Big Fish in Thin Markets: Competing with the Middlemen to Increase Market Access in the Amazon

Viva Ona Bartkus, Wyatt Brooks (), Joseph Kaboski and Carolyn E. Pelnik

No 29221, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Middlemen are ubiquitous in supply chains. In developing countries they help bring products from remote communities to end markets but may exert strong market power. We study a cooperative intervention which organizes together poor fishing communities in the Amazon — one of the poorest and most remote regions of the world — to purchase large boats in order to partially bypass middlemen and deliver their fish directly to market. We find that the intervention increases income by 27%, largely through an increase in price received, and also increases consumption. Moreover, the intervention is highly cost effective with the projected stream of income gains easily covering the cost of the investment. Finally, we formalize a model in which the market power of middlemen itself can create a poverty trap, which can be eliminated with cooperative investment.

JEL-codes: O1 O12 O13 O18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-com and nep-isf
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Published as Viva Ona Bartkus & Wyatt Brooks & Joseph P. Kaboski & Carolyn Pelnik, 2021. "Big fish in thin markets: Competing with the middlemen to increase market access in the Amazon," Journal of Development Economics, .

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Journal Article: Big fish in thin markets: Competing with the middlemen to increase market access in the Amazon (2022)
Working Paper: Big Fish in Thin Markets: Competing with the Middlemen to Increase Market Access in the Amazon (2021)
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