Improving Market Access for Farmers: Evidence from East Africa

Loren­zo Casaburi, As­sis­tant Pro­fes­sor at the UZH De­part­ment of Eco­nom­ics and Af­fil­i­at­ed Pro­fes­sor at the Zurich Cen­ter for Eco­nom­ic De­vel­op­ment, stud­ies eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment in sub-Sa­ha­ran Africa, with a fo­cus on agri­cul­tur­al mar­kets. His re­search com­bines ex­ten­sive field­work, rig­or­ous iden­ti­fi­ca­tion meth­ods, and in­sights from be­hav­ioral eco­nom­ics, in­dus­tri­al or­ga­ni­za­tion, and con­tract the­o­ry. In 2019 Casaburi was among the re­cip­i­ents of the high­ly com­pet­i­tive ERC Start­ing Grants which is award­ed by the Eu­ro­pean Re­search Coun­cil for pre­sent­ing an in­ter­est­ing project with great po­ten­tial. The ERC grant will al­low Casaburi to launch a re­search pro­gram that will study farm­ers’ ac­cess to key mar­kets, in­clud­ing out­put, in­sur­ance, and land mar­kets.

For this pur­pose, he plans to con­duct a num­ber of field ex­per­i­ments and to col­lect nov­el data sources, in part­ner­ship with sev­er­al lo­cal or­ga­ni­za­tions. He and his re­search team ex­pect that their re­search will gen­er­ate im­por­tant in­sights for aca­d­e­mics, de­vel­op­ment prac­ti­tion­ers, and pol­i­cy­mak­ers that will help them to im­prove the eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion for East African farm­ers.

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