This paper exploits the significant positive response of the share of agricultural value added and GDP per capita growth to variations in the international prices for agricultural commodities and rainfall to construct instrumental variables estimates of the causal effect that changes in the size of the agricultural sector and GDP per capita growth have on the urbanization rate for a panel of 41...

BACKGROUND The agreement on agriculture and the World Trade Organization were major outcomes of the 1986-1994 Uruguay Round (UR) negotiations within the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The measures under the UR were predicted to increase poverty in developing countries, a serious cause for concern since poverty alleviation is a major goal of developing countries. Thus this paper ...

Malliaris and Urrutia (1996) use cointegration to analyse the prices of agricultural commodity futures contracts traded on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). They ® nd a long-run relationship among US grown corn, wheat, oat, soybean, soybean meal and soybean oil futures prices and assert that this empirical ® nding is consistent with two alternative hypotheses. The ® rst is that common economic...

In his insightful but unfinished work, Dharm Narain drew attention to the behavior of prices as one of the important factors determining the extent of poverty in rural India. His empirical investigations, summarized in Gunvant Detail contribution 10 this volume (chap 1), provide strong prima facie evidence of such influence. Dhram Narain found that rural poverty is not only inversely related to...

High prices are their own worst enemy. Increased profi t margins entice entrepreneurial investment, which results in increased production. Lower market prices inevitably follow. The magic hand of Adam Smith ensures that winners’ gains and losers’ losses will be temporary, as entrepreneurs correct market imbalances. The temporary nature of high prices is well known to corn, soybean, and wheat fa...

• Food prices have been rising since 2000, spiked in early 2008, and may remain high for another ten years • Prompt action is needed to protect the poorest and support low-income countries faced by surging import bills • In the medium term, economic and agricultural growth can offset the damage, but this will require more determined efforts to boost food production Soaring food prices pose prob...

Ageing typically leads to various memory deficits which results in older adults' tendency to remember more general information and rely on gist memory. The current study examined if younger and older adults could remember which of two comparable grocery items (e.g., two similar but different jams) was paired with a lower price (the "better buy"). Participants studied lists of grocery items and ...

This paper reviews recent developments in China’s fishery and aquaculture sectors, as well as the policies affecting rural households in general and fisheries households in particular. It explores how China’s policies may change as a result of the nation joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001 and the likely impacts of these changes on China’s fishery and aquaculture sector....

Feeder cattle are fattened to become fed live cattle six months later. The U.S. feeder cattle industry is intensively competitive, so that market efficiency suggests feeder cattle prices should fully reflect feed prices and information on future fed cattle prices. Employing a long time series (1979-2004) of feeder cattle futures, live cattle futures, and local corn prices, we test whether compl...