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

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-andx’ 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.

过去半个世纪以来，发展经济学已从经济学的边缘分支一跃成为该学科的核心领域，而该领域的顶尖领军学者也已跻身学科最高层级。与此同时，发展经济学家的研究范畴与身份定位均发生了转变：从最初聚焦于多重市场失灵引致持续性贫困场景的研究者，转变为“发展+X”型学者，其中X可指代农业、人口、环境、健康、劳动、经济学等任一领域。然而，鲜有经济学家（即便有也寥寥无几）会将自己归类为发展-产业组织（Industrial Organisation, IO）经济学家。在本次主旨演讲中，笔者首先将探析这一现象背后的成因；随后将阐释为何当下正值庆祝发展经济学与产业组织学融合的恰当时机，以及为何农业价值链研究正是促成这一融合的理想切入点。