provide sufficient food for the domestic population. The CAP emerged from this situation, with the objectives...

For quite some time long-only index funds have been suspected of being responsible for price increases in agricultural futures markets. This suspicion has prompted demands to drastically limit long-only index funds' scope of activity. Such demands and their underlying diagnoses, however,...