Does Quality Matter in the Iron and Scrap Trade?

This paper sheds light on the iron and steel (IS) scrap trade to examine how economic development affects the quality demanded of recyclable resource. A simple model is presented that show a mechanism of how scrap quality impacts the direction of trade due to comparative advantage. We find that economic development in both importing and exporting countries has a positive effect on the quality of traded recyclables. Developed countries that intend to improve the domestic recovery of recyclables should raise the quality of separating recyclables while developing countries should tighten environmental regulations to help decrease the import of recyclables that cause pollution.

Development strategy in Bihar through revitalizing the agricultural sector : a preliminary analysis

Based mainly on secondary data and partly on primary information obtained through field surveys in selected rural areas in Bihar in 2011, this paper firstly argues the critical importance of agricultural growth for overall economic development, and then reviews the sluggish growth of agriculture in Bihar in the past and examines the major reasons for this. The long-term negligence of agricultural research (especially development and diffusion endeavors for improved rice varieties suitable to the local conditions of Bihar) by the state government and some sort of ‘backwardness’ in tube-well irrigation technology can be pointed out as important constraints. There is, in particular, the ‘paradox’ in Bihar agriculture of why rice and wheat yields have remained so low in spite of the relatively well-developed irrigation by tube-wells. Finally, by showing the process of a rapid increase in autumn and winter rice yields during the 1990s in West Bengal, it is suggested that Bihar farmers and policy-makers should learn from the experience of West Bengal in order to get some hints for the development of the rice sector in Bihar.

Is there any premium for unobservable quality? : a hedonic price analysis of the Malagasy rice market

This paper examines if consumers pay a premium for unobservable quality in the absence of quality standards and/or quality grading systems and, if so, how they assess that unobservable quality, using a rice retail market in Madagascar as an example. In Madagascar, the lack of quality standards and/or grading systems for rice makes is considered to be one of the causes of the rice market's spatial disintegration. Thus, quality standards and grading systems will be necessary to increase the market's efficiency. We hypothesize that consumers and retailers use product origin and rice name as observable indictors of unobservable quality and test the hypothesis using hedonic price regressions. We find that the interaction terms of product origin and rice name significantly affect the price after controlling for both observable quality and spatial and temporal price variation, but that the contribution of product origin and rice name to rice price variation is smaller than spatial and temporal factors. We thus conclude that consumers pay a premium for unobservable quality throughout Madagascar. This finding implies that quality standards and/or grading systems will work in the Malagasy market and that improving market infrastructure such as roads and storage will make them even more effective.

Food quality awareness : cases from shrimp producers in Thailand and vegetable producers in Vietnam

The high number of import rejections of food commodities suggests that producers in exporting countries are not complying with established standards. To understand why this is the case, we explore the behavior of producers and consumers in developing countries. First, we examine the successful transformation of production practices adopted by shrimp producers in Thailand. In support of the dramatic change in practices, we observe an important role played by the public sector in providing a means to visualize chemical residues and to control processes upstream of the supply chain via a registration system and a traceability system called Movement Document. Furthermore, very active information sharing by the private sector contributes to the dissemination of useful technical and market information among producers. We also examine the knowledge and perceptions of consumers with respect to food safety in Vietnam. We find that consumers in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City behave differently toward the third-party certification VietGAP, probably owing to differences in the history of market mechanisms between the two cities.

Participation in farmer's cooperatives and its effects on agricultural incomes : evidence from vegetable-producing areas in China

Chinese agricultural cooperatives, called Farmer's Professional Cooperatives (FPCs), are expected to become a major tool to facilitate agro-industrialization for small farmers through the diffusion of new technologies, the supply of high-quality agricultural inputs and the marketing of their products. This study compares FPC participants with vegetable-producing non-participants and grain farmers in vegetable-producing areas in rural China to investigate the treatment effect of participation in FPCs as well as implementation of vegetable cultivation. I adopt parametric and nonparametric approaches to precisely estimate the treatment effects. Estimated results indicate no significant difference between participants and non-participants of FPCs on agricultural net income in both parametric and non-parametric estimations. In contrast, the comparison between vegetable and grain farmers using propensity score matching (PSM) reveals that the treatment effect of vegetable cultivation is significantly positive for total and agricultural incomes, although vegetable cultivation involves more labor-intensive efforts. These results indicate that it is the implementation of vegetable cultivation rather than the participation in an FPC that enhances the economic welfare of farmers, due to the non-excludability of FPCs' services as well as the risks involved in vegetable cultivation.