Making Markets Work Research Articles

Indonesia Robusta Coffee Value Chain: Mapping and Upgrading Opportunities

Coffee, one of the agricultural commodities, aligns with specific relevant SDGs in addressing its sustainability challenges. This study aims to map and analyze the value chain to identify areas where upgrading interventions could be implemented to enhance the chain’s sustainability. This research was conducted in Bogor Regency, West Java, and Pagar Alam City, South Sumatra, in 2022. 112 farmers and 23 downstream actors participated in this study as respondents. The research utilized the qualitative descriptive method, incorporating the M4P (Making Markets Work for the Poor) approach, Ishikawa analysis, and Gereffi concept. The research discovered that a wide range of actors is involved in the chain, including small farmers, intermediaries traders, cooperative, processing industries, roasteries, retail, and coffee shops. The finding reveals robusta value chain includes several stages of transformation: input, production, processing, trading, roasting, and marketing. Four types of upgrading can be carried out. First, process upgrading by increasing productivity through implementing Good Agricultural Practices and improving post-harvest handling and processing that optimizes water usage and minimizes waste. Second, product upgrading involves product differentiation by producing red-picked green beans. Third, functional upgrading through coffee industrialization by enhancing partnerships in the production network. Fourth, inter-sectoral upgrading by finding new coffee markets. Implementing these interventions is expected to improve the sustainability of Indonesia robusta coffee value chain.

Assessing the Contribution to Market System Change of the Private Enterprise Programme Ethiopia

An impact evaluation of a pro-poor market system development programme, ‘Making Markets Work for the Poor’ (M4P), poses several methodological issues for evaluators. M4P interventions intend to change the contextual conditions in which stakeholders take business decisions so that it triggers change processes in the wider social system and ultimately benefits poor people. An impact evaluation design for such a programme thus needs to be robust enough to adequately capture these systemic outcomes, acknowledging dynamic changes in intervention delivery as well as in market conditions over time. Theory-based evaluation can provide learning and accountability when it incorporates methods that allow a critical reflection on the key causal steps in an intervention’s theory of change. We present our learnings about indicators and methods to reflect on the importance of the contributions to market system change of a large M4P programme in Ethiopia.

Local Knowledge on Sedge Utilisation for Handicraft

Sedge is one of the natural plants for handicraft in Thailand, as well as in the countries where there is sedge; such as Madagascar, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Sumatra island, countries and islands nearby Malay Strait, Borneo, Australia, and Vietnam (Inthongkong, 1986; M4P [Making Markets Work Better for the Poor], 2008). In Thailand, sedge is mostly found especially in eastern part of Southern Thailand; such as Narathiwat, Phatthalung, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Suratthani, Pattani, and Chumphon Provinces (Karakade, 1996). Although in the past there were many researchers studied about sedge utilization in Thailand (Karakade, 1996; Sonsang, 2003; Kullayasiri, 2011), this research article aims to apply the value chain analysis (VCA)—better tools in explanation—to present about the local knowledge, step, process, and flow on sedge utilization for handicraft, especially in Cha-uad District, Nakhon Si Thammarat Province because here is the source of sedge that now distributes to producers in the other provinces, as well as there is a day in July of every year to praise sedge called "Blooming of Sedge Flower Day". This research article aims to 1) support the idea of the Plant Genetic Conservation Project under the Royal Initiative of Her Highest Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn (RSPG); 2) present the local knowledge of sedge utilization for handicraft; and 3) present steps and process, as well as flow of sedge utilization for handicraft. Keywords: Cha-uad District; Handicraft; Local Knowledge; Sedge Utilisation

Fairness and the Challenge of Making Markets Work Better

AbstractThis article explores the revival of fairness as the lodestar of EU competition enforcement. It considers the theory and evolving discourse of fairness, then identifies and evaluates examples of fairness‐oriented enforcement activity. Concluding that fairness represents a distinct development from the ‘hipster antitrust’ movement, the article suggests reasons to explain the shift, including a need to rehabilitate the social market economy in an age of market‐scepticism, and to facilitate the progressive expansion of competition law to address modern market failures.

Eleanor M. Fox and Mor Bakhoum Making Markets Work for Africa

Eleanor M. Fox and Mor Bakhoum Making Markets Work for Africa

‘Starting races’: bringing about market systems change using challenge funds

M4P or ‘Making Markets Work better for the Poor’ is a market systems approach to economic development that seeks to understand how poor people interact with market systems, and therefore how change can take place within those systems to benefit them. Challenge funds, when used as a tool for private sector development, are typically a mechanism to incentivize and support the private sector to invest in ways which both assist businesses to grow as well as provide wider development benefits. Although challenge funds typically act on only part of the M4P ‘doughnut’ and generally support only one type of market actor (i.e. the private sector and not government or civil society), they can and have worked to achieve systemic change. This paper explores lessons learned on how the design and implementation of challenge funds can be adapted to maximize their impact on market systems and, ultimately, poor people

An Essay: Can Competition Law and Policy Be Made Relevant for Inclusive Growth of Developing Countries?

In their book Making Markets Work for Africa, Eleanor Fox and Mor Bakhoum argue that competition law and policy can be made more relevant for the inclusive growth of developing countries if a bottom-up approach is followed. They suggest that the most detrimental obstacles to competition faced by each country differ with their stage of economic development and that national competition laws should therefore be designed so as to allow each country to address the specific challenges it faces. This essay discusses the approach of the authors and points to some areas where further research is warranted in light of the recent experience of Sub-Saharan African countries.

Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work

Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work

Market system diagrams, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the doughnut

Doughnuts (aka market system diagrams) are central to market systems analysis, and to the way of thinking that seeks to investigate and address root causes of market system underperformance. But we rarely see them being used, and still less see them used well. Why is the defining framework of the Making Markets Work for the Poor (M4P) approach not used more, and why is it not used more consistently? This paper starts by getting under the hood of the doughnut to see what’s really going on in there and describes how it needs to sit alongside other M4P tools. It then details three common examples of doughnut-related malpractice and the real implications this has for our ability to deliver sustainable change at scale in market systems. Finally, the paper analyses the incentive and capacity constraints that prevent programmes making better use of doughnuts, and suggests how these may be addressed.

Competition Law and Policy as a Tool for Development: A Review of Making Markets Work for Africa: Markets, Development, and Competition Law in Sub-Saharan Africa by Eleanor Fox and Mor Bakhoum

Prior to the recent commencement of the Agreement Establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area, (AfCFTA), there was no region-wide competition treaty in Africa. Concerted efforts have been invested in uniting broader political, economic and legal policies at sub-Saharan Africa level except for competition law and policy. Granted, the broader political, economic and legal order ought to lay the foundation for a harmonized competition law and policy dispensation. Eleanor Fox and Mor Bakhoum seem to be alive to this reality in their work, Making Markets Work for Africa: Markets, Development, and Competition law in sub-Saharan Africa. Their work brings together the historical, political, economic and legal underpinnings anchoring competition law and policy in today’s sub-Saharan Africa. They do not stop at that. They focus on the legal texts, institutional set-up and performance, and effects of sub-regional regimes on competition law and policy implementation. Fox and Bakhoum’s fairly broad analysis focusing on West, East, and Southern African countries brings to fore the real challenges at play in Africa. It is a fragmented, stratified yet at times vertically united legal and policy landscape. While they observe the need for convergence of competition law at the continental or regional level, they note the different states of developmental progress among sub-Saharan African countries hence concede the need for the fragmented approach.

Eleanor M. Fox and Mor Bakhoum: Making Markets Work for Africa – Markets, Development, and Competition Law in Sub-Saharan Africa

Eleanor M. Fox and Mor Bakhoum: Making Markets Work for Africa – Markets, Development, and Competition Law in Sub-Saharan Africa

Response to Mark I. Vail’s review of Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work. By Steven K. Vogel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 200p. $34.95 cloth.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Reflections on Fox and Bakhoum’s Making Markets Work for Africa (OUP, 2019)

Reflections on Fox and Bakhoum’s Making Markets Work for Africa (OUP, 2019)

Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work by Steven K. Vogel

Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work by Steven K. Vogel

Making Markets Work in the Public Interest: Combating Hazardous Alcohol Consumption through Minimum Pricing Rules in Scotland

Making Markets Work in the Public Interest: Combating Hazardous Alcohol Consumption through Minimum Pricing Rules in Scotland

Turning tides: a systemic approach to intervention in the water sector

Reliable access to clean water remains one of the key global challenges of our time. Over 10 per cent of the world’s population do not have access to clean drinking water, a figure which doubles when applied only to rural areas, more than 20 years after the end of the International Decade for Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation. This paper builds on theoretical literature examining the failure of traditional approaches to development intervention in the water sector and the potential for use of an alternative approach. This paper applies a mixed methods approach to the Making Markets Work for the Poor (M4P) diagnostic process in examining systemic constraints facing the water sector in Bugiri and Namayingo Districts of south-east Uganda. The results of a household survey, in-depth interviews, and secondary data analysis help to explain why previous models’ interventions in these areas have failed to deliver sustainable service provision. It then uses these findings to develop a model that has the potential to address constraints in such a way as to deliver lasting improvements in high-quality water services delivery. The data presented aims to add empirical weight to the theoretical case for adopting analysis-based, context-specific models of intervention, with development actors working through partners to facilitate change, rather than actively participating in a system.

Editorial: New approaches to old problems: systemic change as a unifying objective

Systemic approaches to development have, over the last decade, gone from a niche concern to what is arguably a paradigm shift, in discourse at least. In academia, the global value chains literature has shifted focus to align behind global production networks literature in being more inclusive of the multidirectional flows and institutional dynamics of systems (Hess and Yeung, 2006; Coe et al., 2008; Bair, 2008). In practice, donors have begun to align behind systemic approaches demonstrated by USAID’s shift from Value Chains to Value Chain Systems (USAID, 2014) and the £1 bn of programmes commissioned under a systems banner over the past decade (authors’ analysis of programme documents). The systemic approach to development intervention is grounded in the works of Polanyi, Porter and New Institutional Economics, and has analytical synergies with work on complex adaptive systems (Hall and Clark, 2010; Ramalingam et al., 2008, 2014). However, this journal has played a significant role in the conceptual development of the operational side of market system approaches, and their principal articulation, Making Markets Work for the Poor (M4P) (Elliott et al., 2008; Bear et al., 2003; Hitchins et al., 2004; Taylor, 2013; Bekkers, 2008; Bear and Field, 2008; Jones, 2012; Hitchins and Jain, 2011; Johnson, 2009), codified in the Operational Guide (DfID and SDC, 2008; Springfield Centre, 2015).

Making Markets Work for the Poor (M4P) Approach and Smallholder Irrigation Farming

The aim of this article is to show what M4P is, how it came into being and how it has been used to guide intervention in different context and to weigh the extent to which it can be used to guide the study and interventions aimed at enhancing the sustainability of smallholder irrigation schemes. M4P is a holistic approach to development that offers agencies the route needed to achieve systemic and sustainable change, focusing on the identification and addressing of fundamental constraints that inhibit the beneficial participation of the poor in market systems as either consumers or producers. M4P historically evolved from diverse experiences in business promotion, private- sector policy development, the SL approach and the failure of economic structural adjustment programs and trade liberalizationas development approaches to development and poverty eradication. This diverse background made it holistic and multi-dimensional. The M4P conceptualises market systems as consisting of core markets, supporting functions, and a set of rules. The smallholder farmers, as potential markets for different value chains are not well understood, hence the need to invest into an M4P guided holistic and multi-disciplinary research to identify the factors that prevent markets from working for the smallholder irrigation farmers in Zimbabwe

From Microfinance to Inclusive Financial Markets: The Challenge of Social Regulation

Policy towards microfinance has undergone a shift away from building financial institutions focused on serving poor people to an “inclusive” agenda for financial sector development, operationalized by some donors in an approach entitled “Making Markets Work for the Poor”. This approach is located in New Institutional Economics and the enabling environment focus of the post-Washington Consensus. Despite the way in which this inclusion agenda echoes social exclusion discourse, it engages with a residualist rather than relational understanding of poverty. This leads to an analytical disjuncture between its discourse and analysis, overlooking the root causes of poverty and exclusion in relational processes. Arising from this is the failure to recognize that developing institutions and “enabling” environments require an understanding of social institutions and their influence as social regulatory structures. The author illustrates how analysis can proceed to address this disjuncture using the example of gender relations.