Robust and vibrant agricultural markets are an important component of inclusive agriculture-led economic development. Governments of developing countries play an important role in fostering an enabling environment for agricultural markets to thrive and in addressing shortcomings arising due to incomplete agricultural markets. However, excessive government involvement can also lead to inefficiencies and can further obstruct the development of agricultural markets. This dissertation focuses on various agricultural market outcomes and evaluates them in light of government interventions that potentially have a direct or indirect effect on them.The first essay investigates whether and how liquidity constraints during the production period affect smallholders' market participation and choice of marketing channel in the context of the Zambian maize market. During the period of the study, the country's parastatal marketing board ⁰́₃ the Food Reserve Agency (FRA) ⁰́₃ operated alongside private buyers and purchased large volumes of maize at a pan-territorial price that exceeded average market prices. Results indicate that liquidity-constrained maize-growing smallholders produced less maize output, were less likely to sell maize, and were less likely to sell to the FRA, as compared to those that did not face liquidity constraints. These results imply that benefits of market policies like those of the FRA are likely to be disproportionately captured by relatively wealthier and less resource constrained farmers.The second essay focusses on the effects of various regulations imposed on international trade and the domestic fertilizer market on fertilizer imports - an important component of domestic fertilizer supply in most developing countries. The results indicate that increased time and/or costs needed to comply with border regulations (such as clearing customs and inspections) are associated with a decline in the volume of fertilizer imported. However, fertilizer market-specific regulations are not found to be statistically significantly associated with fertilizer imports. Further investigation reveals that the border regulation-related findings hold mainly for high and middle-income countries, plausibly due to poor enforcement of formal laws and the greater importance of informal rules in the markets of low-income countries.The third essay explores whether price uncertainty (a form of price volatility) affects the price levels of maize products in urban Zambia, in light of the highly discretionary and ad-hoc government interventions in the country's maize markets. Excessive price volatility of staple food products has adverse effects on food and nutritional security of vulnerable populations and can potentially disrupt the development of resilient food markets. I conduct a Vector Autoregressive-Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedastic (1,1)-in-mean (VAR-GARCH(1,1)-in-mean) analysis of monthly price data for four maize products: wholesale maize grain, retail maize grain, and two types of maize flour ⁰́₃ breakfast meal (highly refined) and roller meal (less refined). I find some weak evidence that an increase in uncertainty in wholesale maize grain prices is associated with a small increase in own prices, although this result does not hold across all specifications. Price uncertainty of other products is not found to be associated with changes in prices of own or other products. The application of VAR-GARCH(1,1)-in-mean to model prices of food products across a value chain is a methodological improvement over existing studies in this area in a developing country context.
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