Can agricultural traders be trusted? Evidence from Ethiopia

Thomas Assefa and Bart Minten ()

No 210964, 2015 Conference, August 9-14, 2015, Milan, Italy from International Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: Traditional food marketing systems in developing countries are presumed to suffer from a number of deficiencies. Policy makers therefore often try to regulate them and modern private market arrangements are increasingly emerging to help deal with some of the deficiencies. However, it is unclear if and to what extent regulation and modernization affects governance of these markets. We look in this paper at the case of coffee in urban markets in Ethiopia. We find no significant cheating with weights but there is illegal trade, with significant non-allowed trade of export quality coffee in local markets, and a consistent pattern of mis-representation of not easily verifiable quality characteristics. We further find that modernizing marketing formats, including modern retail, and branded and packaged products, deliver higher quality (at a high price) but they are not more trustworthy than traditional ones along these three dimensions.

Keywords: Agribusiness; Agricultural Finance; Crop Production/Industries; Marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/210964/files/A ... be%20trusted-442.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:ags:iaae15:210964

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.210964

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2015 Conference, August 9-14, 2015, Milan, Italy from International Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().