primitive accumulation agrarian reform and socialist transitions an argument this essay constructs a preliminary argument concerning the position of the peasantry in the twin transitions the first to industrialisation and the second towards socialism within orthodox marxian theory the two transitions are also sequential with the socialist order emerging from the crisis breakdown and overthrow of the capitalist system which in its maturity becomes a fetter upon further development and begets with the inexorability of a law of nature its own negation marx 1969 144 at this juncture the process of proletarianisation has been completed in the economy as a whole including the agricultural sector where the petty peasant producers and artisans have been separated from their means of production and have been reduced to the status of sellers of labour power while the landlords and or sections of the middle and rich peasantry have emerged as capitalist farmers who treat agriculture as a branch of industry integrated fully with the rest of the economy however this bit of marx s theory of history was drafted without the benefit of hindsight and thus far history has resisted conforming to what was expected of it the first socialist revolution broke the capitalist chain not at the strongest but rather at the weakest link and subsequent socialist transitions have also been initiated through revolutionary movements in arenas which display low initial levels of economic especially industrial development at the time of the revolutionary break with the past none of the present roll of socialist economies boasted an advanced industrial sector in none of them was the process of rural proletarianisation anywhere near completion indeed in most cases on both counts the situation was as far from the marxian postulation as could be imagined as such these countries have entered the socialist transition not through the crossroads of industrialisation instead they have launched upon the twin transitions simultaneously

credit constraints and the phenomenon of child labor abstract this paper develops an overlapping generations general equilibrium model where inefficient child labor arises due to credit constraints it derives a positive relationship between inequality in the distribution of income and the incidence of child labor looking at policy implications it shows how trade sanctions against countries using child labor may fail to reduce the incidence of child labor it discusses some alternative policies to reduce the incidence of child labor

economic tactics commercial policy and the socialization of african agriculture abstract commercial policies in some african countries have come under considerable criticism in recent years and it has become necessary to resolve the problems of existing agricultural marketing forms an alternative approach to the market liberalization commonly recommended is to intervene in the market so as to achieve its regulation and control and a pricing system which can and will support the socialization of agricultural production in collective farms maintain incentives for individual producers and encourage state procurement of basic crops such market control cannot be achieved without an active commercial policy based on the transformation of marketing institutions effective forms of market intervention and the devolution of considerable power over pricing and marketing from the national to the local levels

eco labelling consequences in general equilibrium a graphical assessment international environmental groups propose to implement new standards of forest management through programs that certify producers who meet criteria to enhance biodiversity or sustainability these producers could earn an eco label that identifies their products for consumers we consider whether a market economy might generate feedbacks that produce undesirable side effects as consumers respond to price changes while the general case is ambiguous the theoretical framework shows the potential that certification may lead to a reallocation of land toward less ecologically sustainable uses with the possibility of sufficient impact to diminish global biodiversity or sustainability of forest products

returns to work child labor and schooling the income vs price effects abstract this study examines the impact of returns to work for adult labor and child labor on child work and schooling outcomes we propose an empirical strategy that sheds light on the underlying income and price effects specifically we exploit variations in child labor intensity across crops and exogenous changes in crop tariffs following the 1991 indian trade liberalization exploiting pre reform district variations in crop composition we find opposite effects of tariff reductions for adult labor intensive crops and child labor intensive crops while reductions in the returns to adult labor lead to a negative income effect that reduces schooling reductions in the returns to child labor increase schooling due to the countervailing price effect we further document substantial heterogeneity across gender the price effect outweighs the income effect for boys but not for girls using a back of the envelope calculation we estimate the schooling elasticities with respect to returns to adult labor and child labor to be 0 23 and 0 86 respectively

kick starting diffusion explaining the varying frequency of preferential trade agreements environmental provisions by their initial conditions most recent preferential trade agreements ptas include environmental provisions while a number of these environmental provisions remain rare and are incorporated in just a few ptas others are widely popular and are duplicated in more than 100 ptas we still lack a convincing explanation for this varying frequency while the diffusion literature typically tries to explain how diffusion occurs we investigate why certain provisions diffuse more often than others we hypothesise that the initial conditions under which provisions first emerge determine the scope of their diffusion our results support this hypothesis and indicate that provisions originating from intercontinental agreements diffuse more often than others at the same time provisions first designed by economically powerful or environmentally credible countries are not related to more frequent occurrences of diffusion these findings are of interest for the literatures on international institutions design interaction and diffusion

does child labor decline with improving economic status between 1993 and 1997 child labor in vietnam declined by nearly 30 percent while the country s gdp grew by nearly 9 percent per year on average using a simple nonparametric decomposition i investigate the relationship between improvements in per capita expenditure and child labor with a panel data set that spans this episode of growth in vietnam improvements in per capita expenditure can explain 80 percent of the decline in child labor that occurs in households whose expenditures improve enough to move out of poverty this finding suggests a previously undocumented role for economic growth in the amelioration of child labor

a median voter model of social security this paper presents a theoretical median voter analysis of the determination of the level of social security the framework for the analysis is a continuous time overlapping generations model with nonaltruistic households facing borrowing constraints in the capital market a majority voting equilibrium is shown to exist in which the median voter is liquidity constrained the desired level of social security for each voter is a declining function of the preexisting level of social security as a consequence in a sequence of votes on social security beginning with a zero level the program initially overshoots its steady state value copyright 1989 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

child labor and the labor supply of other household members evidence from 1920 america this paper analyses the effect of child labor on household labor supply using 1920 us census micro data the aim of the analysis is to understand who in the household benefits from child labor in order to identify a source of exogenous variation in child labor i use state specific child labor laws i find that a rise in the proportion of working children by household is associated with no variation in parents labor supply i also find a strong negative externality among children as the proportion of working children by household rises everything else equal the probability that each child works falls while the probability that he attends school rises this suggests that parents redistribute entirely the returns from child labor to the children in the household consistent with a model of household labor supply with fully altruistic parents

a theory of political transitions we develop a theory of political transitions inspired by the experiences of western europe and latin america nondemocratic societies are controlled by a rich elite the initially disenfranchised poor can contest power by threatening revolution especially when the opportunity cost is low for example during recessions the threat of revolution may force the elite to democratize democracy may not consolidate because it is redistributive and so gives the elite an incentive to mount a coup highly unequal societies are less likely to consolidate democracy and may end up oscillating between regimes and suffer substantial fiscal volatility

transaction cost economics the natural progression abstract this manuscript provides the nobel laureate s reflections on transaction cost economics the overview section frames governance as the overarching concept and transaction cost economics as the means by which to breathe operational content into governance and organization the vertical integration section identifies efficiency factors associated with determining when a firm produces a good or service to its own needs rather than outsource a discussion of the rudiments of transaction cost analysis is subsequently provided puzzles and challenges that require pushing the logic of efficient governance to completion are examined and followed by concluding remarks

the economics of child labor if child labor as a mass phenomenon occurs not because of parental selfishness but because of the parents concern for the household s survival the popular argument for banning child labor loses much of its force however this assumption about parental decision making coupled with the assumption of substitutability in production between child and adult labor could result in multiple equilibria in the labor market with one equilibrium where children work and another where adult wage is high and children do not work the paper establishes this result and discusses its policy implications copyright 1998 by american economic association

does political reservation for minorities affect child labor evidence from india summary this paper examines the impact of state level political reservation for two minority groups scheduled castes and scheduled tribes on the incidence of child labor in india we estimate the effect of political reservation on the incidence of child labor by exploiting the state variation in the share of seats reserved for the two minority groups in state legislative assemblies mandated by the constitution of india using data from state and household level surveys on fifteen major indian states we find that at the household level schedule tribe reservation decreases the incidence of child labor while scheduled caste reservation increases the total number of children working we examine these impacts on the general as well as the disadvantaged group population independently and across the gender of children we also explore potential explanations for the differential impact of sc and st political reservation including geographic isolation caste fragmentation support for the congress party and decentralization of power our results survive a variety of robustness checks

child labor in the global economy few issues in developing countries draw as much popular attention as child labor this paper begins by quantifying the extent and main characteristics of child labor it then considers the evidence on a range of issues about child labor fundamentally child labor is a symptom of poverty low income and poor institutions are driving forces behind the prevalence of child labor worldwide this study concludes by assessing the policy options to reduce worldwide child labor

an economic theory of economic analysis the case of the school of salamanca the school of salamanca often is identified as the first economic tradition in the history of the dismal science its members anticipated principles later developed by the likes of adam smith and carl menger this paper provides an economic theory of the production of economic analysis by the doctors of salamanca beginning from the observation that producers of economic analysis respond to incentives the same way producers of meat beer or bread do historically the demand for economic analysis arises from two sources governments and interest groups i argue that the changes in international trade associated with the emergence of new transatlantic markets in the sixteenth century led to an increase in the demand for economic analysis by spanish merchants and that the contribution of the school of salamanca was grounded in the predictable supply response to those fresh incentives

money planning and rural transformation in mozambique this article argues that the transformation of the rural economy should proceed on a broad front which links the development of the state sector with the need to transform family agriculture through co operatisation in actual fact planning became concentrated on the state sector which received the bulk of the investible resources disequilibria between the planned needs of resources and their real availability destabilised the exchange between the state sector and peasant production and consequently blocked the possibilities of transforming family agriculture this contradition expresses itself in the form of monetary disequilibrium but it cannot be solved by monetary policy only rather it requires rethinking the nature of planning itself

public versus private education when differential fertility matters we assess the merits of different education systems in a framework that accounts for the joint decision problem of parents regarding fertility and education specifically we compare the implications of a public and a private schooling regime for economic growth and inequality we find that private schooling leads to higher growth when there is little inequality in human capital endowments across families in contrast when inequality is high public education yields higher growth by reducing fertility differentials in addition public schooling leads to income convergence while private schooling can result in ever increasing inequality our analysis highlights theimp ortanceof accounting for endogenous fertility differentials when analyzing educational policies

child labor cause consequence and cure with remarks on international labor standards although the literature on child labor is enormous it lacks a common theoretical foundation in this paper analytical survey of this field is provided keeping in mind that this is an area where the primary reason for theorizing is ultimately to influence policy overall it is noted that the literature on child labor is an illustration of abundance and anarchy although empirical writings on child labor are numerous they are not usually founded on theory it is argued that there is much that can be done in curbing the issue of child labor several theories were studied in this paper including collaborative intervention such efforts include public action which alters the economic environment such that the parents of their own accord prefer to withdraw the child from labor force another strategy involves the government a legal intervention is enforcing a total ban on the subject although such interventions have good intentions some of them may not be feasible in general it is better to take economy wide measures against child labor and if there is to be a sector specific ban it should be based on the working conditions of that sector rather than the destination of the goods

das human kapital a theory of the demise of the class structure this paper suggests that the demise of the capitalists workers class structure was a socio economic transformation orchestrated by the capitalists in reaction to the increasing importance of human capital in sustaining their profit rates physical capital accumulation in the process of industrialization enhanced the importance of human capital in production and generated incentives for capitalists to support the provision of public education for the masses triggering the demise of the existing class structure the implications of the theory are consistent with the voting patterns on england s education reform of 1902

is child labor inefficient we build a model of child labor and study its implications for welfare we assume that there is a trade off between child labor and the accumulation of human capital even if parents are altruistic and child labor is socially inefficient it may arise in equilibrium because parents fail to fully internalize its negative effects this occurs when bequests are zero or when capital markets are imperfect we also study the effects of a simple ban on child labor and derive conditions under which it may be pareto improving in general equilibrium we show that the implications of child labor for fertility are ambiguous

child labor and coordination failures abstract in this note we show that a technology based coordination failure may explain the emergence of laws restricting child labor child labor may arise because of the lack of a coordination mechanism between parental decisions to invest in the human capital of their children and firms decisions to invest in skill biased technologies legislative intervention in many cases helps coordinate expectations towards a pareto superior outcome with investments both in human capital and in skill biased technologies

accumulation social services and socialist transition in the third world reflections on decentralised planning based on the mozambican experience the purpose of this article is to argue for the viability and the logic of a distinctive approach to planning economic development and socialist transition in poor economies the components of this distinctive approach are more decentralised and popularly based planning and control of accumulation the close interlinking of investment in social services and in rural production and an emphasis on intervention in the market as a tool of socialist planning the article therefore presents an argument about economic planning intended to be relevant to a range of countries with similar general aims and problems however the ideas are developed here as they were in practice through a reflection on our own understanding of planning andits problems in mozambique during the first ten years of that country s independence 1

hierarchies markets and power in the economy an economic perspective this paper adopts the transaction cost economics perspective for purposes of examining hierarchies markets and power in the economy transaction cost economics works out of an economizing perspective in which markets and hierarchies are alternative modes of governance and the object is to ascertain which transactions go where and why the role of power in this setup is strictly limited partly because power tends to be myopic transactions are not examined in their entirety and partly because it is tautological power needs to be operationalized whereupon the refutable implications that accrue to this perspective can be derived copyright 1995 by oxford university press

why children work attend school or stay idle the roles of ability and household wealth abstract this paper offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of child labor schooling and idleness neither work nor school with particular emphasis on the roles of child ability and household wealth in determining these decisions we show theoretically that idleness may be chosen optimally by low income households whose child is of low ability using a rich data set from the philippines we find that while other factors including mother s labor supply the presence of a family business and access to good school quality contribute to these decisions child ability and household wealth are the most important determinants of child idleness and the use of child labor an implication of our findings is that any policy aiming to reduce child labor and increase child schooling should also target improvements in child ability and cognitive development through investments in the nutrition and health of poor children

does compulsory school attendance affect schooling and earnings we establish that season of birth is related to educational attainment because of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws individuals born in the beginning of the year start school at an older age and can therefore drop out after completing less schooling than individuals born near the end of the year roughly 25 percent of potential dropouts remain in school because of compulsory schooling laws we estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings by using quarter of birth as an instrument for education the instrumental variables estimate of the return to education is close to the ordinary least squares estimate suggesting that there is little bias in conventional estimates every developed country in the world has a compulsory schooling requirement yet little is known about the effect these laws have on educational attainment and earnings 1 this paper exploits an unusual natural experiment to estimate the impact of compulsory schooling laws in the united states the experiment stems from the fact that children born in different months of the year start school at different ages while compulsory schooling laws generally require students to remain in school until their sixteenth or seventeenth birthday in effect the interaction of school entry requirements and compulsory schooling laws compel students born

revisiting legal realism the law economics and organization perspective the contrast between american legal realism which ran itself into the sand schlegel 1979 p 459 and the law and economics movement which is perhaps the most important development in legal thought in the last quarter century posner 1986 p xix is dramatic that the one foundered while the other flourished is explained in large measure by the absence of an intellectual framework for legal realism and the use by law and economics of the powerful framework of neoclassical economics

aids treatment and intrahousehold resource allocation children s nutrition and schooling in kenya this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled acquired immunodeficiency syndrome aids treatment and intra household resource allocation children s nutrition and schooling in kenya conducted in late 2003 till present in kenya the study observed the impact of antiretroviral arv medications to human immunodeficiency virus infection hiv or aids on the time allocated to various household tasks by treated hiv positive patients and their household members on the individual level treating adult aids patients with arv treatment results in substantial improvements in the welfare of children living with the patients after nine months of treatment the increases in school attendance are maintained with no significant drop off over the time period of study for boys in particular the increase in hours of attendance is almost exactly equal to the treatment driven decrease in their hours of market labor supply the short term nutritional status of young children in adult patients households improves significantly also within six months after treatment is initiated for the patients not presented separately for boys and girls these gains in nutritional status can be expected to improve the physical and cognitive abilities of children and eventually their post school productivity levels funding for the study derived from the economic and social research council pfizer the world bank yale university s center for interdisciplinary research on aids the national institute of mental health the social science research council and the calderone program at columbia university

the use of knowledge about society abstract selection of efficient institutions or policies in politics requires constituents to estimate the net benefits of political reforms political competition fails to inform constituents of the costs of forgone political alternatives ignorance of political opportunity costs prevents the adoption of welfare enhancing reforms of public institutions and policies the empirical record supports this contention

appropriation violent enforcement and transaction costs a critical survey this paper focuses on the extension of transaction costs to appropriative activity and coercive power in the property rights approach it has been argued that including the costs of appropriation and violent enforcement in transaction costs is based on the assumption that coaseian bargaining can be extended to any institutional scenario i e voluntary as well as coercive exchange however voluntary transactions cannot capture the logic of coercive power this means that the assumption of an efficient political market is not valid and that the political coase theorem lacks the logical consistency to provide a cornerstone for political theory

the wto the environment and health and safety standards the world trade organization wto is a product of the general agreement on tariffs and trade gatt the wto was created in the last round of negotiations uruguay round 1986 94 to provide a stronger set of institutions to administer the various agreements negotiated under the gatt framework because the wto is more powerful than its predecessors critics claim that it poses a threat to national sovereignty concerns about the ability of nations to set their own environmental and health and safety agendas have figured prominently in these critiques in addition critics suggest that the wto prioritises trade objectives at the expense of environmental and health and safety objectives the article explores the extent to which the wto has been able to reconcile trade environmental and health and safety objectives by analysing its rulings on these matters overall this analysis suggests that the wto dispute resolution process has balanced all three sets of objectives however it is important to note the small number of disputes to date only 21of the 175 disputes before the wto involve environmental and health and safety matters further the wto has issued decisions in only six of these cases

transforming feudal agriculture agrarian change in ethiopia since 1974 this article seeks to examine the nature and consequences of agrarian change in ethiopia since the revolution of 1974 it argues that while the reforms implemented since 1975 have effectively destroyed the age old feudal framework of agriculture they have not yet created a coherent new framework even though the government s proclaimed objective is to develop a co operative framework not much progress in that direction has so far been made in fact state policies in the past few years were dictated by the need to cope with short term problems arising from a decline in production and marketed surplus of food in the immediate aftermath of the reforms the analysis in this article shows that the basic problem of peasant agriculture is that it currently produces only a meagre economic surplus at this stage therefore agricultural growth is to be achieved primarily through the promotion of labour investment this is the principal argument for co operativisation this view suggests state policies which are

the macroeconomics of child labor regulation we develop a positive theory of the adoption of child labor laws workers who compete with children in the labor market support a child labor ban unless their own working children provide a large fraction of family income fertility decisions lock agents into specific political preferences and multiple steady states can arise the introduction of child labor laws can be triggered by skill biased technological change which induces parents to choose smaller families the theory can account for the observation that in britain regulations were first introduced after a period of rising wage inequality and coincided with rapid fertility decline

the survival of the welfare state this paper provides an analytical characterization of markov perfect equilibria in a model with repeated voting where agents vote over distortionary income redistribution a key result is that the future constituency for redistributive policies depends positively on current redistribution since this affects both private investments and the future distribution of voters the model features multiple equilibria in some equilibria positive redistribution persists forever in other equilibria even a majority of beneficiaries of redistribution vote strategically so as to induce the end of the welfare state next period skill biased technical change makes the survival of the welfare state less likely

to segregate or to integrate education politics and democracy how is the quality of public education affected by the presence of private schools for the rich theory and evidence suggest that the link depends crucially on the political system we develop a theory that integrates private education and fertility decisions with voting on public schooling expenditures we find that the presence of a large private education sector benefits public schools in a broad based democracy where politicians are responsive to low income families but crowds out public education spending in a society that is politically dominated by the rich the main predictions of the theory are consistent with state level data and micro data from the u s as well as cross country evidence from the programme for international student assessment study

the economics of child labor comment in a recent paper kaushik basu and pham hoang van bv 1998 develop an important and very interesting model in which a fairly productive economy exhibits multiple equilibria with children working in at least one they identify two assumptions as essential to this result the first which they call the luxury axiom is that a family sends its children to the labor market only if its income from sources other than child labor is very low the second is embodied in their substitution axiom which states that from the point of view of firms child labor is substitutable for adult labor in this comment we show that in addition to these two assumptions about the micro level behavior of households and firms there is also an essential macro level assumption that may be termed the distribution axiom income or wealth from non labor sources must be sufficiently concentrated in the hands of a few agents we establish that if non labor income is distributed with sufficient equality a market equilibrium with child labor cannot exist in the bv model beyond their contribution as an extension of bv s theory our results formalize a proposition implicit in recent policy discussions of child labor christiaan grootaert and ravi kanbur 1995 note that as household level poverty is well known to be the major cause of child labor g eneral economic development equitably distributed is the best and most sustainable way of reducing child labor p 198 emphasis added policy documents from the international labor organization ilo have long conveyed this view and now the world bank appears to as well peter fallon and zafiris tzannatos 1998 there is a growing recognition that while economic development and development policies are necessary to eliminating child labor they are not always sufficient on their own distributional considerations matter indeed in the case in which bv s model yields multiple equilibria th this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

law or economics w hen aaron director and edward levi launched the journal of law and economics in 1958 director suggested the title law or economics this alternative title certainly described the world more accurately at that time the traditional attitude of each discipline toward the other had been one of indifference only gradually has that attitude been replaced by a mixture of cooperation and hostility the first systematic application in america of economics to law was the use of price theory to explain economic phenomena involved in the antitrust cases director made creative use of price theory to explain phenomena such as tie in sales and patent licensing and assisted younger colleagues such as john mcgee and lester telser in their respective studies of predatory competition and resale price maintenance in such applications professional economic analysis was replacing the amateur economics of the lawyer lawyers did not welcome this development the national committee for the study of the antitrust laws was the scene of a deep schism between the fifty three lawyers and the eight economists 2 these numbers probably represented the belief that 13 percent of antitrust policy is economics the remainder law at one point the lawyers attempted to exclude the economists completely from the formulation of the report the division was not simply one between angels and legally trained devils consider the question of price discrimination economists insisted that price discrimination could persist only under noncompetitive conditions under full competition rivals would undermine any attempt to sell part of the supply at a higher price the lawyers argued to the contrary

perverse consequences of well intentioned regulation evidence from india s child labor ban although bans against child labor are a ubiquitous policy tool there is very little empirical evidence on their effectiveness in this paper we examine the consequences of india s landmark legislation against child labor the child labor prohibition and regulation act of 1986 using data from employment surveys conducted before and after the ban and using age restrictions that determined whom the ban applied to we show that the relative probability of child employment increases and child wages relative to adult wages decrease after the ban our main specification relies on comparing changes in work probabilities over time for children of the same age but with siblings who are rendered either eligible or ineligible for legal work when the ban is implemented the increases in the probability of economic activity are largest for children i in areas where the industries targeted by the ban play a larger role in local labor markets ii in areas where the probability of employer inspections is higher and iii in families that are poorer these results are consistent with a theoretical model building on the seminal work of basu and van 1998 and basu 2005 where families use child labor to reach subsistence constraints and where child wages decrease in response to bans leading poor families to utilize more child labor we also find decreases in child participation in schooling for younger children only and no economically meaningful change in household outcomes like assets or calorie intake

the mystery of monogamy we examine why developed societies are monogamous while rich men through out history have typically practiced polygyny wealth inequality naturally pro duces multiple wives for rich men in a standard model of the marriage market however we demonstrate that higher female inequality in the marriage market reduces polygyny moreover we show that female inequality increases in the process of development as women are valued more for the quality of their chil dren than for the quantity consequently male inequality generates inequality in the number of wives per man in traditional societies but manifests itself as inequality in the quality of wives in developed societies jel j12 j16 j24 z13

will trade sanctions reduce child labour the role of credit markets abstract we examine the interaction between credit markets trade sanctions and the incidence of child labour in a two good two period model with unequally wealthy households both poverty and poor education quality inter alia are important determinants of child labour the incidence of child labour decreases as we move from the case of borrowing constraints to the case in which poor households can borrow freely from rich ones and then to the case of perfect international credit markets trade sanctions can increase child labour especially among poor households a possibility that decreases as their access to credit improves

how does child labor affect the demand for adult labor evidence from rural mexico do employers substitute adults for children or do they treat them as complements using data from a mexican schooling experiment i find that decreasing child farmwork is accompanied by increasing adult labor demand this increase was not caused by treatment money reaching farm employers there were no significant increases in harvest prices and quantities nonlabor inputs or nonfarm labor supply furthermore coordinated movements in price and quantity can distinguish this increase in demand from changes in supply induced by the treatment s income effects thus declining child supply caused increasing adult demand employers substituted adults for children

employment and distributional effects of restricting working time we study the employment and distributional effects of regulating reducing working time in a general equilibrium model with search matching frictions job creation entails fixed costs but existing jobs are subject to diminishing returns we characterize the equilibrium in the de regulated economy where firms and individual workers freely negotiate wages and hours then we consider the effects of a legislation restricting the maximum working time while we let wages respond endogenously employment effects are sensitive to the representation of preferences in our benchmark small reductions in working time starting from the laissez faire equilibrium solution always result in a small increase in the equilibrium employment while larger reductions reduce employment the regulation benefits workers both unemployed and employed even if wages decrease and even in cases where employment falls but reduces profits and output

population technology and growth from malthusian stagnation to the demographic transition and beyond this paper develops a unied growth model that captures the historical evolution of population technology and output it encompasses theendogenous transitionbetween three regimes that have characterized economic development the economy evolves from amalthusianregime wheretechnologicalprogressis slow andpopulationgrowthprevents anysustainedriseinincomepercapita intoapost malthusianregime wheretechnological progress rises and population growth absorbs only part of output growth ultimately a demographic transition reverses the positive relationship between income and population growth andtheeconomyentersamoderngrowthregimewithreducedpopulationgrowth

selling labor low wage responses to productivity shocks in developing countries productivity risk is pervasive in underdeveloped countries this paper highlights a way in which underdevelopment exacerbates productivity risk productivity shocks cause larger changes in the wage when workers are poorer less able to migrate and more credit constrained because of such workers inelastic labor supply this equilibrium wage effect hurts workers in contrast it acts as insurance for landowners agricultural wage data for 257 districts in india for 1956 87 are used to test the predictions with rainfall as an instrument for agricultural productivity in districts with fewer banks or higher migration costs the wage is much more responsive to fluctuations in productivity

inequality and growth why differential fertility matters we argue that inequality and growth are linked through differential fertility and the accumulation of human capital we build an overlapping generations model in which dynasties differ in their initial endowment with human capital growth the income distribution and fertility are endogenous due to a quantiy quality tradeoff families with less human capital decide to have more children and invest less in education when initial inequality is high large fertility differentials lower the growth rate of average human capital since poor families who invest little in education make up a large fraction of the population in the next generation a calibrated model shows that this fertility differential effect is quantitatively important we also provide empirical evidence to confirm the links between inequality differential fertility and growth suggested by the model

child labor and the law notes on possible pathologies abstract the paper demonstrates that the standard policy for controlling child labor by imposing a fine on firms caught employing children can cause child labor to rise this pathological reaction is however reversed as the size of the fine increases

the distributional dimensions of revolutionary transition ethiopia this study attempts to investigate some of the distributional costs that have attended upon the process of revolutionary transition in ethiopia focusing on the crucial role of the rural sector in this regard the central variable through which this sector influenced national economic performance was the marketed proportion of output the study deals with this linkage and with the macroeconomic distributional outcomes of the growth process for the rural and urban sectors the probable distributional implications of the ten year plan are elicited and the sobering findings provide the motivational force behind a few strategic policy considerations that are briefly outlined it is argued that the national economic growth process was seriously imbalanced and the sluggishness of agriculture meant that the growth was financed through an inflationary process which passed on the costs of accumulation substantially on to the poorer sections of the population

eco labelling and the trade environment debate he purpose of this paper is to consider the potential global environmental benefits of eco labelling programmes paying attention in particular to internationally traded commodities this is important for two reasons first we shall argue that in some instances the impetus behind the introduction of eco labels is that they are seen as an alternative to more trade restrictive environmental policies such as import bans or tariffs on goods with harmful environmental effects in such cases however it is desirable to consider the extent to which eco labelling programmes and trade restrictions might be substitutable with respect to their impact on the environment second eco labelling requirements for traded goods may be quite costly due to the potential for abuse of labelling requirements as technical trade barriers and the costs of compliance such as monitoring foreign production methods in view of these costs there is a presumption that ecolabelling requirements for imported goods should yield significant environmental benefits the paper is organised as follows in the next section we characterise some features of eco labelling programmes and show how these contrast with the more common health and safety labels section 3 then considers the political economy of eco labelling programmes specifically the relationship between eco labelling and trade environment disputes in section 4 we discuss the incentive problems inherent in eco labelling policies and identify their appropriateness as a tool of environmental policy section 5 considers these issues in the context of the debate over gm organisms and discusses some of the special issues that arise in that case before concluding in section 6

does voluntary participation undermine the coase theorem abstract the coase theorem states that costless enforcement of voluntary agreements yields efficient outcomes we argue that previous treatments fail to recognize the full meaning of voluntary it requires a two stage game a non cooperative participation decision followed by coaseian bargaining only among those who choose to participate we illustrate this in a simple public goods model and find outcomes ranging from extremely inefficient to fully efficient however the efficient equilibrium is not robust to even very small transaction costs thus we cast doubt on coaseian claims of universal efficiency finally we outline a kind of coercion that restores efficiency

agrarian reform as a model of accumulation the case of nicaragua since 1979 despite the fact that the historical experience of the construction of socialism has taken place in predominantly agrarian societies it is notorious that the agrarian question remains unresolved and constrains their progress to a greater or lesser degree this is all the more crucial for those revolutions of the second half of the twentieth century which generated in the third world by the liberation struggle not only seek an increased food supply as the basis for raising popular living standards but also greater exports from the primary sector to secure imports of producer goods thus the agrarian question becomes central to the accumulation model not only as a source of investible surplus but also as part of the articulation between the different forms of production which underlie the inherited social structure an account of the nicaraguan experience of agrarian reform in its first five years 1980 84 should have some intrinsic interest it also serves to illustrate this central problem of th