smallholder market participation concepts and evidence from eastern and southern africa abstract this paper reviews the evidence on smallholder market participation with a focus on staple foodgrains i e cereals in eastern and southern africa in an effort to help better identify what interventions are most likely to break smallholders out of the semi subsistence poverty trap that appears to ensnare much of rural africa the conceptual and empirical evidence suggests that interventions aimed at facilitating smallholder organization at reducing the costs of intermarket commerce and perhaps especially at improving poorer households access to improved technologies and productive assets are central to stimulating smallholder market participation and escape from semi subsistence poverty traps macroeconomic and trade policy tools appear less useful in inducing market participation by poor smallholders in the region

household level spillover effects from biofuels evidence from castor in ethiopia the indirect effects of biofuels are mostly considered negative in this paper we argue that there may be a positive indirect effect of biofuels on food security and poverty using micro level evidence and a matched plot pair design through which we control for plot and farmer characteristics we show that the introduction of castor production for biofuel in a poor country as ethiopia can significantly improve food productivity of rural households who produce raw material for biofuel production this spillover seems particularly linked to enhanced access to inputs and technical assistance which were provided as part of biofuel feedstock production contracts our results thus document another mechanism through which biofuels may influence smallholders food security a mechanism that did not receive attention so far

interlinked credit and farm intensification evidence from kenya abstract this paper addresses the potential for interlinked credit input output marketing arrangements for particular cash crops to promote food crop intensification using panel survey data from kenya we estimate a household fixed effects model of fertiliser use per hectare of food crops using an instrumental variables approach for addressing the endogeneity of participation in interlinked credit arrangements results indicate that households engaging in interlinked marketing programs for selected cash crops applied considerably greater fertiliser on other crops primarily cereals not directly purchased by the cash crop trading firm these findings suggest that in addition to the direct stimulus that interlinked cash crop marketing arrangements can have on small farmer incomes these institutional arrangements may provide spill over benefits for the productivity of farmers other activities such as food cropping

sovereign default risk and the u s equity market i develop a two country general equilibrium model with firms governments and endogenous default decisions this paper shows that the risk of sovereign default abroad is important in the explanation of the level and the volatility of u s equity returns the intuition is that negative economic shocks deteriorate the fiscal situation of foreign governments thereby increasing the risk of a sovereign default that would trigger a local contraction in economic growth the rise in the risk of an economic slowdown abroad amplifies the direct eect of these shocks on the level and the volatility of equity returns in the u s through i a decrease in the present value of future firm earnings due to the unfavorable adjustment of the real exchange rate for u s exporters and ii a fall in u s equity prices that originates from the investors incentive to rebalance their portfolio towards risk free securities the amplification eect is strongest during periods of financial distress when the risk of corporate default is high in the u s a structural estimation of the model provides strong support for this prediction using monthly data for brazil and the u s over the period 1994 2008

prices institutions and determinants of supply in the malian cotton sector cotton both a source of livelihood for millions of poor rural households and a major source of export revenues is a vital commodity for the economic and social development of mali inefficiencies in the malian cotton system at the ginnery and producers cooperative levels e g late payment to farmers and poorly functioning credit schemes have recently led to an important decline in supply threatening the sustainability of the sector using regional data from 1998 1999 to 2008 2009 this study aims to quantitatively assess the contribution of key determinants such as cotton prices and timely payment toward the downward trend in cotton area a dynamic supply model based on adaptive expectations and partial adjustment is employed to estimate the effects of prices and institutional factors such as credit recovery rates and date of payment to farmers on the malian cotton supply results show that supply responds significantly to cotton prices relative to cereal and fertilizer prices date of payment varies across agricultural cycles and late payment negatively influences land devoted to cotton low credit repayment rates create disincentives to grow cotton therefore the revitalization of the malian cotton sector depends upon getting both prices and institutions right

nonmonetary effects of the financial crisis in propagation of the great depression this paper examines the effects of the financial crisis of the 1930s onthe path of aggregate output during that period our approach is complementary to that of friedman and schwartz who emphasized the monetary impact of the bank failures we focus on non monetary primarily credit related aspects of the financial sector output link and consider the problems of debtors as well as those of the banking system we argue that the financial disruptions of 1930 33 reduced the efficiency of the credit allocation process and that the resulting higher cost and reduced availability of credit acted to depress aggregate demand evidence suggests that effects of this type can help explain the unusual length and depth of the great depression this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

consequences of bank distress during the great depression the consequences of bank distress for the economy during the depression remain an area of unresolved controversy since john m keynes 1931 and irving fisher 1933 macroeconomists have argued that bank distress magnified the extent of the economic decline during the depression as the intermediaries controlling money and credit banks were in a special position to transmit their distress to other sectors but the mechanism through which banking distress mattered for the economy has been hotly contested milton friedman and anna j schwartz 1963 saw the contraction in the money multiplier driven in their view by panicked depositors withdrawals of deposits as the primary mechanism through which banking distress affected the real economy they described the mechanism transmitting banking distress to the real sector as operating at the national level through changes in the aggregate supply of money and interest rates bank distress reduced the money supply available to the public either through the closure of banks and the consequent freezing of bank deposits or the withdrawals of deposits by depositors that feared bank failure ben s bernanke 1983 building on fisher 1933 emphasized the transmission of monetary shocks via their effects on the balance sheets of borrowers and on the supply of credit by banks borrowers balance sheets were worsened by debt deflation as the result of fixed dollar debt obligations borrowers net worth and cash flow declined with the rising value of debt service costs relative to income borrowers with positive net present value projects but weak balance sheets had less internally generated retained earnings to invest and could not qualify for credit furthermore bernanke argued that the contraction of the money supply produced contraction of nominal income and prices relative to fixed debt service which weakened borrowers balance sheets and in turn weakened banks not only did firms financial distress reduce the number of qualified borrowers the contraction in banks net worth forced a reduction in the supply of bank loans to qualified borrowers many firms and individuals relied on banks for credit and as those banks suffered losses of capital due to asset value declines and contractions in deposits as depositors reacted to bank weakness by withdrawing their funds even borrowers with viable projects and strong balance sheets experienced a decrease in the effective supply of loanable funds bernanke termed the combined weakening of borrowers balance sheets and the contraction in bank credit supply a rise in the cost of credit intermediation the scarcity of perfect substitutes for the positive net present value investments of firms with weak balance sheets and for the credit supplied by existing banks implies that the weakening of firms and banks balance sheets the disappearance of banks and the contraction in surviving banks lending made it more difficult for the economy to channel funds to their best use thus what began as a contraction in aggregate demand became a contraction in aggregate supply which magnified adverse economic shocks and prolonged and deepened the depression the financial distress of firms and banks and the decline in bank lending were not only symptoms of the depression but means for magnifying the shocks that caused the depression bernanke s statistical evidence in support of this story is derived from time series analysis at the national level in calomiris graduate school of business 601 uris hall columbia university 3022 broadway new york ny 10027 and national bureau of economic research e mail cc374 columbia edu mason department of finance drexel university 3141 chestnut street philadelphia pa 19104 e mail joe mason drexel edu we thank valerie ramey david wheelock charles himmelberg steve zeldes gary gorton two referees and seminar participants at columbia university wharton northwestern university and the 2001 economic history association meetings for helpful comments on an earlier draft we gratefully acknowledge support from the national science foundation the university of illinois and the federal reserve bank of st louis

examining structural breaks and growth rates in international health expenditures over the last decade there has been a growing interest in examining health expenditures in this paper we study the behaviour of health expenditures in the g3 countries usa the uk and japan and three european countries the uk switzerland and spain over the period 1960 2000 from a different perspective in that we examine 1 whether there is a common structural break in health expenditures across the g3 and european countries 2 whether structural breaks have slowed down health expenditure growth rates in these countries or vice versa our main findings are that 1 health expenditures share a common break in both bivariate and trivariate cases and structural breaks and break intervals suggest that either one or a combination of events second oil price shock the 1987 stock market crash and or recessions have contributed to the commonality of break in health expenditures in the g3 while the oil price shocks have been instrumental in the commonality of breaks for the european countries 2 except for the uk structural breaks have slowed down growth rates in health expenditures for the usa japan switzerland and spain

what drives health care expenditure baumol s model of unbalanced growth revisited the share of health care expenditure in gdp rises rapidly in virtually all oecd countries causing increasing concern among politicians and the general public yet economists have to date failed to reach an agreement on what the main determinants of this development are this paper revisits baumol s baumol w j 1967 macroeconomics of unbalanced growth the anatomy of urban crisis american economic review 57 3 415 426 model of unbalanced growth showing that the latter offers a ready explanation for the observed inexorable rise in health care expenditure the main implication of baumol s model in this context is that health care expenditure is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth this hypothesis is tested empirically using data from a panel of 19 oecd countries our tests yield robust evidence in favor of baumol s theory

do per capita health care expenditures converge among oecd countries evidence from unit root tests with level and trend shifts this study examines the stochastic conditional convergence of per capita health care expenditures pchce among 19 oecd countries over the period 1972 2008 specifically newly developed lm and rals lm unit root tests with allowance for two endogenously determined structural breaks are employed the results indicate support for pchce convergence among most oecd countries the results are stronger in more general tests that control for two breaks and nonnormal errors panel unit root tests provide additional support for the stochastic convergence of pchce

is health care a necessity or a luxury pooled estimates of income elasticity from us state level data this paper provides new evidence on the income elasticity of health care by combining stationarity and cointegration tests of health care expenditure and incomes with estimates of the cointegrating relationship between them a recently updated dataset of health care expenditures and disposable personal income for the us states for the years 1966 1998 is used the principal findings are that health care expenditures and incomes at the state level are non stationary and cointegrated dynamic ols cointegrating regressions of the pooled state time series estimate the income elasticity of health care at 0 817 to 0 844 well below unity confirming that health care expenditure even at the aggregate level is a necessity good

exploring the sources of default clustering abstract we study the sources of corporate default clustering in the united states we reject the hypothesis that firms default times are correlated only because their conditional default rates depend on observable and latent systematic factors by contrast we find strong evidence that contagion through which the default by one firm has a direct impact on the health of other firms is a significant clustering source the amount of clustering that cannot be explained by contagion and firms exposure to observable and latent systematic factors is insignificant our results have important implications for the pricing and management of correlated default risk

agricultural household models extensions applications and policy this book presents the basic model of an agricultural household that underlies most of the case studies undertaken so far the model assumes that households are price takers and is therefore recursive the decisions modeled include those affecting production and the demand for inputs and those affecting consumption and the supply of labor comparative results on selected elasticities are presented for a number of economies the empirical significance of the approach is demonstrated in a comparison of models that treat production and consumption decisions separately and those in which the decisionmaking process is recursive the book summarizes the implications of agricultural pricing policy for the welfare of farm households marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services the rural labor market budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings in addition it is shown that the basic model can be extended in order to explore the effects of government policy on crop composition nutritional status health saving and investment and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the effects on budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings methodological topics primarily the data requirements of the basic model and its extensions along with aggregation market interaction uncertainty and market imperfections are discussed the most important methodological issues the question of the recursive property of these models is also discussed

demographic political institutional and financial determinants of regional social expenditure the case of spain abstractdemographic political institutional and financial determinants of regional social expenditure the case of spain regional studies this paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of regional social spending using a dataset of the 17 regional governments in spain with both a fixed effects static and a dynamic model results suggest that demography inputs institutional design and resources are critical in determining the size of regional social budgets empirical evidence was found about the existence of economies of scale but social services do not seem to follow a luxury goods pattern left wing governments seem to spend more while federal regulations work as constraints of regional autonomy finally strong evidence that the foral system of regional financing is creating horizontal inequalities in the access to essential public services was found while the common regime seems to be working well enough

on stationarity and cointegration of international health expenditure and gdp this paper examines stationarity and cointegration of health expenditure and gdp for a sample of 21 oecd countries using data for the period 1960 1997 by applying a test battery that allows robust inference to be made on the stationarity and cointegration issue trend stationarity and no cointegration are tested using new country by country and panel tests not previously applied in this setting new results for country by country and panel tests of non stationarity and cointegration are presented our unit root and trend stationarity results indicate that both health expenditure and gdp are non stationary the no cointegration and cointegration results indicate that health expenditure and gdp are cointegrated

cash crops and food security evidence from ethiopian smallholder coffee producers one of the central questions in food policy debates has been the role of cash cropping for achieving food security in low income countries we revisit this question in the context of smallholder co

financial factors in the great depression eginning with irving fisher 1933 and john maynard keynes 1931 b 1963 macroeconomists have argued that financial markets were important sources and propagators of decline during the great depression turning points during the depression often coincided with or were preceded by dramatic events in financial markets stock market collapse waves of bankruptcy and bank failure and contractions in the money stock but the mechanism through which financial factors contributed to the depression has been a source of controversy as has been the relative importance of financial factors in explaining the origins and persistence of the depression this essay reviews the literature on the role of financial factors in the depression and draws some lessons that have more general relevance for the study of the depression and for macroeconomics i argue that much of the recent progress that has been made in understanding some of the most important and puzzling aspects of financial real links in the depression followed a paradigm shift in economics a central neglected theoretical piece of the story for financial factors was the allocative effects of imperfections in capital markets which can imply links between disruptions in financial markets and subsequent economic activity also the increasing emphasis on learning and path dependence in economics has helped to explain why financial shocks during the 1930s were so severe and why policy makers failed to prevent the depression

developing agricultural markets in sub saharan africa organic cocoa in rural uganda abstract this article investigates the process of development in a traditional african export market focusing on a contract farming scheme for organic cocoa in rural uganda based on a repeated household survey we measure the impact of the scheme on the income of participants and the economic mechanisms behind these effects we find substantial benefits from the scheme driven primarily by the establishment of credible incentives for farmers to adopt technologies which improve cocoa quality there is also evidence of broader trends of market deepening and increased productivity probably due to positive spillovers

the growth of public health expenditures in oecd countries do government ideology and electoral motives matter this paper empirically evaluates whether government ideology and electoral motives influenced the growth of public health expenditures in 18 oecd countries over the 1971 2004 period the results suggest that incumbents behaved opportunistically and increased the growth of public health expenditures in election years government ideology did not have an influence these findings indicate 1 the importance of public health in policy debates before elections and 2 the political pressure towards re organizing public health policy platforms especially in times of demographic change

convergence in per capita health expenditures and health outcomes in the oecd countries our analysis of 19 organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries over the period 1972 to 2006 provides evidence of convergence in per capita health care expenditures for 17 countries while the us and to a lesser degree norway follow a different path a simple decomposition of per capita health expenditures reveals that the divergence of the us comes from the divergence of the ratio of health care expenditures to gross domestic product gdp component while norway s divergence is mainly caused by the labour productivity component interestingly our results suggest that convergence in per capita health expenditures among the 17 oecd countries does not lead to convergence in health outcomes finally we extend our analysis to examine convergence in various determinants of health expenditures

fundamentals panics and bank distress during the depression we assemble bank level and other data for fed member banks to model determinants of bank failure fundamentals explain bank failure risk well the first two friedman schwartz crises are not associated with positive unexplained residual failure risk or increased importance of bank illiquidity for forecasting failure the third friedman schwartz crisis is more ambiguous but increased residual failure risk is small in the aggregate the final crisis early 1933 saw a large unexplained increase in bank failure risk local contagion and illiquidity may have played a role in pre 1933 bank failures even though those effects were not large in their aggregate impact

health care expenditures and gdp panel data unit root test results abstract this short paper presents unit root test results for time series on per capita national health care expenditures and gross domestic product in the oecd unlike the country by country test used by hansen p king a 1996 the determinants of health care expenditure a cointegration approach j health econ 15 127 137 the test we employ exploits the panel nature of the oecd data using this approach we are able to reject the null hypothesis that these series contain unit roots no single test is likely to be definitive in this rapidly evolving area of econometric research however our results help to mitigate concern that panel data analyses of national health care expenditures are misspecified

cash crop production food price volatility and rural market integration in the third world large farmers in the third world often devote to cash crops a larger share of their land than do small farmers this paper suggests a possible explanation even in the presence of food markets third world farmers food security is best assured by food self sufficiency a model of crop portfolio choice under multivariate risk is used to show that reasonable assumptions regarding risk and preferences reproduce the observed pattern simulations further indicate that food market integration reduces the need for food self sufficiency policy implications are drawn regarding domestic trade liberalization and agricultural technology

the granger causality between health care expenditure and output a panel data approach this study investigates the granger causality relationship between real per capita gdp and real per capita health care expenditure by employing a large macro panel data set with a var representatio

does morbidity matter perceived health status in explaining the share of healthcare expenditures we argue that the demand for healthcare services can be better explained by individual need based variables rather than by macro variables such as the gross domestic product gdp per capita and the share of public healthcare expenditures this study introduces a self rated health variable called morbidity that describes individual needs for health care healthy individuals need less health care than sick ones and that is measured through personal interviews conducted by the organization for economic co operation and development oecd in addition stationary properties of the series are considered in order to understand the effect of shocks to expenditure behaviour on health care stationary test results show that we should not only use differenced values for the model variables but also incorporate time specific effects into the model using the appropriate specification and accounting for the time effect we find evidence supporting the hypothesis that the share of healthcare expenditure in gdp ris

health care expenditure and gdp are they broken stationary in this paper we analyse the stationarity of the real per capita health care expenditure hce and real per capita gdp for a sample of oecd countries allowing for the presence of multiple structural breaks one novelty of the paper is that it permits the presence of structural breaks that affect both the level and the slope of the time series after the cross section dependence is accounted for we have found that these variables can be characterised as stationary processes evolving around a broken trend

demand for medical care consumption and cointegration abstract this paper considers a generalized version of grossman s health capital model and derives a cointegration restriction the restriction is tested using aggregate us data and the results are consistent with the prediction of the model

food marketing and pricing policy in eastern and southern africa a survey abstract this article surveys the empirical record of grain marketing and pricing policy in eastern and southern africa over 1930 1995 the paper addresses five key issues with major implications for food policy throughout africa a why the anticipated supply response to market liberalization has not yet occurred b why the common assumption of state taxation of farmers to support a cheap food policy does not apply in most of the countries in the region c why the temporary successes of the state led approach to stimulating smallholder grain production were unsustainable d why the elimination of government food subsidies associated with market reform has not adversely affected consumers and e why the fiscal cost of the marketing systems at least initially worsened rather than improved after the reforms were implemented in most countries the key future challenges for marketing policy are how to develop coordinated and financially sustainable input finance and commodity marketing systems for raising productivity growth in smallholder agriculture while overcoming inherited agricultural dualism and how to mitigate the effects of food price instability in a cost effective manner

price and quantity in international comparisons of health care expenditure an important omission from earlier cross national comparisons of health care expenditure has been the failure to distinguish between price and quantity using recent data on purchasing power parities the purpose of this article is to report some preliminary results regarding health care expenditure and quantity across 22 oecd countries the article concludes that contrary to what has been suggested in some recent articles the relative price of health care is not correlated to the aggregate per capita income the fraction of the national income that is devoted to health care provision increases with the per capita income regardless of whether health care is measured in terms of expenditure or quantity the relative price of health care has a rationing effect on the quantity of health care that is offered with a price alasticity close to minus one the latter finding means that the health care expenditure is not greater in countries with higherprices furthermore the differences in health care expendit

competition and coordination in liberalized african cotton market systems abstract private operators now dominate input supply crop buying and ginning activities in many african cotton sectors varying levels of competition are observed but greater levels of competition are not necessarily associated with better system performance this paper explores this phenomenon drawing on the liberalization experience of ghana mozambique tanzania uganda zambia and zimbabwe while the capacity of the state to support markets remains weak there may be tradeoffs between the level of competition and the degree of coordination achieved between players within a sector different sectoral structures are observed with a different role for the state appropriate for each

a nonlinear approach to testing the unit root null hypothesis an application to international health expenditures in this article we examine the unit root null hypothesis for per capita total health expenditures hes per capita private hes and per capita public hes for 29 organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries the novelty of our work is that we use a new nonlinear unit root test that allows for one structural break in the data series we find that for around 45 of the countries we are able to reject the unit root hypothesis for each of the three he series moreover using monte carlo simulations we show that our proposed unit root model has better size and power properties than the widely used augmented dickey fuller adf and lagrange multiplier lm type tests

revisiting the cotton problem a comparative analysis of cotton reforms in sub saharan africa summary the cotton sector has been among the most regulated in sub saharan africa ssa and still largely is in west and central africa wca despite repeated reform recommendations by international donors on the other hand orthodox reforms in east and southern africa esa have not always yielded the expected results this paper uses a stylized contracting model to investigate the link between market structure and equity and efficiency in ssa cotton sectors explain the outcomes of reforms in esa and analyze the potential consequences of reforms in wca we illustrate our arguments with empirical observations on cotton sector performance

how does gender affect sustainable intensification of cereal production in the west african sahel evidence from burkina faso better understanding of gender differences in the adoption of agricultural intensification strategies is crucial for designing effective policies to close the gender gap while sustainably enhancing farm productivity we examine gender differences in adoption rates likelihood and determinants of adopting strategy sets that enhance yields protect crops and restore soils in the west african sahel based on analysis of cereal production in burkina faso applying a multivariate probit model to a nationally representative household panel we exploit the individual plot as unit of analysis and control for plot manager characteristics along with other covariates reflecting the socio cultural context of farming combined with the economic attributes of inputs we find that female managers of individual cereal fields are less likely than their male counterparts to adopt yield enhancing and soil restoring strategies although no differential is apparent for yield protecting strategies more broadly gender disaggregated regressions demonstrate that adoption determinants differ by gender plot manager characteristics including age marital status and access to credit or extension services do influence adoption decisions furthermore household resources influence the probability of adopting intensification strategy sets differently by gender of the plot manager variables expressing the availability of household labor strongly influence the adoption of soil restoring strategies by female plot managers by contrast household resources such as extent of livestock owned value of non farm income and area planted to cotton affect the adoption choices of male plot managers rectifying the male bias in extension services along with improving access to credit income and equipment to female plot managers could contribute to sustainable agricultural intensification

unit root and cointegration tests timeseries versus panel estimates for international health expenditure models classical regression estimates of the determinants of the oecd health expenditures are useful for policy formulation and evaluation however if the underlying timeseries data are not collectively stationary in levels the estimated parameters are faulty and can misguide health policy until very recently the crucial stationarity tests were ignored in a large number of studies on international comparisons stationarity adf phillips perron ips heterogeneous panel and cointegration engle granger bivariate johansen s multivariate tests are conducted here using 1960 1997 health expenditures data 1998 cd rom of 19 oecd countries it is found that extending the time series data length affects the order of integration and number of cointegrating vectors however it is arguable whether the order of integration decreases or increases as more observations are added for testing the failure of the johansen and engle granger cointegration tests for most of the oecd countries cautions policy makers against

how institutions mediate the impact of cash cropping on food crop intensification an application to cotton in sub saharan africa summary it is widely agreed that smallholder led agricultural growth would contribute most to improved food security and reduced poverty yet how to achieve broader and more sustainable access by smallholder farmers to productivity enhancing inputs for food crop production remains a largely unsolved riddle in light of the great institutional diversity across cotton sectors in sub saharan africa this study investigates whether cotton can be used to spur the intensification of smallholder food production first a conceptual framework linking cotton institutional structures to food crop intensification is developed then predictions from the conceptual framework are compared with empirical evidence from different countries

aggregate health care expenditures and national income is health care a luxury good it is well known that a strong relationship exists between national expenditures on health care and national income this has been used to suggest that health care is a luxury good and that factors such as the type of health care delivery system in a country are of little importance in determining expenditure levels this paper argues that these implications rely upon the application of microeconomic analysis to macroeconomic data and that this is not appropriate as well as raising questions about the inferences drawn from previous studies new empirical evidence is presented which casts some doubts on previous findings international comparisons are based on purchasing power parity rather than exchange rate conversions underlining the importance of prices as well as quantities in the relationship and leading to the conclusion that the aggregate data show health care to be if anything a necessity rather than a luxury good

corporate debt structure and economic recoveries abstract this paper analyzes the business cycle behavior of the corporate debt structure and its interaction with economic recovery the debt structure is measured as the share of bonds in the total credit to non financial corporations for a quarterly panel of countries over the period 1989 2013 we first show that the substitution of loans for bonds in recoveries is a regular property of business cycles secondly we provide evidence that economies with high bond share and important bond loan substitution recover from the recessions faster this identified link between corporate debt structure and business cycles is robust to the inclusion of traditional factors which shape recessions and recovery such as the size and the quality of financial markets the occurrence of bank crisis the dynamics of credit and the distribution of firm size

globalization privatization and vertical coordination in food value chains in developing and transition countries food and agricultural commodity value chains in developing and transition countries have undergone tremendous changes in the past decades companies and property rights have been privatized markets liberalized and economies integrated into global food systems the liberalization and privatization initially caused the collapse of state controlled vertical coordination more recently private vertical coordination systems have emerged and are growing rapidly as a response to consumer demand for food quality and safety on the one hand and the farms production constraints caused by factor market imperfections in this article we 1 demonstrate the importance of these changes 2 discuss the implications for efficiency and equity and 3 provide empirical evidence on the effects in several developing and transition countries

interlinked markets and the cash crop food crop debate in land abundant tropical agriculture the purpose of this article is to illustrate how such institutions do arise in the african context under certain preconditions it is argued that the lack of a land market due largely to a non capitalist conception of property rights over land 3 along with other conditions to be examined below leads to the failure of labor and private sector credit markets in response indigenous institutions have evolved to cope with the market failures

an annual index of u s industrial production 1790 1915 as a remedy for the notorious deficiency of pre civil war u s macroeconomic data this study introduces an annual index of american industrial production consistently defined from 1790 until world war i the index incorporates 43 quantity based annual series most entirely new in the manufacturing and mining industries in a manner similar to the federal reserve board s monthly industrial production index the index changes our view of the growth and volatility of the u s economy before world war i a direct implication of the index is that antebellum postbellum differences in industrial volatility are statistically indistinguishable the index also demonstrates that the pernicious deflationary depressions that purportedly followed the financial panics in 1837 and 1873 were actually rather mild recessions when expressed in real output

review of the literature on the determinants of healthcare expenditure this study reviews the literature on determinants of healthcare expenditure for the period 1998 to 2007 the methodology combines searches in the mesh database of pubmed with the search in the principal journals of health economics 20 primary studies were found that met the criteria for inclusion no single pattern of results is clearly identified among the 20 articles four consider income to be the principal determinant of healthcare expenditure two of them jointly with population ageing six highlight population ageing as against six others that emphasize the proximity to death the remaining six do not focus on a specific variable or focus on another variable e g technological progress or territorial decentralization 11 of the 20 articles calculate the income elasticity of demand only two of them obtaining a value greater than 1 thus cataloguing healthcare expenditure as a luxury good there is therefore no unanimity in the variables and econometric regressions of healthcare expenditure in

does environmental quality influence health expenditures empirical evidence from a panel of selected oecd countries in this paper we examine the role of environmental quality in determining per capita health expenditures we take a panel cointegration approach in order to explore the possibility of estimating both short run and long run impacts of environmental quality our empirical analysis is based on eight oecd countries namely austria denmark iceland ireland norway spain switzerland and the uk for the period 1980 1999 we find that per capita health expenditure per capita income carbon monoxide emissions sulphur oxide emissions and nitrogen oxide emissions are panel cointegrated while short run elasticities reveal that income and carbon monoxide emissions exert a statistically significant positive effect on health expenditures in the long run in addition to income and carbon monoxide we find that sulphur oxide emissions have a statistically significant positive impact on health expenditures

is social protection a necessity or a luxury good new multivariate cointegration panel data results the aim of this paper is to test the claim that social protection is a luxury good therefore gdp elasticity of selected social protection expenditure is estimated using a new econometric approach developed first by kao and chiang advances in econometrics 15 179 222 2000 time series properties of selected social expenditure in 18 oecd countries from 1981 to 1998 are examined using panel data cointegration tests and ols fmols and dols estimators results were found which differ from previous analyses reporting substantially higher income elasticities with the fmols selected social expenditure has income elasticities smaller than one but greater than one with the dols it is noteworthy that whether selected social expenditure is stationary or nonstationary may have critical implications for researchers and policy makers desiring to model and explain the impact of this expenditure on a country economic system

economic reform and smallholder agriculture in tanzania a discussion of recent market liberalization road rehabilitation and technology dissemination efforts abstract this paper discusses the reforms affecting tanzania s small farm sector during 1984 1993 it focuses on changes in marketing and input supply including the revival of regional cooperative societies the ending of the state monopoly in food crop procurement and changes in the export crop sector efforts to rehabilitate the country s road network and the effects of institutional change on a technology dissemination program sasakawa global 2000 are also discussed the author concludes that improvements in the performance of the smallholder sector cannot be expected to follow automatically from a withdrawal of government

cointegration and unit roots this paper provides an updated survey of a burgeoning literature on testing estimation and model specification in the presence of integrated variables integrated variables are a specific class of non stationary variables which seem to characterise faithfully the properties of many macroeconomic time series the analysis of cointegration develops out of the existence of unit roots and offers a generic route to test the validity of the equilibrium predictions of economic theories special emphasis is put on the empirical researcher s point of view

interdependence between cash crop and staple food international prices across periods of varying financial market stress abstractthis paper investigates the price dynamics between a selection of international staple food and cash crop futures prices this price interaction is particularly relevant for developing coun

disrupting demand for commercial seed input subsidies in malawi and zambia summary this study uses nationally representative household level panel data from malawi and zambia to identify the determinants of subsidized maize seed and fertilizer receipt and to estimate how input subsidies affect households commercial purchases of improved maize seed varieties in both countries we find that households in areas where the ruling party won the last presidential election acquire significantly more subsidized inputs than other households results also indicate that each additional kilogram of subsidized maize seed acquired by a household reduces its commercial improved maize seed purchases by 0 58 kg in malawi and by 0 49 kg in zambia on average

household specific food price differentials and high value crop production in rural ghana using panel data from ghana we have examined the relationship between household specific producer consumer price differentials and rural household cropland allocation between food and high value crops we test the hypothesis that cereal price bands induce a shift of resources away from high value crop production making smallholders appear unresponsive to price incentives our results lend support to this hypothesis implying that a policy aiming at increasing farmers income through high value crop production may fail if hard and soft infrastructure does not improve in rural areas and if staple crop productivity does not increase significantly

on the effect of income and relative price on demand for health care ec evidence this paper demonstrates that the relative price of health care could be used to explain the conflicting results of the empirical studies which attempt to measure the income elasticity of demand our empirical results based on a conventional model and cross national data set for the ec show that whereas health care may be labelled as a luxury good the large income effect can be interpreted as merely offsetting the price effect

new panel results on cointegration of international health expenditure and gdp this article tests for existence of cointegration between health expenditure and gdp using data from 25 oecd countries for the period 19607ndash 1997 the empirical modelling is based on a heterogeneous bivariate vector error correction panel model that allows for trending data as well as intercepts and trends in the cointegrating relations univariate country by country and panel unit root tests generally fail to reject the null of a unit root in the health expenditure and gdp variables country by country results based on the johansen multivariate likelihood based inference indicate somewhat mixed results on country specific cointegration with a rank of one found for 12 countries and a rank of zero for the remaining 13 countries application of a new panel test for cointegration rank with higher power than the individual tests indicates that health expenditure and gdp are cointegrated around linear trends

evidence on the determinants of canadian provincial government health expenditures 1965 1991 abstract real per capita provincial government expenditures on health care over the period 1965 1991 are examined using pooled time series cross section regression analysis key determinants of real per capita provincial government expenditures on health care over the period 1965 1991 are real provincial per capita income the proportion of the provincial population over age 65 and real provincial per capita federal transfer revenues established program financing had a negative and significant impact on real per capita provincial government health expenditures in newfoundland and quebec an income elasticity of 0 77 implies that health care is not a luxury good

conversion factor instability in international comparisons of health care expenditure parkin mcguire and yule 1987 hereafter pmy report that a regression of per capita health care expenditure on per capita income using different conversion factors exchange rates gdp ppps health ppps gave rise to different results in this note we apply updated data to the same empirical relationship in contrast to pmy we find no noticeable conversion factor instability in that relationship either with respect to the health care income elasticity or with the magnitude of multiple correlation coefficient

agricultural commercialization of karen hill tribes in northern thailand based on a random sample of 240 farm households in chiang mai province thailand this study shows that contrary to widespread belief karen farm households are well integrated into markets average levels of market integration are 31 for gross farm output 35 for variable inputs 49 for food consumption and 80 for net family income by estimating a two stage least squares 2sls regression model this study finds that integration into output markets is positively associated with a diversification of land use away from rice monoculture more intense contact with nearby urban centers and a greater number of roads connecting the village to the outside world controlling for these factors the distance to urban centers does not impede market integration distant villages are equally well integrated into output markets the study further finds that integration into output markets improves farm productivity and net per capita income concerns about market integration are discussed results have implications for thai policy makers who have recently placed increasing emphasis on the concept of sufficiency economy in order to promote the well being of rural people

bank bias in europe effects on systemic risk and growth europe s financial structure has become strongly bank based far more so than in other economies we document that an increase in the size of the banking system relative to equity and private bond markets is associated with more systemic risk and lower economic growth particularly during housing market crises we argue that these two phenomena arise owing to an amplification mechanism by which banks overextend and misallocate credit when asset prices rise and ration it when they drop the paper concludes by discussing policy solutions to europe s bank bias which include reducing regulatory favouritism towards banks while simultaneously supporting the development of securities markets

cash cropping and food crop productivity synergies or trade offs the case for promoting export oriented cash crops in africa has generally been based on their direct potential contribution to agricultural productivity and small farmer incomes a relatively neglected avenue of research concerns the synergistic effects that cash cropping can have on other household activities including food production the conventional view that cash crops compete with food crops for land and labour neglects the potential for cash crop schemes to make available inputs on credit management training and other resources that can contribute to food crop productivity which might otherwise not be accessible to farmers if they did not participate in cash crop programs this article builds on previous research by hypothesising key pathways by which cash crops may affect food crop activities and empirically measuring these effects using the case of cotton in gokwe north district in zimbabwe analysis is based on instrumental variable analysis of survey data on 430 rural households in 1996 results indicate that after controlling for household assets education and locational differences households engaging intensively in cotton production obtain higher grain yields than non cotton and marginal cotton producers we also find evidence of regional spill over effects whereby commercialisation schemes induce second round investments in a particular area that provide benefits to all farmers in that region regardless of whether they engage in that commercialisation scheme the study suggests that the potential spill over benefits for food crops through participation in cash crop programs are important to consider in the development of strategies designed to intensify african food crop production

granger causality between total expenditure on health and gdp in oecd evidence from the toda yamamoto approach abstract in this paper a modified version of the granger causality test proposed by toda and yamamoto is used to investigate causality between gdp and healthcare expenditure in oecd countries the findings indicate that bidirectional granger causality is predominant

on the international stability of health care expenditure functions are government and private functions similar this paper studies the stability of health care expenditure functions in a sample of oecd countries we adopt the cointegration approach and the results show that there is a long term relationship between total health care expenditure hce and gross domestic product gdp however the existence of cointegration is only shown when we admit the presence of some changes in the elasticities of the model our results also provide evidence against the existence of a unique relationship between health and gdp for the sample thus we can conclude that the differences in health systems may cause differences in the aggregate functions additionally we examine aggregate health functions for government ghce and private expenditures phce again finding evidence of different patterns of behaviour finally we open a discussion on the character of health as a necessary or luxury good in this context we find differences between the government and the private function in order to illustrate these findings we propose a theoretical model as an example of the influence of political decisions on income elasticity

on the determination of the us aggregate health care expenditure per capita real health care expenditure is examined against three major groups of explanatory variables economic demographic and health stock and it is found that the three groups of variables have an impact on real health care spending other subcategories such as real private and government health care pharmaceutical dental home nursing ambulatory personal medical consumption and in patient expenditures have also been examined and have been found to be affected by the explanatory variables for several subcomponents there is evidence of supplier inducement of the demographic group of variables the ageing population had an impact only on the per capita real overall and private health care outlay and pharmaceutical spending also cointegrating relationships were found and consistent estimators of the elasticities found

is health care really a luxury a demand and supply approach many studies have found strong and positive relationship between per capita income and health care expenditure these studies usually adopt the assumptions that 1 the relationships among the variables are constant and or 2 the supply side market for health care could be treated by using standard demand functions models to take into account of the supply side of health care we use the demand and supply approach with the cointegration model to re examine this issue by using taiwan health care expenditure data our results show that the real income elasticity is smaller than unity and the health care expenditures are primarily for curing rather than caring

the determinants and effects of health expenditure in developed countries previous studies of international differences in health spending have been restricted to the use of relatively small samples of cross sectional data our objective here is to re examine the results of previous work using a sample of 560 pooled time series and cross section observations results confirm the importance of gdp as a determinant of health spending with an estimated income elasticity at or around unity but also suggest that oecd countries should not be regarded as a single homogeneous group the importance of some non income variables is also confirmed although the direct effect of these factors appears to be small

the evolving role of agriculture in poverty reduction an empirical perspective abstract the role of agriculture in development remains much debated this paper takes an empirical perspective and focuses on poverty as opposed to growth alone the contribution of a sector to poverty reduction is shown to depend on its own growth performance its indirect impact on growth in other sectors the extent to which poor people participate in the sector and the size of the sector in the overall economy bringing together these different effects using cross country econometric evidence indicates that agriculture is significantly more effective in reducing poverty among the poorest of the poor as reflected in the 1 day squared poverty gap it is also up to 3 2 times better at reducing 1 day headcount poverty in low income and resource rich countries including those in sub saharan africa at least when societies are not fundamentally unequal however when it comes to the better off poor reflected in the 2 day measure non agriculture has the edge these results are driven by the much larger participation of poorer households in growth from agriculture and the lower poverty reducing effect of non agriculture in the presence of extractive industries

cointegration and dynamic time series models abstract this paper provides a survey of some of the recent developments in the field of econometric modelling with cointegrated time series in particular we describe the testing and estimation procedures which have become increasingly popular in the recent applied literature in addition to the two stage procedure proposed by engle and granger we consider extensions to the modelling of dynamic models with cointegrated variables such as the estimation of models with multiple cointegration vectors simultaneous systems models with seasonally integrated and cointegrated variables furthermore we illustrate the practical application of the techniques describes in the paper by means of a tutorial data set

is health care really a luxury in oecd countries evidence from alternative price deflators this article examines whether real health care expenditure he is a luxury or necessity for organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries over the period 1972 to 2004 within a panel unit root and panel cointegration framework to realize this objective we regress he on real gross domestic product gdp the proportion of the population aged over 65 p65 and a time trend t we first present results for 18 countries where real he per capita is obtained using a general gdp deflator for these countries we find that health care is a luxury for just one country next we present results for eight countries where real he is obtained using a specific health care price index when the general gdp deflator is replaced with a specific health care price index at least one of the gdp p65 or t coefficients for the eight countries changes in a reasonably dramatic fashion suggesting that the use of the gdp deflator introduces bias into the regression we find that he is a necessity in

macroeconomic effects of corporate default crisis a long term perspective abstract using an extensive data set on corporate bond defaults in the us from 1866 to 2010 we study the macroeconomic effects of bond market crises and contrast them with those resulting from banking crises during the past 150 years the us has experienced many severe corporate default crises in which 20 50 of all corporate bonds defaulted although the total par amount of corporate bonds has at times rivaled the amount of bank loans outstanding we find that corporate default crises have far fewer real effects than do banking crises these results provide empirical support for current theories that emphasize the unique role that banks and the credit and collateral channels play in amplifying macroeconomic shocks

health care is an individual necessity and a national luxury applying multilevel decision models to the analysis of health care expenditures health care is neither a necessity or a luxury it is both since the income elasticity varies with the level of analysis with insurance individual income elasticities are typically near zero while national health expenditure elasticities are commonly greater than 1 0 the debate over whether health care is or is not a luxury good arises primarily from the failure to specify levels of analysis clearly so as to distinguish variation within groups from variation between groups apparently contradictory empirical results are shown to be consistent with a simple nested multilevel model of health care spending

stationarity of health expenditures and gdp evidence from panel unit root tests with heterogeneous structural breaks this paper re examines the stationarity of national health care expenditures and gdp in a panel setting utilizing data from 20 oecd countries over the period from 1960 to 1997 previous research in this area has recognized the drawback of not allowing for structural breaks in their unit root tests and noted that their empirical results may not be robust we advance the literature by utilizing a recently developed panel lm unit root test that allows for heterogeneous level shifts in contrast to previous analyses that did not consider breaks our results reject the unit root null hypothesis for both series