the effect of land scarcity on farm structure empirical evidence from mali abstractwe analyze the individualization of farm units in mali in the sense of a transformation of purely collective farms into mixed units in which private plots coexist with collective fields since a moral hazard in team problem plagues production on the latter and the household head extracts his income from it he faces a trade off between efficiency and capture we show within the framework of a patriarchal farm household model that private plots become profitable for the head once land becomes sufficiently scarce specifically greater land scarcity raises both the probability to find private plots in afarm and the share of farmland allocated to these plots on the basis of firsthand data collected in southern mali we test and confirm the two predictions yielded by the above theory moreover we show that a higher number of married men within the household has the same effect as land scarcity thus suggesting an interesting refinement of the moral hazard in team argument

china s collectivisation puzzle a new resolution according to total factor productivity trends in chinese agriculture china achieved productivity gains both when collectivising 1954 58 and when decollectivising 1979 84 its agriculture if the productivity gains from decollectivisation were due mainly to eliminating the incentive problems of collective farms how the initial collectivisation could also have been associated with gains in productivity presents a major historical puzzle we suggest as an answer the possibility that agricultural production in china was widely organised on a household basis until 1958 despite the collectivisation of property rights and that the formation of the agricultural producers co operatives reduced the inefficiencies in factor allocation that existed following china s land reform

democracy and economic growth a meta analysis despite a sizeable theoretical and empirical literature no firm conclusions have been drawn regarding the impact of political democracy on economic growth this article challenges the consensus of an inconclusive relationship through a quantitative assessment of the democracy growth literature it applies meta regression analysis to the population of 483 estimates derived from 84 studies on democracy and growth using traditional meta analysis estimators the bootstrap and fixed and random effects meta regression models it derives several robust conclusions taking all the available published evidence together it concludes that democracy does not have a direct impact on economic growth however democracy has robust significant and positive indirect effects through higher human capital lower inflation lower political instability and higher levels of economic freedom democracies may also be associated with larger governments and less free international trade there also appear to be country and region specific democracy growth effects overall democracy s net effect on the economy does not seem to be detrimental

pricing and lot sizing polices for perishable goods when the demand depends on selling price displayed stocks and expiration date abstract price is a major factor on the demand based on marketing and economic theory in addition the demand for perishable products also depends on its freshness moreover it is a well known fact that increasing stock display e g fresh fruits vegetables baked goods may encourage consumers to purchase more this paper first proposes an inventory model that stipulates the demand explicitly in a multivariate function of price freshness and displayed stocks it may be profitable to have a closeout sale at a markdown price and always keep on hand displayed stocks fresh and plentiful if the demand is freshness and stock dependent hence the traditional assumption of zero ending inventories is relaxed to a non zero ending inventory as a result the objective is to determine three decision variables i e unit price cycle time and ending inventory level in order to maximize the total profit then it is demonstrated that the total profit is strictly pseudo concave in those three decision variables which reduces the search for solutions to a unique local maximum finally numerical examples to illustrate the theoretical results and to highlight managerial insights are presented

globalization labor markets and policy backlash in the past the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have many things in common both periods recorded fast growth convergence and labor market integration between oecd members both periods witnessed intense debate about who gained and who lost from globalization furthermore the earlier period saw a retreat from global liberalism long before the interwar deglobalization disaster did globalization of that time plant seeds of its own destruction are there lessons for the present

modelling political instability and economic performance israeli investment during the intifada i construct a model of investment in israel that incorporates both standard economic factors and indicators of political instability and unrest the model is used to estimate both the extent to which the intifada has depressed israeli investment in different kinds of capital good and the size of the corresponding peace dividend

determination of safety stocks for cyclic schedules with stochastic demands abstract this paper considers the problem of scheduling the production of multiple items each with random demand on a single facility we show how the variance in demand during lead time can be estimated and present a model for determination of safety stocks and order up to levels for a fixed cyclic sequence both with and without idle time for systems with idle time we present a control model to make the decision to produce next item in sequence or idle the facility the performance of the model is tested in a simulation study

extrinsic versus intrinsic problems of agricultural cooperation anti incentivism in tanzania and china peasant willingness to engage in collective farming and the efficiency of collective farms once established may be preconditioned on local self determination participatory control discriminating work incentives and external manoeuvrability in the absence of such preconditions whether or not there exist economies of scale sufficient to offset effectively minimised incentive problems cannot be determined anti incentivism bureaucratic controls and extractive external environments are identified as factors inhibiting successful collective farming in both tanzania and china explanations of these tendencies in the two countries are sought in their political economies and ideological structures

an eoq model for perishable products with fixed shelf life under stochastic demand conditions abstract the paper presents a mathematical stochastic model for perishable open dating foods including shortage and outdating costs the demand fluctuations have been taken into account modeling them through a normal distribution and their impact on the storage time has been studied considering the stochastic nature of such a parameter in turn the quantification of perished products has been also addressed determining the probability for a product of remaining in stock beyond the end of its shelf life on the basis of such premises the optimal set of parameters that minimize the total unit cost has been determined a numerical application and a sensitivity analysis show the practical applicability of the proposed model in the context of warehouse management underlining managerial insights

on the political economy of national tax revenue forecasts evidence from oecd countries sustainable budgets are important quality signals for the electorate politicians might thus have an incentive to influence tax revenue forecasts which are widely regarded as a key element of national budget plans looking at the time period from 1996 to 2012 we systematically analyze whether national tax revenue forecasts in 18 oecd countries are biased due to political manipulation drawing on theories from the field of political economy we test three hypotheses using panel estimation techniques we find support for partisan politics left wing governments seem to produce more optimistic or less pessimistic tax revenue forecasts than do right wing ones contrary to the theoretical prediction based on the common pool problem we find that more fragmented governments and parliaments tend to produce more pessimistic or less optimistic tax revenue forecasts we find no empirical evidence that political business cycles play a role in tax revenue forecasts

new evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic growth it is often maintained that democracy is a luxury which comes at a price in terms of subsequent slower increases in national living standards however various recent cross section studies on economic growth have found evidence that lack of civil and political liberties is negatively correlated with economic growth using a new measure of democracy which is based upon the number of years that a country can be regarded as a democracy the robustness of this relationship is examined both direct and indirect effects of lack of democratic liberties are analysed our main conclusion is that the relationship between democracy and economic growth is not rubust

market oriented institutions and policies and economic growth a critical survey this paper surveys recent evidence suggesting that market oriented institutions and policies are strongly related to economic growth focusing on studies using the economic freedom ef indicator of the fraser institute this index is critically discussed also various serious shortcomings of empirical studies using this index are identified nevertheless there are strong indications that liberalization i e an increase in the ef index stimulates economic growth this paper also reviews studies on the determinants of ef political liberalization is often found to enhance economic liberalization whereas there is less evidence for causality running in the other direction

productivity consequences of alternative land division methods in china s decollectivization an econometric analysis abstract in this paper we examine the productivity effect of the manner of distributing collective land to households under the chinese economic reforms of the 1980s during that period land was distributed by a formula putting weight on both household size and household labor force and land and labor markets were absent or underdeveloped in most regions a simple model of household decision making is developed for this case and a basic result is that agricultural output is concave in the proportion of land distributed according to workforce as opposed to household size this hypothesis is tested on data for 61 production teams of a township formerly commune in hebei province under a quadratic specification grain output displays the expected concave relationship with the land distribution parameter our results provide some evidence of congruence between equality in the distribution of resources and incentives for productivity

review of inventory systems with deterioration since 2001 abstract this paper presents an up to date review of the advances made in the field of inventory control of perishable items deteriorating inventory the last extensive review on this topic dates back to 2001 goyal s k and giri b c recent trends in modeling of deteriorating inventory european journal of operational research 134 1 16 since then over two hundred articles on this subject have been published in the major journals on inventory control indicating the need for a new review we use the classification of goyal and giri based on shelf life characteristics and demand characteristics contributions are highlighted by discussing main system characteristics including price discounts backordering or lost sales single or multiple items one or two warehouses single or multi echelon average cost or discounted cash flow and payment delay

the anticipated and concurring effects of the emu exchange rate volatility institutions and growth abstract reduced exchange rate volatility and higher and less heterogeneous quality of institutional rules and macroeconomic policies are two of the main anticipated and concurring effects expected from a currency union in this paper we measure the magnitude of these two effects for the eurozone countries looking at real effective exchange rates reer and at different indicators of quality of institutional rules and macroeconomic policies qirmp we find that the first effect is much stronger than the second when we compare relative changes for eurozone countries and the rest of the world in the relevant period we further evaluate the impact of both effects on economic growth on a larger sample of countries our findings show that both have significant impact on levels more robust and on rates of growth weaker of per capita gdp

the incentive problem and the demise of team farming in china abstract this paper begins with a discussion of what can be inferred about the efficiency of collective farming from the demise of team production in rural china after reviewing the formal literature on incentives in collective farms it examines two problems that may have plagued the chinese teams first excessive egalitarianism which can be analyzed by modifying existing models and second monitoring problems which require a departure from the perfect information context of those models by numerical example it is shown that the superiority of household farming over forced collective farming does not preclude the possibility that some team production would have existed in a democratic equilibrium dominating both of them finally the post reform household contracting system is examined with special reference to distributive and allocative issues

optimal safety stock levels of subassemblies and manufacturing components abstract in order to control the time to market and manufacturing costs companies produce and purchase many parts and components before receiving customer orders consequently demand forecasting is a critical decision process using modular product design and super bills of materials are two effective strategies for developing a reliable demand forecasting process they reduce the probability of stockouts in diversified production contexts furthermore managing and controlling safety stocks for pre assembled modules provide an effective solution to the problem of minimizing the effects of forecast errors this paper develops evaluates and applies innovative cost based analytical models so that the optimal safety stock of modular subassemblies and components in assembly to order and manufacturing to order systems respectively can be rapidly quantified the implementation of the proposed models in two industrial case applications demonstrates that they significantly reduce the safety stock inventory levels and the global logistical cost

an inventory system with demand dependent on both time and price assuming backlogged shortages abstract in this work we analyze an inventory model for items whose demand is a bivariate function of price and time it is supposed that the demand rate multiplicatively combines the effects of a time power function and a price logit function the aim is to maximize the profit per time unit assuming that the inventory cost per time unit is the sum of the holding shortage ordering and purchasing costs an algorithm is developed to find the optimal price the optimal lot size and the optimal replenishment cycle several numerical examples are introduced to illustrate the solution procedure

global sensitivity analysis in inventory management abstract this paper deals with the sensitivity analysis sa of inventory management models when uncertainty in the input parameters is given full consideration we make use of sobol function and variance decomposition method for determining the most influential parameters on the model output we first illustrate the method by means of an analytical example we provide the expression of the global importance of demand holding costs order costs of the harris economic order quantity eoq formula we then present the global sa of the inventory management model developed by luciano and peccati 1999 capital structure and inventory management the temporary sale problem international journal of production economics 59 169 178 for the economic order quantity estimation in the context of the temporary sale problem we show that by performing global sa in parallel to the modeling process an analyst derives insights not only on the eoq structure when its expression is not analytically known but also on the relevance of modeling choices as the inclusion of financing policies and special orders

historical evidence on the finance trade growth nexus abstract we study linkages between financial development international trade and long run growth using data since 1880 for 17 now developed atlantic economies and a set of cross country and dynamic panel data models we find that finance and trade reinforce each other in data before 1930 but that these effects do not persist after the second world war financial development affects growth positively throughout the sample period while trade affects growth strongly and independently after 1945 we attribute the rising importance of trade to major post world war ii changes in tariffs and quantity restrictions associated with the gatt the establishment of the european common market and the gradual elimination of capital controls after 1973 the findings are robust to the use of deep fundamentals such as legal origin and indicators of the political environment as instruments for financial development and trade financial development however links more closely than trade to these fundamentals

the strategic use of capacity slack in the economic lot scheduling problem with random demand growing interest in designing systems with capacity slack as one form of flexibility raises many questions about its use and its usefulness in the framework of the economic lot scheduling problem with stochastic demand we develop on optimization based model that considers capacity slack safety stock and overtime explicitly and has the objective of minimizing the expected cost per unit time of inventory overtime and where applicable setup costs the solution is a continuous time production plan that consists of a time dependent inventory trajectory for each of the parts including the placement of planned idle time in the schedule we consider schedule stability to be desirable because of potential effects on upstream and downstream operations in multistage production settings thus the plan also has certain characteristics that contribute to achieving stability our results on the relative merits of capacity slack and safety stock indicate that capacity slack in the form of planned idle time is

grain policy in chinese villages yield response to pricing procurement and loan policies this paper assesses the effects of pricing procurement and loan policies on china s grain economy a dynamic control model of the village leader is specified parameters of structural and control equations are estimated using time series cross section data simulation results show that pricing and procurement policies are not effective in raising yields because of conflicting objectives of local officials loan policies can increase yields the paper concludes that rural policies often have contradictory effects that can arise for a number of reasons an important reason is the fact that local officials in a reforming economy have greater decision making discretion than higher level officials and execute policies to meet their own objectives

economic inequality and its socioeconomic impact abstract income inequality is of fundamental interest not only to economists but also to other social scientists a substantial literature in economics and the social sciences has investigated the relationship between income inequality and economic growth and a variety of social phenomena the links between inequality and economic growth are explored as well as those between inequality and such key social variables as political conflict education health and crime the analysis in this paper follows a two step process first a review of the empirical evidence relating inequality to growth and to each of the above social variables is undertaken second the various causal mechanisms that have been proposed in the social science literature to explain those links are surveyed

ration subsidies and incentives in the pre reform chinese commune a central feature of the egalitarianism said to have undermined work incentives in chinese agricultural produ ction teams during the 1960s and 1970s was the distribution of grain rations independently of work contribution this paper analyzes two m odels of grain rationing one drawn from existing theoretical literat ure and the other perhaps more closely based on chinese practice it finds that a scheme of the type commonly depicted was more costly to operate but provided better incentives to labor poor households unde r both schemes however the scope for material incentives was reduce d by grain ration guarantees and was smaller the poorer the team copyright 1988 by the london school of economics and political science

a century of evolution from harris s basic lot size model survey and research agenda abstract determining the economic lot size has always represented one of the most important issues in production planning this problem has long attracted the attention of researchers and several models have been developed to meet requirements at minimum cost in this paper we explore and discuss the evolution of these models during one hundred years of history starting from the basic model developed by harris in 1913 up to today following harris s work a number of researchers have devised extensions that incorporate additional considerations the evolution of eoq theory strongly reflects the development of industrial systems over the past century here we outline all the research areas faced in the past by conducting a holistic analysis of 219 selected journal papers and trying to give a comprehensive view of past work on the eoq problem finally a new research agenda is proposed and discussed

it s the rents stupid the political economy of the resource curse a number of studies suggest that natural resources can have a negative impact on the developing prospects of countries empirical results suggest that political economy models of patronage and rent seeking are central to understanding why such a resource curse arises in other words the resource curse is created by certain resource rents leading to dysfunctional behaviour this article introduces the term impartiality enhancing institutions to structure policy debates by distinguishing conditions under which negative effects of resources can be mitigated moreover it is argued that viewing institutions as an equilibrium outcome has implications for the analysis of institutional change policy initiatives that do not promote the impartiality of institutions nor attend to the underlying interests and incentives keeping a bad institutional equilibrium in place will not help lift the resource curse

an approximation to the continuous review inventory model with perishable items and lead times a continuous review perishable inventory model based on approximations to the expected outdating the expected shortage quantity and the expected inventory level is developed to determine a best q r ordering policy under a positive order leadtime when the total expected average cost per unit time is minimized the approximation method is simple and verified by a comparison with the weiss model the results reveal that the mean absolute deviation from the optimal total expected average cost per unit time is only 0 58 this paper also compares the proposed model to the conventional model with no perishability a value is given to the item lifetime indicating when an approximate answer approaches closely to the conventional ordering policy finally a simulation model written in simscript ii 5 is used to validate the approximate results

a tri level optimization model for inventory control with uncertain demand and lead time abstract we propose an inventory control model for an uncapacitated warehouse in a manufacturing facility under demand and lead time uncertainty the objective is to make ordering decisions to minimize the total system cost we introduce a two stage tri level optimization model with a rolling horizon to address the uncertain demand and lead time regardless of their underlying distributions in addition an exact algorithm is designed to solve the model we compare this model in a case study with three decision making strategies optimistic moderate and pessimistic our computational results suggest that the performances of these models are either consistently inferior or highly sensitive to cost parameters such as holding cost and shortage cost whereas the new tri level optimization model almost always results in the lowest total cost in all parameter settings

numerical computation of inventory policies based on the eoq σx value for order point systems abstract this paper examines the numerical computation of two control parameters order size and order point in the well known inventory control model an s q system with a safety stock strategy the aim of the paper is to show that the eoq x value is both sufficient for controlling the system and essential for the economic consequences of using approximations in computations of optimal policies in view of the evidence from a number of studies showing that firms use of statistical inventory control lags far behind academic interest in the area this is also an important aspect the determination of optimal values for the control variables even in this very simple inventory control system is a complex task and therefore not suited to practical implementation where one or more of the following issues are neglected the interdependence of order size and order point the difference between stock on hand and net stock and the excess stockout included in the next period we use the determination of optimal values for the control variables as a framework to evaluate the economic consequences of these approximations applied in pratical inventory control

income inequality and economic freedom in the u s states this paper examines the impact of economic freedom on income inequality using cross sectional data for u s states while previous research has explored this relationship internationally the results have been conflicting in addition while it seems obvious that the large institutional differences across countries will impact income inequality it isn t so obvious that the smaller variation in policies among u s states can have a measurable impact can improvements in income inequality be used as a justification for marginal pro market policy reforms at the state level or is this argument applicable only to national level institutional reforms

an eoq model with ramp type demand rate time dependent deterioration rate unit production cost and shortages an order level inventory system for deteriorating items has been developed with demand rate as a ramp type function of time the finite production rate is proportional to the demand rate and deterioration rate is time proportional the unit production cost is inversely proportional to the demand rate the model with no shortage case in inventory is first solved the inventory shortage is discussed next results are illustrated with two numerical examples for two models along with its sensitivity

egalitarianism subsistence provision and work incentives in china s agricultural collectives abstract collective agriculture in china failed because its reward system was too egalitarian to provide sufficient work incentives to the peasants a popular view attributes egalitarianism to the difficulties of monitoring work effort in a team an alternative view presented here argues that a the egalitarian provision of basic foodgrains to peasant households reflected more generally the consumption problem of the peasantry who were impoverished by the state s policy of extracting agriculture and b as a remuneration system time rates better served the work and income sharing purpose than piece rates and therefore better protected households with high dependency ratios egalitarianism survives under the household farming system

investment in the absence of property rights the role of incumbency advantages in many situations the individuals who can generate some output must enter a contest for appropriating this output this paper analyses the investment incentives of such agents and the role of incumbency advantages in the contest depending on the advantages an increase in the productivity of the investment can decrease or increase the amount of investment the results are applied to autocrats investment behavior and job specific investment in organizations

channels and policy debate in the globalization inequality poverty nexus the process of globalization has led to a much greater integration of the world economy the flows of trade capital labour technology and information across national borders have accelerated since the 1980s and created an environment conducive to faster economic growth and transmission of knowledge it is evident that the forces of globalization provide a strong potential for a major reduction in poverty in the developing world however for a number of reasons brought out in this chapter the positive impact of globalization on poverty alleviation worldwide has not been as substantial as one might have expected in this chapter we explore structural factors and policies within the world economy and national economies that impede the full transmission of the benefits of the various channels of globalization to poverty reduction

lot sizes in a capacity constrained facility a simulation study of stationary stochastic demand abstract this paper considers the scheduling of several different items on a single machine in literature known as the economic lot scheduling problem elsp one of the characteristics of this problem is that the demand rate is deterministic and constant however in a practical situation demand usually varies in this paper we examine if a deterministic model can be used if demand is stationary stochastic a dynamic programming approach from bomberger manage sci 12 11 1966 778 and a heuristic method from segerstedt int j production econom 59 1 3 1999 469 are used to calculate lot sizes for four items the production of these items is simulated with different variations in demand rates our conclusion is that a deterministic model of this kind can be used in a practical situation where the demand rate is stationary stochastic but the models must be complemented by a decision rule which item to produce and when to produce it in our tests the heuristic method and the dynamic programming approach perform rather similarly with respect to costs and inventory levels but the dynamic programming approach results in more backorders when there is small variation in demand rates this study indicates that the model used for determination of lot sizes is of less importance than the decision rule used for identification of the item to produce and when to produce it

welfare effects of migration in societies with indirect taxes income transfers and public good provision abstract we construct a general equilibrium trade model of a two class small open host or source country when consumption tax revenue finances the provision of a public good marginal migration reduces social welfare in the source country and raises it in the host when consumption tax revenue is equally distributed among domestic households in each country then migration has an ambiguous impact on social welfare in either country when tariff revenue in either country is either equally distributed among domestic households or it is used to finance the provision of a public good then migration has an ambiguous effect on social welfare in the host country and is expected to reduce social welfare in the source

control in a dynamic village economy the reforms and unbalanced development in china s rural economy abstract a dynamic control framework is used to model the chinese village economy in order to explain the rural sector s unbalanced growth in the post reform period village leaders are assumed to maximize a multi attribute utility function by manipulating local policy instruments subject to the structural relationships in the economy the model s parameters are estimated econometrically using a data set from forty villages in eastern china the empirical results identify important linkages between agriculture and rural industry in village economies unbalanced growth can partially be explained by the way economic incentives induce individuals in rural areas to move resources toward the rural industrial sector and away from agriculture

optimal inventory policy for a perishable item with demand function sensitive to price and time abstract we formulate a model for determining the optimal pricing order quantity and replenishment period for perishable items with price dependent and time dependent demand the items have a fixed shelf life and the demand rate decreases linearly in the selling price and polynomially over the time after replenishment until it vanishes either at the reservation price or at expiration time we prove that the three variable profit maximization problem can be reduced into a single variable problem in which the variable is the duration of the replenishment period we show that the profit function is strictly pseudo concave and provide means of obtaining the optimal policy three numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the model accompanied by a sensitivity analysis

natural resources and the tradeoff between authoritarianism and development abstract why do african and middle eastern countries seem cursed by an abundance of natural resources yet usa australia and norway seem blessed a growing literature has argued that the benevolence or malignance of natural resources depends upon the quality of institutions this paper offers a new explanation based on associational freedom and its interaction with the political system the model predicts that natural resources have an adverse impact on economic performance and transition to democracy in authoritarian regimes but not in democracies it also predicts that repression of associational freedom will be increasing in natural resources in authoritarian regimes i test the model s predictions using fixed effects regressions on an international panel from 1975 to 2000 and find support

integrating social conflict into economic theory the generalisation of coasian theorem to the power relationship amounts to depicting conflict as a bargaining process between conflictual parties that are simultaneously both partners and adversaries this perspective leads to different models of rational conflicts i e a threat of conflict without any real clash an alternative approach is developed by different models inspired by the public choice school which build upon the logic of coercive power within the framework of a self interested behaviour the integration of social conflicts in a narrowly defined individual cost benefit theoretical framework has resulted in reducing social conflict to real private but not social conflict in other words economic theory has considered social protesters either as potential or actual looters but rarely as a group of people struggling for a common cause integration of social conflict into economic theory will require i abandoning the ubiquitous market model when describing conflictual relationships ii accepting the logic of force or coercive power as a starting point and iii expanding the idea of interest to include encompassing including class interest

the r q control of a periodic review inventory system with continuous demand and lost sales abstract in this paper we consider a periodic review inventory model with lost sales during a stockout and with the constraint that at most one replenishment order may be outstanding at any time demands in successive review periods are independent identically distributed variables from a continuous distribution the fixed lead time is an integral number of review periods we explore control policies of the r q type that is a replenishment order of size q is placed when the inventory position stock in hand plus stock on order falls to or below the re order level r we use asymptotic renewal theory results to estimate the undershoot of the re order level r and also to estimate the cycle stockholding cost which turns out to take a relatively simple form based on these approximations we set out a policy improvement solution methodology and illustrate this with some numerical examples for which demand is normally distributed these numerical examples suggest that a relatively simple approach based on the economic order quantity can provide results which are very close to optimal