Trade costs and agricultural trade in Central Asia

Handelskosten und Agrarhandel in Zentralasien

Richard Pomfret

No 146, IAMO Discussion Papers from Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO)

Abstract: Central Asian governments frequently express the goal of economic diversification, and specifically of diversifying their agricultural sector, but with little actual impact. Diversification has not happened because high trade costs discourage farmers, potential foreign investors and others from identifying new products that could be produced competitively. This paper reviews recent international literature on trade costs, and the limited Central Asian evidence. Because of high trade costs, the phenomenon of global value chains has scarcely touched Central Asia, apart from a few cases in the Kyrgyz Republic. The examples of clothing and beans illustrate how a Central Asian country has joined international value chains. The paper draws conclusions about how Central Asian countries wishing to diversify their agricultural sectors could draw upon this experience.

Keywords: trade costs; agricultural trade; Central Asia; Handelskosten; Agrarhandel; Zentralasien (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 F14 Q17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cwa and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/97150/1/786369787.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Trade costs and agricultural trade in Central Asia (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:iamodp:146

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAMO Discussion Papers from Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().