The Ethiopian coffee & its institutions:

From the middle of the last century coffee has been the major source of foreign exchange for the Ethiopian economy and its governments. The bulk of production comes from small‐scale peasant producers located in parts of the south, southwest and east of the country, from where it is channelled through a largely privately owned marketing system to auction in Addis Ababa or Dire Dawa. It is then purchased by exporters for further processing and onward shipment. This marketing structure has evolved in a highly regulated way, comprising a set of institutional relationships which are not the product of chance and which in a number of respects predate both the current government and the Derg. As such the coffee filiereoffers an interesting case study of the relative merits of an analysis built upon the principles of ‘new institutional economies’, where efficiency is the benchmark, and one which adopts a more historically based political economy approach in which power and control are the markers. The distinction is not always transparent.