Being highly dependent on the oil sector, Azerbaijan suffered from economic downturn due to sharp fall in oil prices in 2015. However, such dependence creates development challenges for her. Simulated impact of prioritized economic reform policies—using a computable general equilibrium model (AZEORANI)—shows that, under the business-as-usual case with oil prices at 2011 level, it is projected to grow by 2.0% a year to 2030. However, consistent policy reforms enable enhanced growth by another 1.1 percentage points annually due to productivity boost and increased exports from non-oil sectors, viz., tourism and agriculture. In particular, following strategic roadmap, we consider baseline and policy shocks—10% improvement in productive efficiency, investment boost by 5% in non-mineral sector, and enhanced agricultural efficiency by 5%, and boost in tourism and transport by 10% via logistics-infrastructure, and technical progress in manufacturing over long run by 10–20% per annum. All these show that economic reforms have potentials to induce positive impact to overcome the binding constraints inhibiting growth and hence could promote economic development of Azerbaijan.

The rush for land acquisition has attracted considerable attention from the scientific community, although actual research on the topic remains thin. This paper attempts to break new ground by studying the potential effects of land deals in the context of a small open economy subject to exogenous shocks. In particular, it makes three main arguments: first, an increase in world prices of the agro-business sector causes skewed effects in the subsistence sector; second, an attractive premium offered by hosts to lure investors may have immiserizing effects; and third, technological efforts will have favorable effects if host countries adopt policies to revitalize agriculture.

The paper explores the emergence and consequence of contract farming as a new subsector of agriculture in a small open developing economy, applying the theory of finite change in a general equilibrium framework. In this paper, we analyze the entry of a cash crop-producing foreign contract farming (CF) subsector within the agricultural sector of a country. Entry requires a cash crop price that is substantially above the price of the food crop already being produced within the country. CF (a) increases GDP and hence aggregate economic welfare; (b) may make income distribution more skewed; (c) reduces domestic production of food and hence, (d) increases food import and hence food insecurity. Thus, CF might imply a trade-off between inequality and growth. We employ a variant of the 3 × 3 mixed specific factor-Heckscher Ohlin general equilibrium model of production and trade where introduction of a new policy may lead to the emergence of a new sector resulting in finite changes where we show the possibilities of sectoral diversification with combinations of contract farming vis-à-vis traditional agriculture under some plausible conditions. Our results seem to be consistent when compared to some empirically robust conclusions found in the literature and some secondary data available on the FAO website. We also argue that the food insecurity problem gets aggravated as more and more countries engage in contract farming. Policy simulations identify critical parameters confirming the dominance of distribution over the growth effect in terms of a social welfare function. Simulations imply that there could be a food insecurity problem, as rises in GDP could result in increasing inequality so that government—to preserve social welfare—could restrict the extent of contract farming if non-food-producing sectors expand, causing terms-of-trade deterioration of food-importing nations.