nonrenewable resource scarcity nonrenewable resource theory often is summarized by hotelling s rule this paper reviews theoretical extensions and empirical investigations of resource extraction models observed data are often inconsistent with the hotelling rule suggesting that other characteristics of nonrenewable resource supply including exploration heterogeneous ore quality technological progress and capital investment are important determinants of the dynamic behavior of resource prices given the persistent recurrence of concern about nonrenewable resource scarcity measures of nonrenewable resource scarcity and the empirical evidence for the time trends of those measures are reviewed finally the implications of nonrenewable resource scarcity for economic growth are examined

the state and economic stagnation in tropical africa abstract politics while only one strand in the explanation of africa s massive economic problems is nonetheless a significant factor a central conundrum facing postcolonial political leaders is how to govern and hold together unintegrated peasant societies in the absence of legitimacy personal rule a particular mode of patrimonial governance provides an answer permitting regime survival and the advancement of political insiders but personal rule has an economically destructive tendency that only shrewd political leadership and propitious world economic conditions can check if uncontrolled certain political practices corrode bureaucratic and legal rationality and promote the misallocation of scarce public resources the result can be a downward spiral of interrelated political and economic decline that is increasingly difficult to reverse

the environment and emerging development issues development economics for the most part has failed to recognize renewable environmental resources as economic goods yet the lives of the poor in developing countries are intimately tied to the fate of their local common property resources soil fuel wood water and so on ignoring the loss of common property renewable resources via degradation centralization or privatization in calculations of net national product can mask the destruction of resources available to a country s poor behind the false appearance of a growing national economy this paper describes the difference between the problem of managing local common property resources in developing countries and the problem of protecting the global commons such as the atmosphere and oceans it outlines the calculations that would include the local commons in the national income accounting of capital assets and argues that the interests of those most dependent on the increasingly scarce local commons will be best served by placing control in their hands while the central government provides infrastructure and educational support to control the pollution of the global commons on the other hand the paper sketches a plan in which most countries would have a high incentive to participate a global allocation of limited tradable permits to discharge defined pollutants

spatial sustainability trade and indicators an evaluation of the ecological footprint the search for frameworks and indicators of sustainable development has taken a prominent place in this journal however some specific aspects have received little or no attention notably the spatial dimension and the role of international trade in indicator development moreover many sustainable development indicators comprise implicit valuations weighting schemes and policy objectives which are insufficiently recognised as such this contribution tries to highlight these issues by means of a review of a recently proposed indicator for ecological economic analysis namely the ecological footprint that has been developed by wackernagel and rees its concept and calculation procedure are criticised on a number of points and it is concluded that the ecological footprint is not the comprehensive and transparent planning tool as is often assumed in explaining our position we will argue that spatial sustainability and regional sustainable development have not been precisely discussed so far neither in the literature on trade and environment nor in that on sustainable development we will defend the view that trade can contribute positively and negatively to environmental unsustainability consequently indicators and models are needed that allow for analysing interactions and trade offs between such opposite effects 1999 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

nonfarm income diversification and household livelihood strategies in rural africa concepts dynamics and policy implications abstract asset activity and income diversification lie at the heart of livelihood strategies in rural africa this paper introduces a special issue on the topic income diversification and livelihoods in rural africa cause and consequence of change we concentrate on core conceptual issues that bedevil the literature on rural income diversification and the policy implications of the empirical evidence presented in this special issue

statistical measures of unsustainability abstract statistical measures are needed to reveal at a glance how far or near various countries are to meeting the conditions of long run sustainability and how conditions are changing on a year to year basis i e whether sustainability is being approached or not the scheme proposed in this paper presents numerical comparisons of energy and materials use in the real world vis a vis an ideal case where all of the identifiable criteria for sustainability are satisfied apart from population stabilization five general but quantifiable criteria for sustainability are suggested including 1 stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere 2 stabilization of acidity ph in rainfall 3 reduction of dissipative uses and wastes of heavy metals to natural mobilization rates or lower 4 elimination of agriculture based on pumping fossil water from non renewable aquifers and 5 elimination of loss of arable land because of salination or erosion other criteria such as preservation of biodiversity and socio economic equity between countries and generations might be added to the list they introduce more difficult measurement problems however which are not considered further in the paper having fixed the list of criteria the next step is to identify measures that either go to zero or unity as the system approaches more and more closely to sustainability at least in the limited sense defined above various types of measures of sustainability unsustainability can be developed viz i measures of relative dependence of the economy on non renewable sources of energy and materials ii measures of the productivity of energy and materials consumed by the economic system and iii measures of dissipative loss especially of toxic and hazardous substances specific examples of each type are discussed

targeting maps an asset based approach to geographic targeting summary proper targeting of policy interventions requires reasonable estimates of the benefits of the alternative options to inform such decisions we develop an integrated approach stemming from the small area estimation literature that estimates the marginal returns to a range of assets across geographically defined subpopulations we create a series of maps that can be overlaid with traditional poverty maps to identify strong candidate areas for intervention though an efficiency equity tradeoff sometimes exists we apply our method using recent ugandan data results are consistent with independent empirical findings and suggest asset specific transfer schemes would improve with a spatially targeted strategy

cowboys cornucopians and long run sustainability abstract in the 1970s there was a lively debate on the relationship between natural resource availability and long run economic growth one side has been characterized as neo malthusian it emphasized the limited global stockpile of critical natural resources from cobalt to petroleum and the need to curb population and economic growth the other side of the debate has been characterized as cornucopian it emphasized the creative powers of technology and free markets to find substitutes for any and all scarce resources this paper argues that the original dichotomy was false it did not adequately represent either the real positions of most conservative business and political leaders today nor did it reflect the currently emerging consensus among environmentalists the former do not concern themselves with long run issues at all nor do they take a global view of the problems of mankind rather they argue from the standpoint of short run national and corporate interest environmentalists on the other hand do not fit the neo malthusian world view which emphasizes the role of natural resources and land as factors of production and points to the limited supply of renewable resources and the inevitable exhaustion of non renewables the most important scarcities in the emergent environmentalist world view are largely outside the market domain soil fertility clean fresh water clean fresh air unspoiled landscapes climatic stability biological diversity biological nutrient recycling and environmental waste assimilative capacity there are no plausible technological substitutes for these the irreversible loss of species and ecosystems and the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and of toxic metals and chemicals in the topsoil groundwater and in the silt of lake bottoms and estuaries are not reversible by any plausible technology that could appear in the next few decades finally the great nutrient cycles of the natural world carbon oxygen nitrogen sulfur and phosphorus require that constant stocks in each environmental compartment and balanced inflows and outflows these conditions have already been violated by large scale and unsustainable human intervention

environmental kuznets curves real progress or passing the buck abstract recent research has examined the hypothesis of an environmental kuznets curve ekc the notion that environmental impact increases in the early stages of development followed by declines in the later stages these studies have focused on the relationship between per capita income and a variety of environmental indicators results imply that ekcs may exist for a number of cases however the measures of environmental impact used generally focus on production processes and reflect environmental impacts that are local in nature and for which abatement is relatively inexpensive in terms of monetary costs and or lifestyle changes significantly more consumption based measures such co2 emissions and municipal waste for which impacts are relatively easy to externalize or costly to control show no tendency to decline with increasing per capita income by considering consumption and trade patterns the author re examines the concept of the ekc and proposes the use of alternative consumption based measures of environmental impact the author speculates that what appear to be improvements in environmental quality may in reality be indicators of increased ability of consumers in wealthy nations to distance themselves from the environmental degradation associated with their consumption

asking questions to understand rural livelihoods comparing disaggregated vs aggregated approaches to household livelihood questionnaires summary this study tests the hypothesis that both disaggregated and aggregated data collection methods produce similar estimates of the relative importance of livelihood portfolio activities and expenditures the results show that different methods of data collection yield substantively different estimates of livelihood strategies for two indicators income and expenditure we also find evidence of a seasonal bias in responses to household livelihood questions asked at higher levels of aggregation our findings highlight the challenge of designing household surveys to elicit accurate and precise information and demonstrate that different methods of data collection influence our understanding of rural livelihoods

rural nonfarm activities and agricultural crop production in nigeria although most rural households are involved in the farm sector the nonfarm sector has grown significantly in recent decades and its role in rural development has become increasingly important this article examines the effect of participation in nonfarm activities on crop expenses of farm households in nigeria the relationship is modeled using a nonseparable agricultural household model that suggests that participating in nonfarm activities can relax the credit constraints facing farm households and reduce risk thereby helping households improve farm production and smooth consumption over time the results show that participation in nonfarm activities by nigerian farmers has a positive and significant effect on crop expenses and in particular on payments for hired labor and inorganic fertilizers separate analysis of the six geopolitical zones in nigeria indicates that it is in the south south and south east zones where nonfarm participation appears to induce more hiring of labor the results support the hypothesis that nonfarm participation helps relax liquidity constraints but suggests how that liquidity is used is zone specific in general the results also indicate that liquidity is used more to pay for inputs into staple production as opposed to cash crops

on the intergenerational allocation of natural resources it is known hartwick and others that under standard assumptions a society that invests in reproducible capital the competitive rents on its current extraction of exhaustible resources will enjoy a consumption stream constant in time it is shown here that this result can be interpreted as saying that an appropriately defined stock of capital including the initial endowment of resources is being maintained intact and that consumption can be interpreted as the interest on that patrimony this seems like a useful rule of thumb for policy

rural livelihood diversification in sub saharan africa a literature review abstractthis article provides a comprehensive review of the literature on the nature and evolution of rural livelihood diversification in sub saharan africa and the situation regarding smallholders it reveals mixed findings about the causes and consequences of livelihood diversification on rural smallholders adopting this strategy a lot of evidence from the literature suggests that it is relatively better off smallholders with sufficient assets who achieve successful livelihood diversification mainly by exploiting opportunities and synergies between farm and nonfarm activities because of asset constraints increase in incomes and wealth based on livelihood diversification has not yet benefitted the large majority of smallholders

few opportunities much desperation the dichotomy of non agricultural activities and inequality in western kenya summary using data from western kenya we confirm the existence of a dichotomous non agricultural sector the poverty and inequality implications of the differently motivated diversification strategies only partly correspond to expected patterns while high return activities are indeed confined to richer households low return activities constitute an important income source for households across the entire income distribution finally we examine the wider implications of our findings for rural livelihoods we find that only engagement in high return non agricultural activities is significantly associated with increased agricultural productivity it seems that such high return activities play a key role in triggering cumulative effects of relative livelihood success

the role of technology in sustaining agriculture and the environment abstract visions of sustainable development often leave unanswered the question what actions taken by the current generation will ensure that future generations can meet their economic and environmental needs in this context we assess the role of technology in steering agriculture along a more sustainable path from the agricultural sector s perspective this requires an optimal investment plan for a nation s stock of environmental assets that accounts for an intergenerational fulfillment of sustainability s dual goals 1 satisfying food and fiber needs at reasonable costs to consumers and 2 providing environmental service flows in reviewing agricultural indicators to assess the nation s performance in meeting these goals we find productivity growth has increased while rates of soil erosion wetland conversion and pesticide application have declined however individuals continue to demand more environmental services while private markets undersupply environmental services the capacity of the agricultural sector to meet food and fiber and environmental service demands partially depends on the availability and adoption of new technology several market impediments explain the undersupply of sustainable technologies 1 firms cannot fully appropriate rents from technology development 2 success may vary with farm structure 3 the heterogeneity of the resource base influences adoption and 4 farmers cannot capture the benefits of environmental services to address these market failures sustainable agriculture policy should 1 support research and development in sustainable technologies and provide incentives to encourage adoption 2 ensure that conservation efforts reflect the efficient and sustainable allocation of environmental assets and 3 legitimize markets for foods produced under more sustainable practices

agriculture reform and food crisis in syria impacts on poverty and inequality abstract the paper pursues a twofold objective from a methodological viewpoint it shows how to carry out an impacts evaluation of exogenous shocks on poverty and inequality in a context characterised by out of equilibrium poorly adjusting markets as it is the case in many developing countries using a social accounting matrix framework from an empirical viewpoint it provides an assessment of how the cereal price spikes of 2007 2008 and the global recession of 2008 2009 have impacted the welfare of syrian households and how did they compound with the on going agricultural sector liberalisation implemented by the government of syria since mid 1990s this will contribute to shed some lights on the economic background behind the spreading of unrest across the country over the last couple of years or so the results show that liberalisation impacts are very different and largely affected by the adopted budget closure rules while reforms aiming at reducing agricultural market distortions such as production subsidies and price support for strategic crops could generally have a positive effect on growth poverty and inequality the elimination of food security interventions such as food stamp schemes determines an adverse distributional impact against rural household and an increase of poverty the recent macroeconomic shocks food price crisis and the global recession determined a generalised poverty increase and showed an income distribution bias against rural households three fundamental policy implications can be drawn by this study first the liberalisation of agricultural sector shows a significant growth potential and is likely to determine positive effects on poverty through a generalised increase of incomes as well as public budget savings that could be used for pursuing other policy goals second in the short run there is a structural trade off between equity improvements and poverty alleviation the policy options that will more likely reduce absolute poverty show undesirable distributive biases both on overall inequality and on rural households vis a vis urban households third the reform should include a careful design of the use of budget savings mainly to address equity goals that are likely to be generated in the short run by liberalisation

poverty and the rural nonfarm economy in oromia ethiopia the rural nonfarm sector has gained increasing importance not only in asia but also in africa it is however widely believed that in most parts of africa the growth of the nonfarm economy has increased inequality and has had a limited effect on the poor who face entry barriers to nonfarm activities the present article analyzes the relation between nonfarm income poverty and inequality in oromia ethiopia we use two complementary methodologies i econometric estimates of household income from the nonfarm sector and ii a gini decomposition of analysis income inequality by source the results consistently indicate that in oromia entry barriers to nonfarm activities is low and the general growth of the sector will benefit the poor

famine and household coping strategies abstract households faced with risks to their entitlement to food will plan strategically to minimize their impact the task of doing this will be particularly demanding during famines this paper reviews the evidence on household strategies for coping with famine in africa and identifies some distinctive patterns in these strategies which can be used to examine household objectives at times of crisis the management of resources to meet these objectives and limits to the effectiveness of coping strategies in particular it examines the role of asset management and trade offs between maintaining current food consumption levels and protecting the future income generating capacity of the household

between ostrom and nordhaus the research landscape of sustainability economics abstract we survey the emerging research area of sustainability economics through a quantitative full text analysis of peer reviewed journal publications from 1987 to 2013 to identify relevant contributions we draw on existing definitions of sustainability economics for a keyword based identification strategy a combined focus on a the human nature relationship b the long term uncertain future c normative orientation towards sustainability and d economic analysis our analysis of a random subsample of 343 relevant papers reveals that i sustainability economics is a rapidly developing research area ii while theoretical contributions shaped the area in earlier years applied work now constitutes the largest share of contributions iii the research landscape can be clustered into eleven research clusters these range from participatory governance of social ecological systems associated with the work of elinor ostrom to questions of intertemporal allocation and distribution applied to climate economics associated with the work of william nordhaus iv the research area is broad in scope and heterogeneous and there is relatively little interaction between important clusters v relevant contributions are published in more than 100 journals ten journals publish half of all contributions led by ecological economics and 40 appear in non economics journals underscoring the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue

balancing rural poverty reduction and citizen participation the contradictions of uganda s decentralization program abstract uganda s ambitious decentralization program is analyzed in terms of a dual mode system of local governance under a technocratic mode conditional funding from the center is earmarked for particular programs but with little local participation in contrast the patronage mode is an elaborate system for local bottom up planning but with limited resources which are largely consumed in administrative costs and political emoluments along with the spoils of a committee system controlling contracts and appointments these resources provide the means for building political alliances and loyalty in the absence of a culture of transparency and civic engagement to assure downward accountability it remains to be seen whether decentralization can promote both efficient service delivery and local empowerment simultaneously

rural livelihoods and poverty reduction strategies in four african countries this paper compares and contrasts rural livelihoods in uganda kenya tanzania and malawi with a view to informing rural poverty reduction policies within poverty reduction strategy plans prsps low household incomes in rural areas of all countries are associated with low land and livestock holdings high reliance on food crop agriculture and low monetisation of the rural economy these adverse factors are in some instances made more difficult by land sub division at inheritance declining civil security in rural areas deteriorating access to proper agronomic advice and inputs and predatory taxation by decentralised district councils better off households are distinguished by virtuous spirals of accumulation typically involving diverse livestock ownership engagement in non farm self employment and diversity of on farm and non farm income sources lessons for prsps centre on the creation of a facilitating rather than blocking public sector environment for the multiplication of non farm enterprises seeking creative solutions to the spread of technical advice to farmers and examining critically the necessity for and impact of tax revenue collection by district councils on rural incomes and enterprise

global ex vessel fish price database revisited a new approach for estimating missing prices the global ex vessel fish price database ex vessel db reported in sumaila et al j bioecon 9 1 39 51 2007 was the first comprehensive database that presents average annual ex vessel prices for all commercially exploited marine fish stocks by nationality of the fishing fleet it contained over 30 000 reported price items covering the period from 1950 to the present and supplemented missing prices with estimates based on prices from a different year species group or fleet nationality this paper describes a revised missing price estimation approach focused on the computation of annual average international prices for each species group adjusted to domestic prices using the real exchange rate based on national purchasing power parity key advantages of the new approach are that it allows a larger number of reported prices to be used in the price estimation and accounts for relative price level differences that exist between countries our new approach should improve the estimates in regions where reported prices are scarce or non existent by linking domestic prices to the trends in international prices our analysis based on the revised ex vessel price estimates in real 2005 usd shows that the global marine fisheries landings have generated total value of usd 4 2 trillion since 1950 including usd 100 billion in 2005

nonfarm employment agricultural intensification and productivity change empirical findings from uganda this article uses panel data from the living standards measurement study integrated surveys on agriculture for uganda to assess the farm level effects of nonfarm employment on agricultural intensification and productivity change a sample selection model is used to account for both unobserved heterogeneity and potential simultaneity between agricultural production and nonfarm income results show that nonfarm employment can have differential impacts on farm technology intensity and productivity nonfarm income is found to have a positive impact on farm hired labor and improved seed intensity a negative effect on on farm family labor use and no significant impact on fertilizer soil water management and joint use of farm technologies the econometric evidence also indicates that agricultural productivity declines as nonfarm income increases taken together our findings reveal important trade offs between nonfarm employment and income and farm productivity growth under smallholder agriculture the results indicated that targeted policies are required to reduce these potential trade offs between nonfarm employment and agricultural intensification and productivity change

ten years of q squared implications for understanding and explaining poverty summary over the past decade there have been a number of initiatives to promote a more systematic integration of quantitative and qualitative or q squared approaches to poverty analysis in the global south and a large body of literature had emerged the objective of the article is to present a selective review of this empirical work with a view to demonstrate the value it has added for understanding and explaining poverty the evidence strongly suggests that q squared approaches have aided our understanding of the characteristics of the poor and the causes of poverty

designing sustainable energy supply chains by the p graph method for minimal cost environmental burden energy resources input we present a computer aided methodology for designing sustainable supply chains using the p graph framework to develop supply chain structures which are then analyzed using cost the cost of producing electricity and two sustainability metrics the ecological footprint and the emergy input these metrics respectively represent environmental burden in terms of land use and energy resources the results are the continuation of a research effort between members of the office of research and development ord of the u s epa and the university of pannonia in earlier work the basis of the research the integration of supply chain design and sustainability were presented there the p graph framework provided a mathematically rigorous procedure for synthesizing optimal and alternative suboptimal networks subject to profitability and ecological footprint criteria in this work the effort is extended with another sustainability metric emergy emergy a measure of the energy used up in transformations directly and indirectly to make a product or maintain a service was assessed for each energy production supply chain the proposed methodology demonstrates the optimal design of a supply chain which provides electric power and heat to an agricultural region with agricultural wastes that can potentially be recovered as renewable resources the results of the study indicate that compared to using electricity from the grid and or natural gas renewable energy resources can yield substantial cost reductions of up to 17 as well as significant ecological footprint and emergy reductions these results indicate that it is possible to design more sustainable supply chains that are also cost effective

the conditions for achieving environmentally sustainable development this paper is interested in the narrower interpretation the relationship between environmental quality and sustainable economic activity the latter is interpreted as that level of economic activity which leaves the environmental quality level intact with the policy objective corresponding to this notion being the maximization of net benefits of economic development subject to maintaining the services and quality of natural resources over time 3