Browsing by Person "Jaffe Lopez, Mercedes Isabel"

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Institutional change in Cuba's agricultural sector
(2010) Jaffe Lopez, Mercedes Isabel; Zeller, Manfred
Cuba has a low agricultural production and depends on costly food imports. The partial reforms advanced by the government during the 1990s seem to have failed in increasing productivity or output. Due to a lack of primary research in the agricultural sector, little is known about the incentives and constraints that producers face. This dissertation seeks to contribute in the reduction of this knowledge gap and proposes a new way of understanding the transition in the agricultural sector in Cuba. The role of the institutions governing this sector is studied in order to evaluate the main problems of different producer types and the possibilities and constraints of reform towards a more productive agriculture. The dissertation is organized around three papers. The analyses presented in these papers use quantitative and qualitative data collected during two field trips in 2007-2008 and 2009, as well as secondary data from publications, news and official statistics. The first paper describes the sector?s institutional framework and compares the performance of different producer types that include state farms, semi-independent collectives, and private producers. These producers differ in their access to illegal markets, and in their property rights for land and cattle. Private farmers have more incentives to produce due to their stronger user rights, resulting in a better productive performance when compared to state and state-dependent collective farms. The results cast doubt on the prevailing idea that production problems result from technical or resources deficiencies. The second paper deals with the largest producer type described in the first paper, by exploring poverty and food access of collective farm households with the use of principal component analysis and other methods. It is found that relative poverty and food security depend on the household?s access to individual and collective resources for subsistence production. The main productive activities and the economic performance of the state-dependent collective farms have no correlation with the poverty status of their workers, exposing incentive problems at worker level. The third paper investigates the constraints that have led to the failure of adopting economically efficient institutions by evaluating the historical political power dynamics in Cuba?s agricultural sector. It is found that the institutions adopted aim to limit the accumulation of political power by private producers. Economic crises that threaten the political elite have caused the partial and temporary adoption of free markets and the distribution of state land to private farmers. These reforms, however, have been blocked by the bureaucrats as they lose political power. The papers show that the incomplete and insecure property rights regime in Cuba results in low overall productivity caused by incentive and other problems. In the case of the state-dependent collective farms, this increases the poverty and food insecurity of the workers, while hurting the supply of rationed food to the general population. The institutional setup is a result of power dynamics where the elite, using the bureaucracy, tries to minimize the political threat of organized private producers by limiting their accumulation of wealth. Successful reform of the agricultural sector would require a redefinition of the power bases and relationships between the government and political stakeholders such as the bureaucracy and other groups (for example the civic society) by allowing participation of these stakeholders in the shaping of the reforms. The dissertation concludes by presenting an outlook for research and the international development organizations working in the country.