Agricultural value chains: towards a marriage of development economics and industrial organisation?*

Abstract

In the last half-century, development economics has gone from being a fringe field of economics to being at the very centre of the discipline, and the field’s foremost proponents have been elevated to the highest levels of the discipline. At the same time, development economists have gone from being economists who study situations wherein multiple market failures lead to persistent poverty to being ‘development-and-x’ economists, where x is any of agricultural, demographic, environmental, health, labour, economics etc. Yet few economists, if any, would label themselves development-and-industrial organisation (IO) economists. In this keynote, I first speculate as to why that is. I then explain how the time is ripe to celebrate the marriage of development and IO, and why the study of agricultural value chains provides the ideal inception point for that marriage to be consummated.