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My paper with my former colleague Nick Carnes on the political economy of agricultural protection, which looks at why members of Congress vote for or against the farm bill, has just been accepted by and is now forthcoming at Food Policy.

Nick and I have been working on this since early summer 2013. The idea came to us as we were having lunch and I asked him whether the data he’d assembled for his book White Collar Government included any information about whether members of Congress had worked as farmers. We began with an interest in knowing whether having worked as a farmer drove how members of Congress vote on farm bills, but we soon expanded our analysis to also include the proportion of farmers in a member of Congress’ district as well as the amount of money she had received from agricultural political action committees. This allows us to run a horse race between competing theories for what drives agricultural protection, i.e., subsidies to farmers along with the taxes and quotas imposed on agricultural imports.

After the paper was rejected twice at other journals (complete with a referee report that compared part of our paper to a high-school term paper, no less) we decided to send this to Food Policy in October 2013. Little did I know that I was going to become an associate editor of that same journal a month later!

Here is the abstract:

I spent most of last week in Dar es Salaam at the POLICOFA — the acronym stands for “Potentials and Limitations of Contract Farming” — conference jointly organized by researchers from the University of Copenhagen and Mzumbe University. I was there because I had been asked by Niels Fold, one of the Danish researchers involved in POLICOFA, to give one of the two keynote addresses of the conference. The other one was given by Carlos Oya, from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, who has published a really good review of the contract farming literature in 2012 in the Journal of Agrarian Change.

The title of my talk was “Empirical Research on Contract Farming: Quo Vadis?,” and it was a nice occasion for me to gather my thoughts as to where the research on contract farming should be going. If you have an interest in applied contract theory, agricultural development, agribusiness, and development, you can find my slides here.

A new World Bank working paper by Paul Brenton and coauthors looks at what roads can do for development:

Market integration is key to ensuring sufficient and stable food supplies. This paper assesses the impediments to market integration in Central and Eastern Africa for three food staples: maize, rice, and sorghum. The paper uses a large database on monthly consumer prices for 150 towns in 13 African countries and detailed data on the length and quality of roads linking the towns. The analysis finds a substantial effect of distance and share of paved road on the level of market integration, as measured by relative prices. Furthermore, the paper evaluates the additional domestic and cross-border impediments to market integration in the region and represents them on a regional map. The analysis finds heterogeneous levels of domestic market integration across countries and significant “border effects” for the majority of contiguous countries in the sample, which reveal that markets are more integrated within than between countries. Countries that are members of the same regional trade agreement have substantially “thinner” borders with other members. Finally, the analysis shows that countries with less integrated domestic markets and “thicker” borders with their neighbors also have a higher prevalence of food insufficiency. These findings support policy efforts in tackling domestic and border impediments to transactions such as reforming customs, simplifying nontariff measures, addressing corruption, improving the quality of roads, and deepening regional trade agreements.

The emphasis is mine. None of these results are very surprising, but roads and infrastructure, even though they are about the least sexy investment an international development donor can make, are necessary for economic development.

Indeed, while they may not lend themselves to cool behavioral “nudges”or clever experimental designs, roads and infrastructure are what leads to the existence of markets, markets are what leads to more trade, and trade is what leads to large numbers of people attaining higher levels of welfare.

This is especially so when it comes to roads leading to lower food prices. Everyone needs food to live, and in developing countries, people often spend up to 80 percent of their income on food alone, which means that a significant reduction in food prices helps almost everyone. Just something to keep in mind the next time someone suggests handing out laptops to kids in developing countries…