Potato traders in West Bengal: A survey of contractual relations and market structure
Pilot survey of a random sub-set of phorias (middlemen) and larger traders who operate in 72 villages of West Medinipur and Hugli districts and their corresponding potato markets.
Our goal is to understand the nature of contractual relations between farmers and phorias on the one hand, and between phorias and wholesale traders that they sell to on the other hand. The surveys will enable us to obtain systematic information on market structure, trader costs and profits, entry barriers, contractual relations across successive layers of the supply chain, and the nature of competition at each layer. Eventually the hope is that we will obtain a richer understanding of the organization of these bottom-most layers of the supply chain, that will both explain magnitudes of observed margins and pass-through of external price shocks to farmer earnings, as well as enable us to predict the effect of various policies intended to enhance efficiency of the supply network and pass-through to farmers.
The data sits under “Supplementary Material – Click here to access replication data”. It can then be downloaded from Dataverse in Stata format.