Improving the Impact of Market Reform on Agricultural Productivity in Africa: How Institutional Design Makes a Difference

effective ways of increasing access to inputs, through improving the delivery of inputs and
enabling farmers to acquire the means to pay for them” (p. 23).

There is increasing recognition that the general prescriptions promoting “liberalization” over the
past two decades have been made and implemented with insufficient knowledge and analysis of
how specific market institutions were affecting economic outcomes (e.g., World Bank 1997).
There is also an emerging general consensus that future productivity growth within the evolving
market economies of developing areas will require closer attention to the institutional details of
the system — i.e., going beyond the truisms that property rights, market rules, and exchange
mechanisms need to be defined and worked out, to actually conducting pragmatic applied
research on the specific property rights, rules, and exchange arrangements that would most
contribute to economic development under particular country circumstances (Schmid 1992).

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