This study tackles the decomposition of efficiency with respect to agricultural production in transition economies by using a case study on small scale maize farmers in Romania. The underlying modelling assumption is that farmers in transition countries still face heavily distorted price...

Typically, big changes in the economic system lead to alterations on the disposable income of families and thus on their spending for different type of products, including food. These may imply, in the long run, a structural modification of the quality of diet of the population. After the fall...

This paper focus on the time adjustment paths of the exchange rate and prices in response to unanticipated monetary shocks following model developed by Saghaian et al. (2002). We employ Johansen's cointegration test along with a vector error correction model to investigate whether agricultural...

More powerful computers, the better availability of micro-data, and the development of new modeling techniques, such as multi-agent systems, allows to analyze agricultural policies from the bottom up. We present such an approach that considers the spatial interaction of thousands of individually...

We estimate the effect of democratic transitions on agricultural protection in a sample of 74 developing and developed countries, observed in the 1955-2005 period. We employ both differences-in-differences regressions and semi-parametric matching methods, exploiting the time series and...

Studies on efficiency changes in transition agriculture yield mixed results. This paper develops both a theoretical model of efficiency changes during transition and uses a unique set of representative farm survey data to assess efficiency changes during transition. We find that reforms have a...

The Russian Federation is facing crucial dietary problems which burden the health care sector to an increasing degree. In order to correct this trend explanations for the observed mostly unhealthy diets are needed. Therefore the main target of this study was to find evidence about the main...

Paper replaced with revised version 06/03/08

Inefficient performance of irrigation systems not only leads to a waste of water resources, but may also affect agriculture production, especially in regions facing a water stress problem. In rural China, only 40% of the water allocated to irrigation is effectively used, a figure much lower than...