Market Reform (market + reform)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Impacts of Market Reform on Spatial Volatility of Maize Prices in Tanzania

JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, Issue 2 2008
Fredy T. M. Kilima
C33; D40; O12; O55 Abstract Maize is one of the major staples and cash crops for many Tanzanians. Excessive volatility of maize prices destabilises farm income in maize-growing regions and is likely to jeopardise nutrition and investment in many poor rural communities. This study investigates whether market reform policies in Tanzania have increased the volatility of maize prices, and identifies regional characteristics that can be attributed to the spatial price volatility. To achieve the objectives, an autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity in mean (ARCH-M) model is developed and estimated in this study. Results show that the reforms have increased farm-gate prices and overall price volatility. Maize prices are lower in surplus and less developed regions than those in deficit and developed regions. Results also show that the developed and maize-deficit regions, and regions bordering other countries have experienced less volatile prices than less developed, maize-surplus and non-bordering regions. Our findings indicate that investments in communication and transportation infrastructures from government and donor countries are likely to increase inter-regional and international trade, thereby reducing the spatial price volatility in Tanzanian maize prices in the long run. [source]


The Societal Consequences of Market Reform in Peru

LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 1 2006
Moisés Arce
ABSTRACT This article analyzes how market reform policies already in place affect social interests, and the feedback effects of those interests on reform processes. The variety of societal responses includes the creation of new societal organizations, reflecting the variable content and asymmetrical distribution of costs and benefits of the policies implemented. Because of this variety even in Peru, where the disorganizing effects of neoliberal reform appear to be strongest, it would seem that the societal impact of economic reform elsewhere in Latin America would also warrant more careful examination. [source]


Risky Business: Economic Uncertainty, Market Reforms and Female Livelihoods in Northeast Ghana

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 5 2000
Brenda Chalfin
This article examines the implications of economic uncertainty for rural markets and the livelihoods of female traders. It does so through a case study of a community in northern Ghana caught in the throes of a structural adjustment-driven privatization initiative. In order to fully comprehend the nature of the economic uncertainties in which rural economic actors are enmeshed and the manner in which they resist, engage or engender these conditions, two theoretical lenses are interposed. One, focusing on structural dissolution and an overall process of rural, and especially female, disempowerment, is drawn from recent approaches to African political economy. The other, gleaned from the field of economic anthropology, attends to the agency and knowledge of rural entrepreneurs in the face of unstable and imperfect market conditions. By bringing together these different analytic traditions, the critical significance of uncertainty within the complex process of rural economic transformation and reproduction becomes evident. Rather than functioning as a diagnostic of economic crisis and insecurity, uncertainty can be a strategic resource integral to the constitution of markets, livelihoods and economic coalitions. Such a perspective, privileging the institutional potentials of local social practice, makes apparent the forceful role played by female traders in the structuring of rural marketing systems even in the face of externally-induced and sometimes dramatic shifts in material conditions. [source]


"We Have A Consensus": Explaining Political Support for Market Reforms in Latin America

LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 2 2002
Leslie Elliott Armijo
ABSTRACT By the 1990s, to the astonishment of many ob0servers, most Latin American countries had reformed their systems of national economic governance along market lines. Many analysts of this shift have assumed that it circumvented normal political processes, presuming that such reforms could not be popular. Explanations emphasizing economic crisis, external assistance, and politically insulated executives illustrate this approach. Through a qualitative investigation of the reform process in the region's four most industrialized countries, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, this study argues, to the contrary, that reforming governments found or created both elite and mass political support for their policies. [source]