AfricaBib 
bibliographic database
| Previous page | New search |
The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here
 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | African Marketing Institutions and Rural Development Policy |
| Author: | Handwerker, W. Penn |
| Year: | 1981 |
| Periodical: | African Urban Studies |
| Volume: | 10 |
| Period: | Spring |
| Pages: | 5-20 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Liberia Africa |
| Subjects: | rural development marketplaces marketing Economics and Trade Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment Politics and Government |
| Abstract: | Daily markets in less developed countries (LDCs) persist because of low levels of discretionary income available to consumers. Efficient change in these retail institutions presupposes substantial increase: in real income. Periodic markets in LDCs persist because food productivity is low and sales are not contractualised. Efficient change in these combined retail/wholesale institutions presupposes substantial increases in agricultural productivity. Marketplaces, and the atomistic competition among large numbers of tiny firms with which they are associated, thus do not impede development. They reflect its absence. Because they increase consumer costs, price-support programs defeat the central purpose of economic development policy. Rural development goals can best be served by increasing productivity, and thereby lowering the costs of production, increasing farmers' incomes and lowering consumers' costs. Achieving these goals, in turn, can be expected to bring about structural changes in marketing institutions efficiently. This line of reasoning is developed through an analysis of the origins and change in the structural, spatial, temporal, and functional attributes of the contemporary food marketing institutions in Liberia. Notes, ref. |