Abstract
In the last half-century, development economics has gone from being a fringe field of economics to being at the very centre of the discipline, and the field’s foremost proponents have been elevated to the highest levels of the discipline. At the same time, development economists have gone from being economists who study situations wherein multiple market failures lead to persistent poverty to being ‘development-and-x’ economists, where x is any of agricultural, demographic, environmental, health, labour, economics etc. Yet few economists, if any, would label themselves development-and-industrial organisation (IO) economists. In this keynote, I first speculate as to why that is. I then explain how the time is ripe to celebrate the marriage of development and IO, and why the study of agricultural value chains provides the ideal inception point for that marriage to be consummated.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 241-255 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics |
| Volume | 66 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:I am indebted to NIFA for funding a lot of the work that led to this keynote through grant MIN‐14‐061 – ‘The Effects of Smallholder Participation in Agricultural Value Chains: Evidence from the Developing World’. I thank Kaitlyn Wilson for excellent research assistance, the AARES—Michael Harris and David Ubilava in particular—for inviting me to be keynote speaker at its annual meeting, and Tihomir Ancev for inviting me to publish this as an article in this journal. I also thank an anonymous reviewer for excellent comments and suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank Jeff Bloem, Yu Na Lee, and Eva‐Marie Meemken for comments. All remaining errors are mine. †
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Inc.
Keywords
- agricultural value chains
- development economics
- industrial organisation
