Targeted Global Constraint: Ineffective Agricultural Resource Use in Post-Reform Economies
Constraints to Effective Agriculture Resource Use in Post-Reform Economies

Constraints to effective agricultural resource use have been generally attributed to lack of private property and distorted pricing mechanisms. Therefore, global policy and institutional reform suggest two basic recommendations in order to promote development of the agricultural sector and rural economies:

1. creation or support of family-farm agriculture through secure and marketable private property rights, and
2. price liberalization so that domestic producer prices reflect international market prices.

Despite the internal coherence of this policy reform model, it has had mixed success. In areas where this reform strategy has been implemented, growth has sometimes been sluggish, sometimes rapid but exclusive of the poor, and sometimes unevenly spread across the agricultural economy. Innovative thinking is needed to better understand the reasons for this mixed success. BASIS research is designed to identify whether these two recommendations promote the necessary and sufficient conditions for development or whether agricultural development is dependent on other or additional factors.

Constraints to Growth in Russian Agriculture is working to produce reliable information on the progress, performance, and constraints to reform the former Soviet Union. The project is tackling the challenge of investigating and understanding policy-related barriers to markets, emerging forms of land markets, coping strategies under constrained and disorganized farm credit and public financing systems, and constraints on efficient allocation and mobility of farm labor.

Innovating Institutions to Help Land Reform Beneficiaries is building on established knowledge about the constraints that limit effective resource use by smallholders. Where it has not been feasible to privatize land, infrastructure, or movable assets to individual owners, beneficiaries sometimes find themselves co-owning resources. However this has often been in diverse groups that lack the constitutional rules and organizational arrangements needed to curtail free-riding and encourage investment by the co-owners and outside financiers. It is searching for innovative policy reform models for group-owned enterprises.

Deepening of Financial Services through Credit-Reporting Bureaus examines how liberal reforms, especially the implementation of credit-reporting bureaus influence agricultural production.

Reducing Poverty in Post-Reform Economies investigates the structure and performance of rural financial markets and the welfare of the rural poor in Peru and Mexico.