Agricultural Comparative Advantage under International Price Uncertainty: The Case of Senegal

Jabara, Cathy L.; Thompson, Robert L.

doi:10.2307/1239684

Cited by 26 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 1 publication

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Hapgood, 1967; Bainard and Cooper, 1968;Jabara and Thompson, 1980;Jaffee, 1992;Delgado, 1995). In many developing countries, agricultural production is seen as excessively specialized because of a limited natural resource base or deliberate policy choices or distortions.…”

Section: Diversification In the Literature Of Agricultural Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If, on the one hand, the assumption that farmers are relatively risk-averse and the government is risk-neutral is reversed, the argument could be made that farmers overexpose the economy to risk. Such a proposition was advanced several years ago by Bainard and Cooper (1968) and Jabara and Thompson (1980), suggesting that corrective action by the government was called for. We question whether such corrective action is appropriate.…”

Section: Trade Policy and Diversificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Diversification and International Trade

McCalla¹,

Valdés²

2018

Food Security, Diversification and Resource Management: Refocusing the Role of Agriculture?

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Significant strands of the literature of agriculture development argue that agricultural diversification is a desirable outcome either of the dynamics of the development process or as a result of deliberate policy choice (Millikan and *The World Bank, Washington, DC, USA. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the management or executive directors of the World Bank. The comments of Alain de Janvry are gratefully acknowledged.

show abstract

Section: Diversification In the Literature Of Agricultural Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Trade Policy and Diversificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diversification and International Trade

McCalla¹,

Valdés²

2018

Food Security, Diversification and Resource Management: Refocusing the Role of Agriculture?

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…What is needed is reformulation of the optimality conditions for production patterns, by rewriting the objective function as maximization of expected utility. Consideration of the effects of risk aversion could then be incorporated along the lines followed by J abara and Thompson (1980). They found that diversification or self-sufficiency may be an appropriate response to the variability of international prices.…”

Section: Evaluation and Summarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing agricultural comparative advantage

Abbott

Thompson

1987

Agricultural Economics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

97Abbott, PC. and Thompson, R.L., 1987. Changing agricultural comparative advantage. Agric. Econ., 1: 97-112.Special circumstances in the agricultural sector have limited the use of comparative advantage in addressing the planner's dilemma of allocating investment between industry and agriculture and in examining the doctrine of food selfsufficiency. A three-factor model of agricultural trade, extending earlier models, is used to address some of these special circumstances and to formulate a theory of agricultural comparative advantage under changing economic conditions. Emphasis is placed on the short-run fixity of sector-specific capital stocks, the role of qualitative differences in land (natural resource) endowments, and on non-homothetic preferences. In addition to insights on agricultural comparative advantage, implications for project evaluation are considered.

show abstract

“…In short, the presumption that individuals are rational does not enable us to predict their behavior, and efforts to explain agricultural performance in terms of the rationality of peasants (or planners) frequently prove tautologous, inconsistent, or confused. One recent attempt (Jabara and Thompson, 1980) to take account of the impact of international price fluctuations on economic policy argued that, because international prices of peanuts and rice are more unstable than that of millet, if Senegalese planners dislike instability, their comparative advantage lies in producing more millet, less rice, and fewer peanuts. If they enjoy gambling, presumably they should specialize completely in peanuts!…”

Section: Rational Peasants and Imperfect Structuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Food Crisis and Agrarian Change in Africa: A Review Essay

Berry¹

1984

African Studies Review

143

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent assessments of the performance and prospects of African economies portray a deepening economic crisis centered on the problem of food supplies. During the last ten years, a rapidly rising number of Africans have had an increasingly difficult time getting enough to eat. By all accounts, domestic food supplies are falling further and further behind domestic needs; both governments and consumers face serious problems in procuring the kinds and quantities of food they want at prices they can afford to pay. Chronic hunger and malnutrition are spreading, escalating quickly into famine at times of environmental or financial crisis. Covering food deficits from foreign sources has also become more difficult in the last decade. World prices of grains have risen; soaring petroleum prices have put heavy strains on many African countries' balances of payments and worsened their terms of trade; and agricultural exports have not increased sufficiently to cover rising import bills. Food aid to Africa has grown at unprecedented rates in the last decade, but it is neither adequate to meet shortterm needs, nor is it a solution to the crisis in the long run. The question to which this review will be primarily addressed is whether the food crisis in Africa is mainly a result of lagging or insufficient agricultural production or whether it is part of a larger crisis of economic management, reflected in chronic balance of payments deficits, rising foreign indebtedness, inflation, low productivity, corruption, waste, and deteriorating standards of living for all but a privileged few. For the most part international agencies, from the OAU to the World Bank, have attributed the crisis to declining or stagnant agricultural production brought about by government policies which discourage or inhibit agricultural growth. The analysis walks on two legs. First, aggregate production indices compiled by African governments and/or the international agencies themselves suggest that, in most of sub-Saharan Africa, agricultural output per capita has stagnated or even declined in recent years. Second, studies of development policy in several Asian and Latin American economies (Little et al., 1970) showed that strategies of import-substituting industrialization (widely practiced in the 1950s and 1960s) tend to discriminate against agriculture. After independence, African governments frequently adopted similar policies with, it is argued, similar results: in Africa's largely agrarian economies, the resulting decline in agricultural output (or growth) not only led to food shortages and mounting balance of payment deficits, but also undermined the entire process of economic development.

show abstract

Agricultural Comparative Advantage under International Price Uncertainty: The Case of Senegal

Cited by 26 publications

References 1 publication

Diversification and International Trade

Diversification and International Trade

Changing agricultural comparative advantage

The Food Crisis and Agrarian Change in Africa: A Review Essay

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About