Marc F. Bellemare Posts

My chapter with Jeff Bloem and Sunghun Lim titled “Producers, Consumers, and Value Chains in Low- and Middle-Income Countries,” which we wrote for the sixth volume of the Handbook of Agricultural Economics, is finally out, and freely available for download until July 12. Get it while you can! (And if you read this after July 12, 2022, email me for a copy.)

Here is an outline of the chapter:

The task of summarizing the literature on agricultural value chains was a monumental one given how much of it there is. That task was made even more monumental because we wanted to summarize both the literature on within-country value chains (i.e., how agricultural commodities go from the farm gate to final consumers or exporters, in section 2), which is what Jeff and I have written about, as well as the literature on between-country value chains (i.e., global value chains, or how agricultural commodities that may be produced in a given country end up consumed in another, in section 3), which is what Sunghun has written about.

Anyone interested in this topic can be brought up to speed by reading sections 1 to 3. But for me, most of the value added of this chapter is in the future research directions we lay out in section 4. This should be of interest to graduate students, early-career researchers, and others interested in working in this area, where new thinking is required, as I have made the case here and there. The research gaps we identify are as follows:

According to Amazon.com, my book Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School―But Didn’t is either “out of print” or “currently unavailable.” And indeed, this is what I currently see when I go to the book’s Amazon page:

Don’t believe your lying eyes: My book is not out of print, just out of stock; Amazon just sold all the copies it had in its warehouses, and now you can only get it from third-party booksellers if you choose to buy it from Amazon.com.

That my book has exceeded expectations in terms of sales and is currently out of stock is a nice problem for me to have, but what can you do if you would like to purchase your own copy? Here are two options:

1. You can backorder a copy from Bookshop. I have been using Amazon for so long that this needed to be explained to me, and maybe it needs to be explained to you, too. The way my editor explained it is as follows: “A backorder means that you’ll be placing an order that will be filled as soon as stock arrives … with Bookshop, a customer can place the order now and it will be fulfilled once books are back in stock.” The link to get the book through Bookshop is here.
2. If you are in the US, you can backorder a copy from Penguin Random House and get a $5 discount. The MIT Press marketing folks have created a discount code that can get you a $5 discount on the price of the book (so instead of paying $25, you pay $20) for people with US mailing addresses. The link to order from Penguin Random House is here; use “DoingEcon” (no quotation marks) as discount code (there is a limit of one discount per order). In this case, too, your copy will ship once inventories are replenished.

My book Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School―But Didn’t (MIT Press) is finally out. You can get it here from Amazon, or you can click here for non-Amazon alternatives.

Once you have read it, I would be grateful if you could please take time to review it on Amazon, Goodreads, or B&N, as reviews drive a book’s post-release marketing.