credit natural disasters coffee and educational attainment in rural honduras summary this paper exploits a two stage estimation approach to examine the impact on secondary school attainment in rural honduras of four key variables affecting household choices wealth credit access crop choice and shocks the first stage estimates the probability that a household is credit constrained while the second estimates secondary school educational attainment of appropriately aged children the second stage includes variables for crop selection and household wealth shocks from hurricane mitch in addition to other characteristics of the child household and community that can influence educational attainment credit constrained households have lower educational attainment and are more likely to be adversely affected by negative shocks

the impact of population on co2 emissions evidence from european countries this paper analyses the impact of population growth on co2 emissions in european union countries traditionally researchers have assumed a unitary elasticity of emissions with respect to population growth in this study population is treated as a predictor in the model instead of being included as part of the dependent variable per capita emissions thus relaxing the above mentioned assumption of unitary elasticity we also contribute to the existing literature by taking into account the presence of heterogeneity in the sample and considering a dynamic specification the sample covers the period 1975 1999 for the current european union members our results show that the impact of population growth on emissions is more than proportional for recent accession countries whereas for old eu members the elasticity is lower than unity and non significant when the properties of the time series and the dynamics are correctly specified the different impact of population change on co2 emissions for the current eu members should therefore be taken into account in future discussions of climate change policies within the eu

the dynamic cost and persistence of asset inequality in an agrarian economy abstract a growing literature suggests that asset inequality can be economically costly in the presence of agency costs that constrain labor and capital markets unclear in this literature is whether asset markets and optimal individual accumulation of self finance capacity suffice to eliminate costly inequality over time this paper uses numerical dynamic programming methods to explore this question with a model of an initially inegalitarian agrarian economy while an egalitarian asset distribution emerges over time the process involves sufficiently great productivity losses along the way that a redistributive policy could improve on the market s performance by both equity and efficiency criteria

credit market constraints consumption smoothing and the accumulation of durable production assets in low income countries investments in bullocks in india in this paper we formulate and estimate a finite horizon structural dynamic model of agricultural investment behavior that incorporates the major features of low income agricultural environments income uncertainty constraints on borrowing and rental markets and the use of investment assets to generate income and smooth consumption the model is fit to longitudinal indian household data on farm profits bullock stocks and pump sets the estimated structural parameters are used to assess the effects on the life cycle accumulation of bullocks agricultural profits and welfare associated with complete markets and bullock liquidity and with second best policies that provide assured sources of income to farmers and weather insurance

economic growth and pollutant emissions in tunisia an empirical analysis of the environmental kuznets curve abstract this paper investigates the relationship between economic growth and pollutant emissions for a small and open developing country tunisia during the period 1961 2004 the investigation is made on the basis of the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis using time series data and cointegration analysis carbon dioxide co 2 and sulfur dioxide so 2 are used as the environmental indicators and gdp as the economic indicator our results show that there is a long run cointegrating relationship between the per capita emissions of two pollutants and the per capita gdp an inverted u relationship between so 2 emissions and gdp has been found with income turning point approximately equals to 1200 constant 2000 prices or to 3700 in ppp constant 2000 prices however a monotonically increasing relationship with gdp is found more appropriate for co 2 emissions furthermore the causality results show that the relationship between income and pollution in tunisia is one of unidirectional causality with income causing environmental changes and not vice versa both in the short run and long run this implies that an emission reduction policies and more investment in pollution abatement expense will not hurt economic growth it could be a feasible policy tool for tunisia to achieve its sustainable growth in the long run

conditional cash transfers shocks and school enrolment in nicaragua abstract this work estimates the impacts of a nicaraguan cash transfer programme that pays households conditional on school attendance and family visits to health clinics and seminars a model explores the impact on school enrollment of cash transfers given differences in household wealth labour market opportunities and negative shocks a difference in difference estimation for distinct wealth cohorts reveals that the programme led to a significant improvement in school enrollment outcomes among poor households in coffee cultivating communities the results cast doubt however on proposals that broadly link conditional cash transfers to negative shocks

toward a political ecology of migration land labor migration and climate change in northwestern nicaragua summary smallholder labor migration and its relationship to climate change adaptation has received increasing attention with migration often represented either as part of successful adaptive livelihood diversification or as symptomatic of a lack of in place adaptive capacity using a case study we focus on the relationship between labor migration agrarian livelihood diversification and climate change to further a more nuanced understanding of migration as adaptation than is implied by a simple dichotomy of success versus failure smallholder diversification both on and off farm has largely been framed as a risk spreading practice that lowers climate change vulnerability but after decades of advocating livelihood diversification with labor migration now increasingly a part of smallholder livelihood activities it is urgent to pose a number of questions why do smallholders migrate how does labor migration unfold for them and with what outcomes our primary goal here is to explore the nature of the relationship of labor migration to climate change and climate change adaptation through empirical fieldwork in northwestern nicaragua we explore the role of labor migration in smallholder household production and reproduction as families confront increasingly difficult climatic conditions for agricultural production and a relative absence of the state within a neoliberal political economy our analysis draws on household surveys and qualitative interviews and focus groups we carried out in the municipality of somotillo in northwestern nicaragua over three years 2013 15 our findings demonstrate that household labor migration neither facilitates adaptation to climate change nor reflects a failure to adapt but rather reflects the weak position of smallholders in interlocking relations of power and the relative land scarcity experienced by many we argue that labor migration barely maintains semi subsistence agricultural production and reinforces existing social inequalities raising questions regarding a conceptualization of migration as adaptation and the benefits of this type of livelihood diversification

energy consumption carbon emissions and economic growth in saudi arabia an aggregate and disaggregate analysis the objective of this study is to examine the relationship among economic growth carbon emissions and energy consumption at the aggregate and disaggregate levels for the aggregate energy consumption model we use total energy consumption per capita and co2 emissions per capita based on the total energy consumption for the disaggregate analysis we used oil gas and electricity consumption models along with their respective co2 emissions the long term income elasticities of carbon emissions in three of the four models are positive and higher than their estimated short term income elasticities these results suggest that carbon emissions increase with the increase in per capita income which supports the belief that there is a monotonically increasing relationship between per capita carbon emissions and per capita income for the aggregate model and for the oil and electricity consumption models the long and short term income elasticities of carbon emissions are negative for the gas consumption model this result indicates that if the saudi arabian economy switched from oil to gas consumption then an increase in per capita income would reduce carbon emissions the results also suggest that electricity is less polluting than other sources of energy

property rights and consumption volatility evidence from a land reform in vietnam summary during vietnam s transition from a socialist to a market economy household s property rights over agricultural land were considerably strengthened through a land certification program this resulted in active formal credit and land markets either of which potentially affects consumption levels and volatility this article evaluates the program impact with respect to consumption outcomes in particular it identifies the channel of impact through which improved property rights affect consumption volatility we find that land certification increases consumption levels for rural households but also consumption volatility for a subgroup of households identified by an instrument we show that the certification program affects consumption outcomes of this subgroup through presumably more risky credit based agricultural investment at the intensive margin

determinants and impacts of rural land market activity evidence from nicaragua summary use of data from nicaragua to examine the performance of land rental and sales markets during 1995 98 which coincide with the implementation of major macroeconomic and sectoral reforms leads to three main conclusions first even though the data point toward an inverse farm size productivity relationship and large differences in land productivity between large and small producers land markets have not led to an equalization of returns among the groups considered second both in 1995 and in 1998 land sales markets have contributed to land concentration suggesting that credit market imperfections impeded demand in land sales markets third the policy reforms undertaken after 1995 have led to a structural shift in the performance of the land rental market instead of transferring land to large owners as it did in 1995 the land market now moves land from large to small producers the quantities involved however remain limited we conclude that if it is to contribute to equity and efficiency liberalization of land sales markets has to be complemented by measures to reduce the attractiveness of speculative land accumulation furthermore measures to reduce the transaction costs of land rental e g titling and to increase effective demand from small producers e g technical assistance and credit will be needed 2003 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

beyond optimal city size an evaluation of alternative urban growth patterns the aim of the paper is to present a critical view of theoretical works on city size we begin with the consideration that during the 1960s and 1970s the question of optimal city size tended to b

energy consumption real income and temporal causality results from a multi country study based on cointegration and error correction modelling techniques abstract unlike previous studies on the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth this paper illustrates how the finding of cointegration i e long term equilibrium relationship between these variables may be used in testing granger causality based on the most recent johansen s multivariate cointegration tests preceded by various unit root or non stationarity tests we test for cointegration between total energy consumption and real income of six asian economies india pakistan malaysia singapore indonesia and the philippines non rejection of cointegration between variables rules out granger non causality and imples at least one way of granger causality either unidirectional or bidirectionial secondly by using a dynamic vector error correction model we then analyse the direction of granger causation and hence the within sample granger exogeneity or endogeneity of each of the variables thirdly the relative strength of the causality is gauged through the dynamic variance decomposition technique by decomposing the total impact of an unanticipated shock to each of the variables beyond the sample period into proportions attributable to shocks in the other variables including its own in the bivariate system results based on these tools of methodology indicate that while all pair wise relationships shared common univariate integrational properties only relationships for three countries india pakistan and indonesia were cointegrated for these countries temporal causality results were mixed with unidirectional causality from energy to income for india exactly the reverse for indonesia and mutual causality for pakistan the vdcs were not inconsistent with these results and provided us with an additional insight as to the relatively more dominant direction of causation in pakistan simple bivariate vector autoregressive models for the three non cointegrated systems did not indicate any direction of causality significantly in either direction

does the quality of institutions limit the mena s integration in the world economy using a large sample of countries over the 1990s this paper examines the extent to which institutions functioning disables a greater participation of the middle east and north africa mena in the world economy it focuses on the impact on manufactured exports and fdi attractiveness and considers a broad index of political risk as well as indices targeted toward specific aspects of governance corruption government effectiveness and the rule of law the results are robust to different econometric approaches and lend strong support to the hypothesis that the functioning of institutions may disable the participation of mena countries in the world economy they suggest that the impact of an improvement in the quality of institutions may result in a sensitive increase of fdi inflows and manufactured exports that increase is comparable to the one resulting from liberalisation policies hence although institutional reforms can take time they deserve the necessary efforts given their outcomes as compared to other reforms

an econometric study of co2 emissions energy consumption income and foreign trade in turkey abstract this study attempts to empirically examine the dynamic causal relationships between carbon emissions energy consumption income and foreign trade in the case of turkey using the time series data for the period 1960 2005 this research tests the interrelationship between the variables using the bounds testing to cointegration procedure the bounds test results indicate that there exist two forms of long run relationships between the variables in the case of first form of long run relationship carbon emissions are determined by energy consumption income and foreign trade in the case of second long run relationship income is determined by carbon emissions energy consumption and foreign trade an augmented form of granger causality analysis is conducted amongst the variables the long run relationship of co2 emissions energy consumption income and foreign trade equation is also checked for the parameter stability the empirical results suggest that income is the most significant variable in explaining the carbon emissions in turkey which is followed by energy consumption and foreign trade moreover there exists a stable carbon emissions function the results also provide important policy recommendations

is there an ekc between economic growth and smog pollution in china new evidence from semiparametric spatial autoregressive models abstract although china has achieved rapid economic growth it suffers from severe smog conditions determining how to promote cleaner production and environmental sustainability is of great significance in clarifying the relationship between income and pollutants within an extension of the stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology stirpat framework the effects of economic growth on pm2 5 contamination are explicitly investigated based on a recent large sample of 249 chinese cities in 2015 from a nonlinear spatial perspective this study marks the first attempt at comprehensively exploring the nexus between the selected variables and pm2 5 emissions using semiparametric spatial autoregressive models which overcome the misspecification issues of conventional parametric models to avoid the limitations of a single method this study also applies different estimation techniques such as the spatial lag model slm the spatial autoregressive model with spatial autoregressive disturbances sarar two stage least squares regression 2slsr quantile regression qr and nonparametric regression npr the results reveal that pm2 5 pollutants show strong positive characteristics of spatial spillover the results also suggest that there is a significant inverted u shaped relationship between economic growth and pm2 5 concentrations which confirms the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis additionally the empirical findings highlight the influence that the population density industrialization urbanization and traffic development factors have on increasing pm2 5 emissions in contrast technological innovation and green coverage do not play important roles in reducing pm2 5 concentrations the distribution of pm2 5 concentrations displays apparent geographical features to provide an in depth understanding of these impacts marginal analysis is performed to distinguish the local and neighbouring effects of determinants on pm2 5 pollution

neoclassical growth the j curve for abatement and the inverted u curve for pollution abstract this paper reexamines the neoclassical environmental growth model of forster to gain insights into the dynamic relationships among pollution abatement effort and economic development whereas the model has heretofore been used to examine steady state levels of capital consumption and environmental quality it also provides a theoretical basis for recent empirical research on j curves for abatement effort and inverted u curves for pollution

rural credit and agricultural supply in brazil the objective of this study is to determine the financing impact of total expenditure on the use of agriculture inputs fertilizers labor and pesticides and the output of cotton rice beans corn soybean and wheat in brazil we study the period 1976 2005 the analysis is based on duality applied to the production theory the output supplies and conditioned input demands are estimated from a translog multi output multi input restricted profit function where the total production credit is used as proxy of the total expenditure farmer expectations with respect to crop prices are incorporated to the estimation based on the quasi rational expectation model the output and input responses to the total expenditure are positive and statistically significant except for cotton wheat fertilizer and pesticides the short run output supply response to own prices is inelastic except for wheat which presents elastic response to its price acreage has a positive impact on the output supply and it is influenced by land productivity the main conclusion is that farmers face budget restrictions to purchase inputs and a government credit program might increase the agricultural supply

does economic integration damage or benefit the environment africa s experience abstract the leaders of african nations have committed to the establishment of the continental free trade area cfta over the coming years improved links among the african nations via increased intra regional trade have been considered as an essential mechanism to produce desired growth run overs and to support regional economic improvement however remarkable theoretical and empirical evidence has shown that increased trade might damage the environment and therefore may hinder the effort towards sustainable development and poverty reduction on the continent the present paper seeks to investigate and test the impact of intra africa trade using two measurements of environmental pollutants namely co2 and mp10 whilst integrating economic growth and energy consumption the study used a panel dataset regarding 46 african countries over the period 1990 2017 to carry out the empirical analysis the latest panel estimation techniques were employed more specifically and for the urbaneness purpose we employed a parametric technique which is dynamic ols and a non parametric approach which is fmols the results of both methods suggested that intra africa trade improved environmental quality on the continent in addition the results confirmed the presence of the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis the findings also indicated that whilst the consumption of energy played a vital role in the deterioration of the environment its impact remained marginal overall the results implied that intra regional trade and the environment quality were mutually supportive in africa

determinants of co2 emissions in a small open economy abstract the aim of the paper is to explore the relationship between economic development and carbon dioxide co2 emissions for a small open and industrialized country austria we test whether an environmental kuznets curve relationship also holds for a single country rather than concentrating on panel or cross section data for a set of countries a cubic i e n shaped relationship between gdp and co2 emissions is found to fit the data most appropriately for the period 1960 1999 and a structural break is identified in the mid seventies due to the oil price shock furthermore two variables are additionally significant import shares reflecting the well known pollution haven hypothesis and the share of the tertiary service sector of total production gdp accounting for structural changes in the economy emission projections derived from this single country specification support the widely held opinion that significant policy changes are asked for when implementing the kyoto protocol in order to bring about a downturn in future carbon emissions

economic growth and emissions reconsidering the empirical basis of environmental kuznets curves abstract recent empirical research indicates that certain types of emissions follow an inverted u or environmental kuznets curve ekc as income grows this regularity has been interpreted as a possible de linking of economic growth and patterns of certain pollutants for developed economies in this paper the empirical basis of this result is investigated by considering some statistical particularities of the various ekc studies performed it is argued that the inverted u relationship between income and emissions estimated from panel data need not hold for specific individual countries over time based on insights from intensity of use analysis in resource economics an alternative growth model is specified and estimated for three types of emissions co2 nox and so2 in four countries netherlands uk usa and western germany it is found that the time patterns of these emissions correlate positively with economic growth and that emission reductions may have been achieved as a result of structural and technological changes in the economy sustainable growth is defined as the rate of economic growth that does not lead to growth in emissions its rate is calculated for each type of emission and country based on estimated parameter values the resulting indicators reflect a balance between the positive influence of growth and negative influence of structural change and technological progress on emission levels

investment and equity effects of land regularisation the case of nicaragua we use data from nicaragua to examine the impact of award of registered and non registered title on land values and changes in land attached investment registration acquisition through purchase and agrarian reform title all are associated with significant increases in the value of plots receipt of registered title is found to increase land values by 30 and at the same time greatly increase the propensity to invest bringing such investment closer to the optimum in line with descriptive statistics indicating great demand for land right regularisation especially from the poor this suggests that titling can have a positive distributional effect at the same time the legal validity and official recognition of the titles issued appears to be of great importance

credit constraints credit unions and small scale producers in guatemala abstract efficient and equitable development outcomes may depend in part on whether formal financial institutions leave low wealth producers tightly constrained in their access to credit if so can cooperative institutions efficiently relax these constraints these issues are explored using survey data gathered from 950 small scale producer households in areas of guatemala with market oriented credit unions that mobilize savings and make unsubsidized loans nonprice rationing by banks is found to be common among lower wealth households while credit unions relax credit constraints for a significant portion of those rationed by banks but not the poorest of the study households

the diversity of land markets and regulations in europe and some of its causes abstractthe creation of optimal land institutions attracted renewed attention in the 1990s because of its central role in the transition process in former communist countries in the former soviet union and eastern europe and more recently because of large scale land investments in developing countries this article documents the existence of large variations in land institutions markets and regulation using current and historical data from western and eastern europe it then offers explanations for these differences and draws implications for the role and optimality of land institutions in development with special reference to the current debate on large scale land acquisitions

an analysis of offer functions of banks and credit unions in guatemala economists have sought to identify institutions which might fill the gap in household access to credit arising from rationing by formal lenders credit unions have been identified as institutions which might use informational and monitoring advantages to fill that gap using information on household perceptions of their access to credit this article analyses the impact of certain credit unions on the access to credit of households in guatemala regression results indicate that credit unions serve markets unserved by formal lenders and that information on household perceptions of their access to credit is important in making inferences about lender lending activities

urbanization and co2 emissions a semi parametric panel data analysis this paper investigates the relationship between urbanization and co2 emissions in a sample of 20 emerging countries over the period 1992 2008 using the semi parametric panel data model with fixed effects proposed by baltagi and li 2002 we find little evidence in support of an inverted u curve and thus the kuznets hypothesis is not confirmed by our analysis our findings shed new light on the urbanization co2 emissions nexus

electricity consumption and economic growth a time series experience for 17 african countries abstract while the availability of electricity by itself is not a panacea for the economic and social problems facing africa the supply of electricity is nevertheless believed to be a necessary requirement for africa s economic and social development this paper tests the long run and causal relationship between electricity consumption per capita and real gross domestic product gdp per capita for 17 african countries for the period 1971 2001 using a newly developed cointegration test proposed by pesaran et al 2001 and using a modified version of the granger causality test due to toda and yamamoto 1995 the advantage of using these two approaches is that they both avoid the pre testing bias associated with conventional unit root and cointegration tests the empirical evidence shows that there was a long run relationship between electricity consumption per capita and real gdp per capita for only 9 countries and granger causality for only 12 countries for 6 countries there was a positive uni directional causality running from real gdp per capita to electricity consumption per capita an opposite causality for 3 countries and bi directional causality for the remaining 3 countries the result should however be interpreted with care as electricity consumption accounts for less than 4 of total energy consumption in africa and only grid supplied electricity is taken into account

access to capital and agrarian production organisation there are two problems both universal that entrepreneurs in any economy must contend with firstly an agent generally has access only to a limited amount of working capital secondly workers hired by an agent are subject to moral hazard and this necessitates their supervision this paper models for an agrarian economy the constraints imposed on entrepreneurs activities by these two problems and endogenously determines the various organisational forms of production as well as the allocation of resources that will obtain with a simple model we endeavour to explain a diverse set of empirical observations pertaining to the less developed countries in terms of the general processes that determine the distribution of income among the various agents and the hierarchical relationships that develop among them agricultural production typically involves a period of several months between the time the inputs are purchased and the time the output is marketed access to working capital and hence to the credit market thus plays an important role in a farmer s production decisions the distribution of access to credit in turn tends to be an important determinant of income distribution in poor agrarian economies credit is invariably rationed according to the ability to offer collateral the amount of working capital a farmer can mobilise therefore depends on the amount of land he owns which is often a good proxy for his overall wealth and thus his ability to offer collateral further since hired hands have a propensity to shirk they need to be supervised and therefore the

the impact of market friendly reforms on credit and land markets in honduras and nicaragua summary this article explores the impacts on credit access and agrarian structure of land market liberalization policies undertaken in honduras and nicaragua during the 1990s like liberalization efforts pursued in many latin american countries these market friendly reforms were designed to activate land transfers and enhance agricultural efficiency in large part by improving the access of the rural poor to both credit and land markets panel data sets gathered in honduras and nicaragua are used to compare title credit and land access patterns before and after the reforms descriptive nonparametric regression analyses show that despite major gains in titling across the land size spectrum and some increase in land market activity the other hoped for improvements in credit and land access did not occur and appear unlikely to occur without further policy attention to credit markets

property rights and water access evidence from land titling in rural peru summary insecure land tenure and property rights are an impediment to infrastructure access and services for households in many developing countries this paper explores whether alleviating this impediment through a land titling program in rural peru is associated with improvements in household water sources as well as sanitation and electricity services the economics literature on the links between property rights and investment decisions has amassed yet due to the necessity of water for life the high fixed costs associated with water infrastructure construction and the positive externalities that can result from water provision it is not obvious how water services might respond to land tenure improvements utilizing the phased in program timing in a quasi experimental design we exploit the differences in implementation timing across space in conjunction with the differences in program impact across households that held property titles prior to the project and those that did not results from this modified difference in differences method indicate that land titling is associated with small in magnitude but statistically significant increases in water access larger gains in sanitation and electricity services are found we investigate the channels through which this improved access occurs and find evidence of investments in all three services via either government or water utilities we find evidence of individual household investment only in the case of sanitation taken together these results indicate that land titles are important but not sufficient to increase access to water and other services

co2 emissions energy consumption trade and income a comparative analysis of china and india in order to prevent the destabilisation of the earth s biosphere co2 emissions must be reduced quickly and significantly the causes of co2 emissions by individual countries need to be apprehended in order to understand the processes required for reducing emissions around the globe china and india are the two largest transitional countries and growing economies but are in two entirely different categories in terms of structural changes in growth trade and energy use co2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have significantly increased in the recent past this paper compares china and india using the bounds testing approach to cointegration and the ardl methodology to test the long and short run relationships between growth trade energy use and endogenously determined structural breaks the co2 emissions in china were influenced by per capita income structural changes and energy consumption a similar causal connection cannot be established for india with regard to structural changes and co2 emissions because india s informal economy is much larger than china s india possesses an extraordinarily large number of micro enterprises that are low energy consumers and not competitive enough to reach international markets understanding these contrasting scenarios is prerequisite to reaching an international agreement on climate change affecting these two countries

economic growth and environmental degradation the environmental kuznets curve and sustainable development abstract in this paper we critically examine the concept of the environmental kuznets curve ekc it proposes that there is an inverted u shape relation between environmental degradation and income per capita so that eventually growth reduces the environmental impact of economic activity the concept is dependent on a model of the economy in which there is no feedback from the quality of the environment to production possibilities and in which trade has a neutral effect on environmental degradation the actual violation of these assumptions gives rise to fundamental problems in estimating the parameters of an ekc the paper identifies other econometric problems with estimates of the ekc and reviews a number of empirical studies the inference from some such ekc estimates that further development will reduce environmental degradation is dependent on the assumption that world per capita income is normally distributed when in fact median income is far below mean income we carry out simulations combining ekc estimates from the literature with world bank forecasts for economic growth for individual countries aggregating over countries to derive the global impact within the horizon of the bank s forecast 2025 global emissions of so 2 continue to increase forest loss stabilizes before the end of the period but tropical deforestation continues at a constant rate throughout the period

risk wealth and sectoral choice in rural credit markets we model the role of the informal credit sector in developing countries the informational advantage of informal lenders is portrayed as the ability to monitor borrowers monitoring reduces the incentive problem and allows for contracts with lower collateral this enables informal lenders to serve both individuals who cannot post the collateral required by the formal sector and those who are able but do not want to post collateral the model is consistent with the conventional view of the informal sector as recipient of spillover demand from the formal sector it also shows that the informal sector may provide partial insurance as the lower collateral requirement implies greater consumption smoothing for borrowers

a note on the causal relationship between energy and gdp in taiwan abstract this paper re examines the causality between energy consumption and gdp by using updated taiwan data for the period 1954 1997 as a secondary contribution we investigate the causal relationship between gdp and the aggregate as well as several disaggregate categories of energy consumption including coal oil natural gas and electricity applying granger s technique we find bidirectional causality between total energy consumption and gdp we find further that different directions of cause exist between gdp and various kinds of energy consumption

asset smoothing consumption smoothing and the reproduction of inequality under risk and subsistence constraints abstract a growing literature asks whether low wealth agents can accumulate assets over time or whether they are trapped in poverty this paper develops a stochastic dynamic programming model with endogenous asset price risk to explore savings and portfolio decisions in a resource poor environment characterized by risk and subsistence constraints optimal portfolio strategies are found to bifurcate despite divisible assets and fully rational agents wealthier agents acquire a higher yielding portfolio and pursue conventional consumption smoothing poorer agents acquire a less remunerative portfolio and pursue asset smoothing rather than consumption smoothing asset based risk coping thus results in positive correlation between initial wealth and portfolio rate of return

does land titling improve credit access quasi experimental evidence from rural china based on official surveys conducted in 2010 and 2015 we study how the chinese land titling reform beginning in 2009 affected rural households access to credit we find that the reform had differe

the environmental kuznets curve and sustainability a panel data analysis abstract in recent years sustainability has represented one of the most important policy goals explored in the environmental kuznets curve ekc literature but related hypotheses performance measures and results continue to present a challenge the present paper contributes to this ongoing literature by studying two different ekc specifications for 10 middle east and north african mena countries over the period 1990 2010 using panel data methods for the first specification namely ekc we show that there is an inverted u shape relationship between environmental degradation and income while for the second specification namely modified ekc mekc we show that there is an inverted u shape relationship between sustainability and human development hd the relationships are shaped by other factors such as energy trade manufacture added value and the role of law more interestingly findings from the estimation show that ekc hypothesis hd and sustainability are crucial to build effective environmental policies

does supervision matter some hypothesis tests using indian farm level data abstract a model is developed and estimated to test for heterogeneity of family and hired labor in agricultural production and to estimate the impact of employer supervision on the productivity of hired labor plot level data are used from a rice growing village in semi arid tropical india the hypothesis that family and hired labor are homogeneous inputs was rejected results indicate that family member supervision is required to increase hired labor productivity output loss attributable to operating at reduced supervision intensity was greater than 10 on over 40 of the plots

explaining the relationship between co2 emissions and national income the role of energy consumption i estimate a simultaneous equation system in which gdp and co2 emissions are jointly determined i find that including energy consumption in the regression implies a negative relationship between income and co2 emissions which is contrary to previous findings

peasant household behaviour with missing markets some paradoxes explained a model of peasant household behavior under varying degrees of household specific food and labor market failures is constructed to show that these structural features can explain several well known patterns of peasant response which have often been attributed to peculiar motives presumed specific to peasants the model explains sluggish response to cash crops prices and high instability in perceived food and labor scarcities the key role of manufactured consumer goods prices in stimulating peasants effort in cash crops production the effectiveness of taxation as opposed to incentives in stimulating cash crops production and the key role of technological change in food production to enhance cash crop production results are obtained analytically in the case of one market failure and by numerical simulation with more than one

the nexus between carbon emissions energy consumption and economic growth in middle east countries a panel data analysis abstract the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis assumes that there is an inverted u shaped relationship between environmental degradation and income per capita in other words as a country grows it is assumed that its environmental quality improves in this study we aim to test the ekc hypothesis for 12 middle east countries during the period 1990 2008 by employing recently developed panel data methods our results provide evidence contrary to the ekc hypothesis we found evidence favorable to the u shaped ekc for 5 middle east countries whereas an inverted u shaped curve was identified for only 3 middle east countries furthermore there appear to be no causal links between income and co 2 emissions for the other 4 countries regarding the direction of causality there appears to be a unidirectional causality from economic growth to energy consumption in the short run in the long run however the unidirectional causality chain runs from energy consumption and economic growth to co 2 emissions we also suggest some crucial policy implications depending on these results

wealth weather risk and the composition and profitability of agricultural investments despite the growing evidence that farmers in low income environments are risk averse there has been little empirical evidence on the importance of risk in shaping the actual allocation of production resources among farmers differentiated by wealth the authors use panel data on investments in rural india to examine how the composition of productive and nonproductive asset holdings varies across farmers with different levels of total wealth and across farmers facing different degrees of weather risk income variability is a prominent feature of the experience of rural agents in low income countries the authors report evidence based on measures of rainfall variability that the agricultural investment portfolio behavior of farmers in such settings reflects risk aversion due evidently to limitations on consumption soothing mechanisms such as crop insurance or credit markets the authors results suggest that uninsured weather risk is a significant cause of lower efficiency and lower average incomes a one standard deviation decrease in weather risk measured by the standard deviation of the timing of the rainy season would raise average profits by up to 35 percent among farmers in the lowest wealth quartile moreover rainfall variability induces a more unequal distribution of average incomes for a given distribution of wealth wealthier farmers are willing to absorb significant risk without giving up profits to reduce production risk smaller farmers have to invest their limited wealth in ways that reduce their exposure to risk at the cost of lower profit rates the authors found that at high levels of rainfall variability differences in rates of profit per unit of agricultural assets were similar across classes of wealth but over the sample range of rainfall variability these rates of profit were always higher for the poorer farmers than for the wealthier ones suggesting that the disadvantages of small farmers in risk diffusion are more than offset by their labor cost advantage

land tenure and property rights theory and implications for development policy this article explores the nature of property rights systems their evolution and their effect on resource allocation it is argued that certain institutional arrangements for land rights have evolved in order to reduce uncertainty and increase efficiency in credit as well as in land markets of particular relevance to developing countries the article emphasizes the contribution of public sector infrastructure to effective land rights systems an appendix to the article presents a formal model analyzing the effects of security of land rights on land prices the intensity of cultivation and the use of credit empirical evidence from thailand supports several of the propositions derived from the model

foreign direct investment co2 emissions nexus in middle east and north african countries importance of biomass energy consumption abstract this study examines the association between foreign direct investment fdi and carbon emissions for the middle east and north african mena region in 1990 2015 including biomass energy consumption as an additional determinant of carbon emissions we apply the generalized method of moments gmm to validate the existence of the pollution haven hypothesis phh the n shaped association is also validated between fdi and carbon emissions the link between economic growth and carbon emissions is inverted u and n shaped that is it satisfies the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypotheses biomass energy use lowers carbon emissions and the causality analysis reveals that fdi causes co2 emissions clearly the results confirm the existence of a feedback effect between economic growth and carbon emissions the connection between biomass energy use and co2 emissions is also bidirectional the empirical findings suggest policy makers to design comprehensive trade and energy policies by targeting the cleaner production practices for not only to ensure environmental sustainability but also to fulfil the objectives of sustainable development goals

spatial collocation and venture capital in the us biotechnology industry biotechnology firms operate in a high risk and high reward environment and are in a constant race to secure venture capital vc funds previous contributions to the literature show that the vc firms tend to invest locally in order to monitor their investments and to provide operating assistance to their target firms further biotechnology is a knowledge based industry that tends to exhibit spatial clusters and the firms in such industries may collocate to benefit from gaining access to local markets for specialized inputs e g skilled researchers and from local knowledge spillovers and network externalities if such gains exist we expect that the collocated firms should exhibit positively correlated performance including in their ability to attract venture capital funds the purpose of this paper is to empirically measure the strength and spatial extent of the relationships among the amount of funds raised by proximate biotechnology firms we model these relationships with a spatial autoregression sar model and we control for characteristics of the biotechnology firms and the vc firms that provide their funds as well as site specific factors based on our fitted sar model we find that the amount of venture capital raised by a particular biotechnology firm is significantly influenced by the number of vc firms and the vc funding levels raised by biotechnology firms located within a 10 mile radius but these relationships are not statistically significant beyond this range

carbon dioxide emission and income a temporal analysis of cross country distributional patterns the existence of a cointegrating relationship between income and co2 emission for individual country groups suggests existence of a corresponding relationship between the inter country disparities in the levels of income and co2 emission this paper explores the relationship between the patterns of cross country distribution of income and co2 emission and temporal shifts in such a relationship this paper also examines how the mean level of per capita co2 emission and its distributional inequality are related to the corresponding mean income level and the distributional inequality of income the analysis is based on a cross country panel data set at the level of country group environmental quality demanded is treated as a private good and not as a public good as done in most other studies the technique of lorenz and specific concentration curve analysis are used as the basic analytical framework to argue that a measure of relative distributional inequality of income should be used as an explanatory variable in the environmental kuznets curve ekc relationship along with the mean income level in the empirical exercise johansen s cointegration analysis technique is used to explore existence of statistically significant cointegrating vector s relating mean level of emission and specific concentration ratio scr of emission to mean income level and lorenz ratio lr of income the empirical results confirm that the pattern of cross country income distribution has significant effect on the mean level of emission for all the country groups considered

income and emission a panel data based cointegration analysis this paper presents the results of an investigation of the causality issue of incomeemission relationship based on time series econometric techniques of unit root test cointegration and related error correction model for a panel data set here the nature of causality between per capita co2 emission pcco2 and per capita gdp pcgdp has been examined using a cross country panel data set covering 88 countries for the period 1960 90 using the panel unit root test procedure of im et al 1997 ips we have found that the hypothesis of unit root i e non stationarity of the time series of pcgdp and pcco2 can not be rejected for individual country groups as both the variables are found to follow i 1 process we next have performed the panel data co integration test and finally we have estimated the ecm for these country groups for which significant income emission cointegration was obtained to explore the nature of dynamics implicit in the given panel data set our findings suggest that there is more or less a bi directional causal relationship between income pcgdp and co2 emission pcco2 for africa central america america as a whole eastern europe western europe europe as a whole and the world as a whole that means the movement of the one variable directly affects the other variable through a feedback system thus the policy makers should be cautious to make proper decision about the control of emission level

the changing rewards to science the case of biotechnology little is known about the form and or magnitude of compensation provided university based scientists working on firm r d this is unfortunate given the important role that university based scientists play in r d and the growing literature concerning compensation and innovation this paper sheds some light on these issues by examining the compensation of university based scientists involved with 52 biotech firms that made an initial public offering between march of 1990 and november of 1992 although the stock holdings of the university scientists are of particular interest additional forms of compensation received by the scientists are also examined

a semi parametric panel data analysis on the urbanisation carbon emissions nexus for the mena countries abstract this study seeks to examine the impacts of urbanisation on carbon emissions through the investigation of the existence of an environmental kuznets curve ekc within the stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology stirpat framework this is the first study in the mena region to explore the urbanisation and carbon emissions nexus using panel data together with a semi parametric panel fixed effects regression the data set refers to a panel of 20 countries in the mena region spanning the period 1980 2014 according to the results there is little evidence to support an inverted u shaped relationship between urbanisation and carbon emissions in the region more specifically it was found in the region and with the continuation of the urbanisation process carbon emissions per capita decreased in addition the results suggest that energy use and economic growth are the main sources of carbon emissions in the region the results imply that policies to reduce carbon emissions in the countries with relatively higher carbon emissions should concentrate more on energy use and the pattern of economic growth and not the urbanisation issue

panel estimation for co2 emissions energy consumption economic growth trade openness and urbanization of newly industrialized countries abstract this paper empirically examines the dynamic causal relationships between carbon dioxide emissions energy consumption economic growth trade openness and urbanization for the panel of newly industrialized countries nic using the time series data for the period 1971 2007 using four different panel unit root tests it is found that all panel variables are integrated of order 1 from the johansen fisher panel cointegration test it is found that there is a cointegration vector among the variables the granger causality test results support that there is no evidence of long run causal relationship but there is unidirectional short run causal relationship from economic growth and trade openness to carbon dioxide emissions from economic growth to energy consumption from trade openness to economic growth from urbanization to economic growth and from trade openness to urbanization it is found that the long run elasticity of carbon dioxide emissions with respect to energy consumption 1 2189 is higher than short run elasticity of 0 5984 this indicates that over time higher energy consumption in the newly industrialized countries gives rise to more carbon dioxide emissions as a result our environment will be polluted more but in respect of economic growth trade openness and urbanization the environmental quality is found to be normal good in the long run

the adaptive life cycle of entrepreneurial ecosystems the biotechnology cluster we propose an empirical framework for assessing the vibrancy and trajectory of regional entrepreneurial ecosystems we apply this framework to study the us national capital region s localized cluster of biotechnology related entrepreneurship by building our analysis around a set of indicators of ecosystem vitality proposed by stangler and bell masterson 2015 this application constitutes an initial attempt at mapping the dynamics of an industry cluster within the adaptive life cycle of a wider regional ecosystem we find that the biotechnology cluster in the national capital region entered a reorientation stage in the early 2000s building up stored energy capital and connectedness in non research oriented activities an increasing regional presence of large biotech firms in the past 5 years a highly active and diverse start up sector increasing merger and acquisition activity and declines in regional public funding for medical and clinical trials all suggest a transition of entrepreneurial activity in the region from a dynamic driven by federal research spillovers to one increasingly driven by private sector actors

outreach sustainability and leverage in monitored and peer monitored lending abstract i study the contract design problem facing microfinance lending organizations mfos that want to maximize the impact and outreach of their lending activities to a target population of poor borrowers while remaining financially sustainable tradeoffs between outreach sustainability and financial leverage are shaped by the endogenous monitoring and delegation costs that arise within a chain of agency relationships subject to moral hazard between borrowers loan staff mfo equity owners and outside investors all else equal sustainable mfos that target poorer borrowers must charge higher interest rates have higher staff costs per dollar loaned and are less leveraged analysis of data for 72 mfos tends to support the findings

the relationship between credit and productivity in chinese agriculture a microeconomic model of disequilibrium credit is an important element in agricultural production systems it allows producers to satisfy the cash needs induced by the production cycle which characterizes agriculture preparation planting cultivation and harvesting of the crops are typically done over a period of several months in which very little cash revenue is earned while expenditures on materials purchased inputs and consumption must be made in cash cash income is received a short time after the harvest in the absence of credit markets farmers would have to maintain cash reserves so as to facilitate production and consumption in the next cycle the availability of credit allows both greater consumption and greater purchased input use and thus increases welfare of the farmers

risk credit constraints and financial efficiency in peruvian agriculture abstract based on a panel data set we use a two stage analysis to evaluate the effects of access to formal credit on financial efficiency of farms in northern peru the first stage uses non parametric data envelope analysis to estimate farm specific measures of financial efficiency 28 per cent of farmers are financially inefficient and credit constraints reduce profits of these farmers by an average of between 17 and 27 per cent the second stage uses tobit regression to evaluate the determinants of financial inefficiency the results point to uninsured risk as a key determinant of financial inefficiency and suggest that policies to strengthen agricultural insurance markets would likely pay large dividends in rural peru

environment kuznets curve for co2 emissions a cointegration analysis for china abstract this study examines the long run relationship between carbon emissions and energy consumption income and foreign trade in the case of china by employing time series data of 1975 2005 in particular the study aims at testing whether environmental kuznets curve ekc relationship between co 2 emissions and per capita real gdp holds in the long run or not auto regressive distributed lag ardl methodology is employed for empirical analysis a quadratic relationship between income and co 2 emission has been found for the sample period supporting ekc relationship the results of granger causality tests indicate one way causality runs through economic growth to co 2 emissions the results of this study also indicate that the carbon emissions are mainly determined by income and energy consumption in the long run trade has a positive but statistically insignificant impact on co 2 emissions

the role of small firms in u s biotechnology clusters the biotechnology industry poses a particular challenge to analysis because its origins were poorly understood or even noticed at the time the purpose of this paper is to examine and make sense of recent developments in the u s biotechnology industry the pioneers and subsequent followers in biotechnology came from other fields they altered their career trajectories in sciences like genetics and medical research to enter an unknown and undefined field which only subsequently became labeled as biotechnology those regions exhibiting the greatest success in developing biotechnology clusters also possessed the greatest ability to unleash the potential commercialization latent in those scientists to generate a successful regional cluster the existence of world class scientific talent is a necessary condition however it is not a sufficient condition the ancillary or complementary factors must also be available to translate this knowledge into a commercialized product the complementary factors include the presence of venture capital and other forms of finance the existence of an entrepreneurial culture and transparent and minimal regulations fostering the start up and growth processes

direct elicitation of credit constraints conceptual and practical issues with an application to peruvian agriculture abstract this article provides a methodological bridge leading from the well developed theory of credit rationing to the less developed territory of empirically identifying credit constraints we begin by developing a simple model showing that credit constraints may take three forms quantity rationing transaction cost rationing and risk rationing each form adversely affects household resource allocation and thus should be accounted for in empirical analyses of credit market performance we outline a survey strategy to directly elicit households status as unconstrained or constrained in the credit market and if constrained to further identify which of the three nonprice rationing mechanisms is at play we discuss several practical issues that arise due to the use of a combination of factual and interpretative survey questions finally using a farm level data set from peru we illustrate how the methodology can be used to estimate the impacts of credit constraints

land inequality and economic growth a dynamic panel data approach the growing body of literature devoted to studying the impact of inequality on economic growth has centered its attention on the income distribution effect even though the theoretical relationships are more related to assets distribution while some recent studies have tried to overcome this limitation by introducing asset indicators they meet new constraints when dealing only with time invariant measurements for this explanatory variable this article provides a theoretical discussion and some novel empirical tests to better understand the relationships between assets distribution and economic growth we assembled a new panel database that includes observations for more than 30 countries over the last three decades the data include a time varying variable for changes in the land gini index over this period that enables us to overcome the limitations of previous studies a system general method of moments gmm estimator is used to generate truly unbiased and consistent estimates for the parameters of interest we explore some of the likely channels through which asset distribution and economic growth may be linked paying particular attention to the role of secure property rights and the relations between land ownership and education we find robust and significant negative signs for land inequality in the growth regressions indicating that changes in asset distribution are an important factor for economic development

a structural var analysis of electricity consumption and real gdp evidence from the g7 countries in this paper we depart from the literature on electricity consumption real gdp in that for the first time we examine the reaction of real gdp to shocks in electricity consumption to achieve this goal we use the structural vector autoregressive svar model and examine the impact of electricity consumption shocks on real gdp for the g7 countries we find that except for the usa electricity consumption has a statistically significant positive impact on real gdp over short horizons this finding implies that except for the usa electricity conservation policies will hurt real gdp in the g7 countries

global co2 efficiency country wise estimates using a stochastic cost frontier this paper examines global carbon dioxide co2 efficiency by employing a stochastic cost frontier analysis of about 170 countries in 1997 and 2007 the main contribution lies in providing a new approach to environmental efficiency estimation in which the efficiency estimates quantify the distance from the policy objective of minimum emissions we are able to examine a very large pool of nations and provide country wise efficiency estimates we estimate three econometric models corresponding with alternative interpretations of the cancun vision conference of the parties 2011 the models reveal progress in global environmental efficiency during a preceding decade the estimates indicate vast differences in efficiency levels and efficiency changes across countries the highest efficiency levels are observed in africa and europe while the lowest are clustered around china the largest efficiency gains were observed in central and eastern europe co2 efficiency also improved in the us and china the two largest emitters but their ranking in terms of co2 efficiency deteriorated policy implications are discussed

the impact of urbanization on co2 emissions evidence from developing countries abstract this paper analyzes the impact of urbanization on co2 emissions in developing countries from 1975 to 2003 it contributes to the existing literature by examining the effect of urbanization taking into account dynamics and the presence of heterogeneity in the sample of countries the results show an inverted u shaped relationship between urbanization and co2 emissions indeed the elasticity emission urbanization is positive for low urbanization levels which is in accordance with the higher environmental impact observed in less developed regions among our contributions is the estimation of a semi parametric mixture model that allows for unknown distributional shapes and endogenously classifies countries into homogeneous groups three groups of countries are identified for which urbanization s impact differs considerably for two of the groups a threshold level is identified beyond which the emission urbanization elasticity is negative and further increases in the urbanization rate do not contribute to higher emissions however for the third group only population and affluence but not urbanization contribute to explain emissions the differential impact of urbanization on co2 emissions should therefore be taken into account in future discussions of climate change policies

a brief review of some problems in using national accounts data in level of output comparisons and growth studies abstract after an initial burst of enthusiasm for establishing their national accounts 30 or 40 years ago some countries have made continuous improvements while others have done little to maintain even their initial system presently most developing countries make their basic estimate of gdp from the production side and most do not have adequate surveys to permit a consistency check of their production and expenditure side estimates the base surveys for expenditures and production are typically over ten years old and the lags in basic surveys for constructing constant price estimates are frequently longer a number of countries estimate their growth from a weighted average of volume indexes and make no attempt at direct deflation many of those that do deflate their current expenditure estimates do so at a very aggregate level users of national accounts should be aware of the varying quality of the estimates across countries and hopefully continual questioning of the numbers will help to encourage improvement

do investments in specialized knowledge lead to composite good industries we try to understand why firms producing goods by means of complementary components do not merge especially in industries in which investments in component based knowledge matters as audretsch we state that these activities are developed by individuals who do their best to appropriate the return from their knowledge and whose effort is non contractible the organization of the industry into firms is identified to a partition of the set of individuals in this context we prove that an organization in which each individual hold his own firms is both stable with respect to unilateral deviation and optimal in the line of the property right approach if the returns are high enough this structure is even the only one which shares both properties

the compact city just or just compact a preliminary analysis the aim of the research described in this paper is to examine the validity of the claims that higher density urban form promotes social equity that is promotes benefits for the life chances of low income groups overall the evidence suggests that for medium sized english cities higher urban densities may be positive for some aspects of social equity and negative for others more specifically likely benefits include improved public transport reduced social segregation and better access to facilities while the main problems are likely to be reduced living space and a lack of affordable housing investigations of different aspects of density show that the cities that most support social equity appear to be those that have a large proportion of high density housing

reassessing the environmental kuznets curve for co2 emissions a robustness exercise the number of studies seeking to empirically characterize the reduced form relationship between a country economic growth and the quantity of pollutants produced in the process has recently increased significantly in several cases researchers have found evidence pointing to an inverted u benvironmental kuznetsq curve in the case of co2 however the evidence is at best mixed in this paper we reconsider that evidence by assessing how robust it is when the analysis is conducted in a different parametric setup and when using alternative emissions data from the international energy agency relative to the literature our contribution can be viewed as a robustness exercise in these two respects the econometric results lead to two conclusions firstly published evidence on the ekc does not appear to depend upon the source of the data at least as far as carbon dioxide is concerned secondly when an alternative functional form is employed there is evidence of an inverted u pattern for the group of oecd countries with reasonable turning point regardless of the data set employed not so for non oecd countries as the ekc is basically increasing slowly concave according to the iea data and more bellshaped in the case of cdiac data d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

level playing fields and laissez faire postliberal development strategy in inegalitarian agrarian economies focusing on the rural sector in latin america this paper explores the microeconomic linkages between distribution and growth which drive the possible reproduction of rural poverty over time the result of this exploration is a neostructuralist perspective which argues that actually existing laissez faire agrarian economies do not present a level playing field and that low wealth farms face disadvantages which tend to reproduce or even deepen sectoral inequality the paper then tries to identify the sorts of public policy and collective action which might modify the nature of growth and distribution in post liberalization agrarian market economy

pooled mean group estimation of an environmental kuznets curve for co2 abstract we apply the pooled mean group estimator to test for the existence of an environmental kuznets curve for co2 in 22 oecd countries this approach allows for more flexible assumptions in a panel data framework the period goes from 1975 to 1998

the role of technological change for a sustainable development technological change has become a major focus in environmental policy as well as in energy and climate policy indeed there is a growing body of knowledge about how and in which direction technological change might have an impact on environmental resource constraints and how environmental policy might have an impact on this direction in this article we introduce the contributions to this special issue showing how they add to recent developments in the field of economics of technological change and sustainability we also discuss potential avenues for future research

energy consumption income and carbon emissions in the united states abstract this paper investigates the effect of energy consumption and output on carbon emissions in the united states earlier research focused on testing the existence and or shape of an environmental kuznets curve without taking energy consumption into account we investigate the granger causality relationship between income energy consumption and carbon emissions including labor and gross fixed capital formation in the model we find that income does not granger cause carbon emissions in the us in the long run but energy use does hence income growth by itself may not become a solution to environmental problems

co2 emissions energy consumption and output in france abstract this paper examines the dynamic causal relationships between pollutant emissions energy consumption and output for france using cointegration and vector error correction modelling techniques we argue that these variables are strongly inter related and therefore their relationship must be examined using an integrated framework the results provide evidence for the existence of a fairly robust long run relationship between these variables for the period 1960 2000 the causality results support the argument that economic growth exerts a causal influence on growth of energy use and growth of pollution in the long run the results also point to a uni directional causality running from growth of energy use to output growth in the short run

the electricity consumption and gdp nexus for the fiji islands fiji is a small open island economy dependent on energy for its growth and development hence the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth is crucial for fiji s development in this paper we investigate the nexus between electricity consumption and economic growth for fiji within a multivariate framework through including the labour force variable we use the bounds testing approach to cointegration and find that electricity consumption gdp and labour force are only cointegrated when gdp is the endogenous variable we use the granger causality f test and find that in the long run causality runs from electricity consumption and labour force to gdp implying that fiji is an energy dependent country and thus energy conservation policies will have an adverse effect on fiji s economic growth

land accumulation dynamics in developing country agriculture abstractunderstanding land accumulation dynamics is relevant for policy makers interested in the economic effects of land inequality in developing country agriculture we thus explore and simultaneously test the leading theories of micro level land accumulation dynamics using unique panel data from paraguay the results suggest that farm growth varies systematically with farm size a formal rejection of stochastic growth theories that is gibrat s law and that titled land area may have considerable influence on land accumulation furthermore our estimates indicate that a dualistic agrarian structure is the likely product of the unfettered operation of land markets

is china s development conforms to the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis and the pollution haven hypothesis abstract the environmental kuznets curve and pollution haven hypotheses have been verified by many studies however there is still no consensus on whether china s situation is consistent with the abovementioned hypotheses therefore to investigate whether china s development aligns with the environmental kuznets curve and pollution haven hypotheses this study considered provincial panel data from 1996 to 2015 and used the fixed effects panel data partially linear additive model which integrates economic growth and foreign direct investment into the same framework to investigate their impact on carbon emissions the results revealed that there exists a reverse u shape relationship between economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions and an inverted n shaped relationship between foreign direct investment and carbon dioxide emissions moreover the results revealed that energy consumption has an accelerating effect on the production pace of carbon dioxide emissions the upgrading of industrial infrastructure technology diffusion and trade liberalization can contribute to the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions additionally this study proposes the following future research directions first considering the regional differences in china the conclusions of this study should be re examined by grouping different regions secondly the formation mechanism of the inverted n type relationship between foreign direct investment and carbon emissions is also an issue that requires further discussion finally a comparative study between developed and developing countries is needed to test and verify the universality and adaptability of the conclusions drawn from this study

energy consumption economic growth and co2 emissions in middle east and north african countries this article extends the recent findings of liu 2005 ang 2007 apergis et al 2009 and payne 2010 by implementing recent bootstrap panel unit root tests and cointegration techniques to investigate the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions energy consumption and real gdp for 12 middle east and north african countries mena over the period 1981 2005 our results show that in the long run energy consumption has a positive significant impact on co2 emissions more interestingly we show that real gdp exhibits a quadratic relationship with co2 emissions for the region as a whole however although the estimated long run coefficients of income and its square satisfy the ekc hypothesis in most studied countries the turning points are very low in some cases and very high in other cases hence providing poor evidence in support of the ekc hypothesis co2 emission reductions per capita have been achieved in the mena region even while the region exhibited economic growth over the period 1981 2005 the econometric relationships derived in this paper suggest that future reductions in co2 emissions per capita might be achieved at the same time as gdp per capita in the mena region continues to grow

risk rationing and wealth effects in credit markets theory and implications for agricultural development we develop a model that shows that asymmetric information can result in two types of credit rationing conventional quantity rationing and risk rationing whereby farmers are able to borrow but only under high collateral contracts that offer them lower expected well being than a safe subsistence activity after exploring its incidence with respect to wealth we show that risk rationing has important policy implications specifically land titling will be only partially effective because it does not enhance producers willingness to offer up the collateral needed to secure loans under moral hazard constraints efforts to enhance agricultural investment and the working of agricultural credit markets must step beyond land titling and also deal with risk copyright 2008 oxford university press

the relation between farm size and farm productivity the role of family labor supervision and credit constraints abstract the paper shows that if the performance of hired farmhands is affected by supervision from family members and if the availability of credit is dependent on the amount of land owned then a systematic positive or negative relationship between per acre yields and farm size will prevail a model with no supervision effects on labor productivity would predict that yields are unaffected by farm size the paper also investigates the relation between land utilization and owned holding size when land rental possibilities are limited results are shown to be compatible with various observed patterns in ldcs