Compare methods

	Rapid Market Appraisal	Agricultural Market Integration Analysis
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Regression model
Year of origin	2007	1986
Originator	John Holtzman and the rapid-appraisal marketing tradition; FAO agrifood-chain guidelines	Martin Ravallion
Type	Rapid, iterative field-appraisal pipeline for market and value-chain diagnosis	Spatial price cointegration and transmission model
Seminal source	da Silva, C. A., & de Souza Filho, H. M. (2007). Guidelines for Rapid Appraisals of Agrifood Chain Performance in Developing Countries. Agricultural Management, Marketing and Finance Occasional Paper 20. Rome: FAO.	Ravallion, M. (1986). Testing Market Integration. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 68(1), 102-109.
Aliases	RMA, Rapid Reconnaissance of Agricultural Markets, Rapid Agrifood Chain Appraisal, Subsector Rapid Appraisal	Spatial Market Integration Analysis, Price Transmission Analysis, Cointegration of Food Prices, Ravallion Market Integration Test
Related	4	3
Summary	Rapid market appraisal (RMA) is a fast, low-cost, interdisciplinary field method for diagnosing how agricultural markets and value chains perform and where their binding constraints lie. Rooted in the rapid-reconnaissance marketing tradition associated with John Holtzman and codified for value chains in FAO's 2007 guidelines by Carlos da Silva and Hildo de Souza Filho, RMA trades the comprehensiveness of a formal survey for speed and flexibility: a small team scopes the commodity system, mines existing data to form hypotheses about constraints, and then conducts iterative semi-structured interviews with actors all along the chain — producers, traders, processors, transporters, retailers, and support services — refining its understanding as it goes and triangulating across sources. The product is a timely, actionable diagnosis of market structure, conduct, and performance that can guide investment, policy, or project design when a slow census-style study is neither affordable nor warranted.	Agricultural market integration analysis asks whether prices for the same commodity in geographically separated markets move together — and how quickly and symmetrically a price change in one market is transmitted to another. Martin Ravallion's 1986 article 'Testing Market Integration', using Bangladesh rice prices, set the template: spatial price relationships are dynamic, so integration must be tested in a model that distinguishes short-run from long-run co-movement. The modern toolkit formalises this with cointegration and error-correction methods — long-run integration means prices share a common stochastic trend, while the error-correction term measures how fast deviations from the long-run relationship are arbitraged away. Barrett and Li later sharpened the conceptual distinction between mere price equilibrium and genuine tradability-based integration.