Publications

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) has been hailed as a key pillar and catalyst for economic growth, industrialization, and sustainable development in Africa. One of the anticipated benefits is the promise to increase intra-African trade through the elimination of import duties and other tariffs among countries. However, due to the heterogeneity between the African countries, questions remain as to whether each country will benefit ...

Despite recent attention, the concept of food agency has been largely overlooked in academics as a food security dimension. In this study, we define lack of food agency as the inability to make food choices and the consumption of non-preferred and undesirable foods, and examine its relation to other food insecurity domains and household characteristics. Our analysis is based on data collected from 486 households in the impoverished regions of ...

This study investigates the adoption of Digital Beehive Monitoring Technology (DBMT) based on a survey with 844 beekeepers across 18 European countries, shedding light on their characteristics, current usage patterns, expected benefits, and the determinants influencing technology adoption. Notably, 79.1 % of beekeepers had yet to embrace any form of digital monitoring, while 20.9 % engaged in limited monitoring, primarily focused on hive weight. ...

This study examines the crowding out of informal institutions after the introduction of formalized collective action in isolated and subsistence-oriented regions, using the case of coffee cooperatives in Ngozi Province, Burundi. Using experimental economics, we provide evidence that cooperative membership can corrode existing intrinsic motivations to cooperate spontaneously by replacing it with incentivized, extrinsic motivations for formalized ...

The paper investigates the benefits of certification of cooperatives in conflict-affected areas. We study whether and how certification may contribute to attenuate the impact of conflicts on the members of coffee cooperatives in the Eastern DRC. We use an inverse probability weighted difference-in-difference approach to study data collected between December 2017 and October 2019 from four NGO-supported cooperatives. Two of these cooperatives got ...

In the Eastern DRC, coffee farmers combine the different sales outlets available to them. Cooperative members sell coffee to the cooperatives they belong to as well as to informal markets, which include a channel of illegal cross-border smuggling. In this conflict affected region, the informal cross-border markets persist irrespective of the presence of cooperatives. This paper seeks to understand the motivating factors of the sideselling ...

The literature on migrants' integration and wellbeing is ample, but the case of economic-asylum seekers in a protracted asylum application system is yet to receive sufficient attention. The economic-asylum seekers are a unique group who migrate with an economic motive but apply for asylum to achieve economic integration in the host country. We use the aspiration-capability framework and a mixed-method approach: participant observation, focus ...

This paper estimates the regional effects of high-speed broadband coverage on economic growth in a panel of 1348 regions across all European Union Member States between 2011 and 2018. We distinguish between different connectivity speed levels by aggregating the available regional data across all existing broadband technologies, and investigate how regional differences in the contribution of broadband coverage to real economic growth can ...

Purpose This paper investigates the relationship between plot size and fertilizer use efficiency (FE) in Chinese large-scale farming and searches for the underlying mechanisms that explain this relationship. Design/methodology/approach Based on a household- and plot-level data set of large-scale production units (LSPUs) from Jiangsu and Jiangxi Provinces, the technical and fertilizer use efficiency of large-scale rice production is estimated by ...