Agri-food Value Chain Revolutions in Low-and Middle-Income Countries* Christopher B. Barrett, Thomas Reardon, Johan Swinnen and David Zilberman♣ June 2020 revised version * We thank Carolina Vargas, Caroline Miehe and Anna Deitcher for excellent research assistance, and Justus Wesseler, Peter Timmer, James Thurlow, Barry Popkin, Hope Michelson, Eva Meemken, Uma Lele, Tom Kopp, Thom Jayne, Miguel Gómez, Steven Durlauf, Brian Dillon, Xinshen Diao, Lorenzo Casaburi, Pat Canning, Larry Blume, Lauren Falcao Bergquist, Marc Bellemare, Channing Arndt, and four anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and discussions. A prior version circulated under the title “Structural Transformation and Economic Development: Insights from the Agri-Food Value Chain Revolution”. Any remaining errors are our sole responsibility. ♣ Cornell University, Michigan State University, International Food Policy Research Institute, and University of California-Berkeley, respectively. Seniority of authorship is shared equally. Barrett is the corresponding author at
[email protected]. 1. Introduction The economic development process invariably involves structural transformation. The narrative is familiar. A low-income agrarian economy, in which low productivity agriculture employs most workers and generates most output – much of it for subsistence consumption – transitions to a higher-income, more industrialized, service-oriented and diversified economy with a far more productive, but relatively much smaller agricultural sector (Lewis 1954; Johnston and Mellor 1961;