B019048 - ECONOMICS OF AGRI-FOOD SYSTEMS

English

echnical and eonomic features of agricultural production; peasant agriculture; agricultural household models; structural change and agriculture transformation; the role of agriculture in economic development; land and land reform; credit; risk and insurance; labor; farm organization; food security, rural-urban migration; human capital; access to market and value chain participation; environment and climate change; investments

de Janvry, A., and Sadoulet, E., 2016. Development Economics. Theory and Practice. Routledge. London.

The overall objective is the analysis of determinants of agricultural and rural development in LDCs.

The course consists of two types of activities:
a) lectures: 22 lectures of two hours each (total 44 hours), and
b) homeworks, due every other week, to be done at home either individually or in groups of no more than 4 students, on selected lecture topics.

The lecture handouts and materials can be downloaded from the Moodle platform at http://e-l.unifi.it/login/index.php. The password to access rge course materials will be provided by the lecturer

Lectures and homeworks are meant as coordinated components of the course and, as a result, they all contribute to the student evaluation mechanism. Furthermore, the student attendance rate and participation in class discussion contribute also to the overall grade.

The evaluation mechanism for students attending the lectures is as follows:
• attendance and participation to classes (10%);
• homeworks (20%);
• final exam (written) (70%).

Non-attending students can take the exam provided that they had delivered all due homeworks at least one week before the exam session. In this case the evaluation mechanism is as follows:
• homeworks (20%);
• final exam (written) (80%).

L1 – Introduction: what is agriculture about?
• Introduction
• Technical features of agricultural production
• Economic characteristics of agricultural production

L2 – Agriculture in LDCs
• Peasant agriculture
• Agricultural household models

L3 – Structural change and agriculture transformation
• Patterns of development
• Economic growth and structural change
The changing role of agriculture

L4 – The role of agriculture in economic development
• The four contributions of agriculture to economic growth
• Agriculture development and poverty reduction

HW1 – Agriculture in economic development

L5 – Determinants of agricultural growth (I)
• Agricultural prices
• Agricultural markets

L6 – Determinants of agricultural growth (II)
• Technical change
• Green vs. gene revolution

L7 – Land and farm organization
• Technical and economic characteristics of land
• Land tenure and farm organization
• Agrarian contracts

L8 – Access to land
• Land size and productivity
• Land and agrarian reform
• Land grabbing

HW2 – Land reform

L9 – Credit to rural households
• Characteristics of credit transactions
• Credit in rural areas

L10 – Access to credit
• Old credit policy
• Institutional innovations in the credit sector
• Microcredit and formal-informal integration

L11 – Risk and insurance
• Risks in rural areas
• Classification of risks
• Responses to risk

L12 – Limits to insurance and safety nets
• The perfect insurance model
• Informal insurance
• Index-based weather insurance
• Safety nets

L13 – Labor
• Casual labor vs. permanent labor
• Nutrition, health and labor

L14 – Migration
• Dualistic models and rural-urban migration
• The new labor migration economics
• Impacts of migration

HW3 – Rural-urban migration

L15 – Human capital
• Nutrition
• Education
• Health

L16 – Food and nutrition security
• Multidimensionality of FNS
• FNS analysis
• FNS policies

HW4 – Human capital

L17 – International trade
• Gains from trade
• Agricultural protectionism

L18 – Value chains
• Value chains
• Small-holders participation in global value chains

L19 – Environment and agriculture
• Sustainability and SDGs
• Economy-environment interactions
• Market failures: externalities, public goods, property rights
• Poverty-environment dilemma

L20 – Climate change and agriculture
• What is climate change
• The two-way relationship between climate change and agriculture
• Mitigation measures
• Adaptation measures

L21 – Project cycle
• Result-based management of projects
• Logical framework
• Problem tree and objective tree

L22 – Financial and economic analysis of development projects
• Cash-flow and discounting
• Indicators: NPV, B/C, IRR
• Sensitivity analysis

HW5 – Project evaluation and cost-benefit analysis