Design Effective Agricultural Liberalization: An Analysis of Peasants, Their Markets and Supply Response in Madagascar

小行星9312615 马达加斯加的农业自由化产生了令人失望的结果：自改革开始以来，人均农业产量下降。 本论文的研究项目将试图从微观经济学的角度解释自由化逻辑中的谬误，这些谬误产生了这些意想不到的结果。 候选人克里斯托弗B。巴雷特教授的指导下工作。威斯康星州-麦迪逊大学农业经济系的卡特将收集马达加斯加主要农业区之一--中部高地的瓦基南卡拉特拉地区--十个村庄的市场结构数据。 马达加斯加的合作机构-塔那那利佛大学经济研究中心将在Pepe Andrianomanana博士的指导下协助查明线人。 这些数据将结合从各种来源收集的现有数据进行分析，包括1990年对825户马达加斯加农场管理进行的实地研究。 研究者将利用这些数据来检验一个关于农民在不完全市场环境下对风险反应的微观经济理论。 传统的还原主义方法将价格确定为水平，仅用价格水平来代表市场，预测各家庭的生产者反应相对一致。 所提出的方法将为传统模型增加三个直观的见解：价格是分布的，市场传递价格信号的方式并不统一，农场层面的非价格约束对生产者和商品的约束不同。 潜在的实际利益将是一个新的视角，可以改善农业自由化计划的设计。 ***

9312615 Carter Agricultural liberalization in Madagascar has had disappointing results: agricultural production per capita has declined since reforms began. This dissertation research project will attempt to explain in microeconomic terms the fallacies in the logic of liberalization which have produced these unexpected outcomes. The candidate, Christopher B. Barrett, working under the supervision of Prof. Michael R. Carter, of the Department of Agricultural Economics, of the University of Wisconsin - Madison, will collect market-structure data on ten villages in one of Madagascar's principal agricultural regions, the Vakinankaratra area of the Central Highlands. The cooperating Malagasy institution, the Centre d'Etudes Economiques of the Universite d'Antananarivo, under the direction of Dr. Pepe Andrianomanana, will assist in identifying informants. These data will be analyzed in conjunction with existing data already gathered from a variety of sources, including an 825-household Malagasy farm management study fielded in 1990. The researcher will use the data to test a microeconomic theory of peasant response to risk in an imperfect market environment. The conventional, reductionist approach, which identifies prices as levels and represents markets by price levels alone, predicts relatively uniform producer response across households. The proposed approach would add three intuitive insights to the conventional model: that prices are distributions, that markets are not uniform in the way they transmit price signals, and that farm-level, non-price constraints bind differentially across producers and commodities. The potential practical benefit would be a new perspective that could improve the design of agricultural liberalization programs. ***