women s land tenure security and household human capital evidence from ethiopia s land certification this paper examines the impact of ethiopia s gendered land certification programs on household consumption of healthcare food education and clothing ethiopia embarked on a land tenure reform program in 1998 after years of communism during which all land was nationalized the reform began in tigray region where land certificates were issued to household heads who were primarily male in a second phase carried out in 2003 2005 three other regions issued land certificates jointly to household heads and spouses presenting variation in land tenure security by gender results using household panel data show that joint land certification to spouses was accompanied by increased household consumption of healthcare and homegrown food and decreased education expenditure compared to household head land certification joint land certification was also accompanied by increased consumption of women s and girls clothing and decreased men s clothing expenditures indicating results may be explained by a shift in the gender balance of power within households analysis on the incidence and duration of illness indicates that increased healthcare expenditures after joint land certification may be due to joint certification households seeking more effective treatment than head only certification households for household members who fell ill or suffered injuries

gambian women unequal partners in rice development projects agricultural development projects usually channel inputs to male household heads on the assumption that they control the land labour crops and finances this assumption is challenged for the mandinka women cultivate rainfed rice having ownership or use rights to rice land while men control upland and grow groundnuts and millets both cultivate household and personal crops three development projects introduced irrigated rice to men who therefore control this land and crop failure to involve women in rice development schemes has not only increased their economic dependence on men but is also a major reason for deficiencies in these projects and low national rice production

specific experience household structure and intergenerational transfers farm family land and labor arrangements in developing countries data from indian rural household survey was used to test th hypothesis that the coexistence in traditional rural societies of extended intergenerational families infrequent land sales and high reliance on family members as farm laborers is the result of the economic advantages which accrue from the knowledge gained by farming a particular ploy of land over a long period of time the land specific experience of elderly members of a intergenerational household who farmed the land as a child and then as an adult are expecially critical in adverse weather years most previous investigators attributed the existence of multigenerational households the use of family members rather than hired laboreds and the infrequency of land sales to deficiencies in the market i e labor market imperfections and an absence of capital insurance and asset markets in the present investigations these same characteristics are viewed as having an economic advantages a model for estimating the contribution of the experience of the elderly household members to agricultural profits was developed and applied to data from a 3 year panel study of 2900 indian rural farm households the data was collected between 1968 71 by the national council of applied economic research the survey collected information on farm profits farm inputs demographic characteristics and the effects of weather conditions on profits a major limitation of the study was a lack of information on the duration of land ownership age of household members was substituted as a proxy for duration of ownership findings were consistent withe the hypothesis in poor agricultural years gross returns for households which contained an elderly household member were greater than the gross returns for comparable households which did not contain an elderly member the economic advantages of specific knowledge embodied in the experienced elderly farmer were comparable to the economic advantages which accrued to households whose members were more educated the hypothesis cannot fully explain the existence of intergenerational families since there is a relatively large proportion of such families among nonfarm families in many countries including india findings suggest that intergenerational families may provide for more occupational diversity and thereby reduce income risks the specific experience hypothesis has policy implications if technological changes are introduced the value of specific experience may be lost and the frequency of intergenerational households may decline the hypothesis may also explain why farmers are reluctant to agree to land redistribution and consolidation schemes this reluctance may disappear after sufficient technological change has occurred

exporting does sales volume make a difference this research examines the effect that the size of a firm has on export activities perceived problems in exporting and attitudes toward exporting the results indicate that broad generalizations concerning the size of firms and exporting appear to be inappropriate

water from basic need to commodity a discussion on gender and water rights in the context of irrigation abstract this paper examines the implications of changing water policies for women s water rights and access to water in irrigation systems with growing water scarcity and programs to increase the efficiency of water allocation and delivery the allocation of water rights becomes critical although women often have informal means and mechanisms to obtain and secure access to water in most systems studied there is no recognition of women s specific water needs especially for production as opposed to domestic consumption current policies to privatize and devolve management of irrigation need to increase responsiveness to specific women s water needs and interests if they are to address efficiency as well as equity concerns

an experimental study of truth telling in a sender receiver game a recent experimental study of cai and wang 2005 on strategic information transmission reveals that subjects tend to transmit more information than predicted by the standard equilibrium analysis to evidence that this overcommunication phenomenon can be explained in terms of a tension between normative social behavior and incentives for lying we show in a simple sender receiver game that subjects incurring in costs to punish liars tell the truth more often than predicted by the logit agent quantal response equilibria whereas subjects that do not punish liars after receiving a deceptive message play on the aggregate equilibrium strategies thus we can partition the subject pool into two groups one group of subjects with preferences for truth telling and one taking into account only material incentives

gender and command over property a critical gap in economic analysis and policy in south asia abstract this paper focuses on a much neglected issue the links between gender inequities and command over property it outlines why in rural south asia where arable land is the most important form of property any significant improvement in women s economic and social situation is crucially tied to their having independent land rights better employment opportunities can complement but not substitute for land but despite progressive legislation few south asian women own land even fewer effectively control any why a complex range of factors social administrative and ideological are found to underlie the persistent gap between women s legal rights and their actual ownership of land and between ownership and control the necessity of collective action by women for overcoming these obstacles and the aspects needing a specific focus for policy and action are also discussed

female land ownership and fertility in nepal this paper examines the association between female land ownership and fertility in nepal using propensity score methods a female land owner is found to have an average of 0 26 0 47 fewer children than her non owner counterpart such negative female land fertility trends are observed for women in different age groups evidence indicates that female land ownership promotes women s wealth and decision making authority which could be the pathways through which their fertility is influenced these findings imply that female land ownership could have substantial welfare benefits for women and population implications for countries

rescuing gender from the poverty trap the new poverty agenda is seen as incorporating gender within a new broader concept of poverty lipton and maxwell 1992 capable of measuring evaluating and redressing gender bias along with poverty reduction policies based on labor intensive growth targeted social services and safety nets multilateral positions on gender and development gad for their part also stress the poverty of women as a primary justification for development interventions designed to improve the position of women it is argued here however that the concept of poverty cannot serve as a proxy for the subordination of women that antipoverty policies cannot be expected to improve necessarily the position of women and that there is no substitute for a gender analysis which transcends class divisions and material definitions of deprivation the instrumental interest in women as the means to achieve development objectives such as poverty reduction may ultimately undermine gad gender appears to have collapsed into a poverty trap this essay raises a call for help or at least a discussion about the relative benefits of captivity vs escape

strategic communication with lying costs i study a model of strategic communication between an uninformed receiver and an informed but upwardly biased sender the sender bears a cost of lying or more broadly of misrepresenting his private information the main results show that inflated language naturally arises in this environment where the sender almost always claims to be of a higher type than he would with complete information regardless of the intensity of lying cost there is incomplete separation with some pooling on the highest messages the degree of language inflation and how much information is revealed depend upon the intensity of lying cost the analysis delivers a framework to span a class of cheap talk and verifiable disclosure games unifying the polar predictions they make under large conflicts of interest i use the model to discuss how the degree of manipulability of information can affect the trade off between delegation and communication copyright 2009 wiley blackwell

intergenerational transfers in philippine rice villages gender differences in traditional inheritance customs abstract this paper examines education land and nonland asset transfers from parents to children in five rice villages in the philippines a model with family fixed effects explains transfers better than either individual heterogeneity or observed parent and child characteristics without family fixed effects families facing different land constraints exhibit significantly different patterns of educational investment in children in a subsample with completed inheritance daughters receive less education land and total inheritance but are compensated with nonland assets parents also exhibit preferential behavior towards children of the same gender daughters of better educated mothers receive more land nonland assets and total inheritance better educated fathers give land preferentially to sons but favor daughters in education

separation of powers and political accountability political constitutions are incomplete contracts and therefore leave room for abuse of power in democracies elections are the primary mechanism for disciplining public officials but they are not sufficient separation of powers between executive and legislative bodies also helps to prevent the abuse of power but only with appropriate checks and balances checks and balances work by creating a conflict of interest between the executive and the legislature yet requiring both bodies to agree on public policy in this way the two bodies discipline each other to the voters advantage under appropriate checks and balances separation of powers also helps the voters elicit information

is women s ownership of land a panacea in developing countries evidence from land owning farm households in malawi our analysis of a rich representative household survey for malawi where patrilineal and matrilineal institutions coexist suggests that in matrilineal societies the likelihood of high value crop cultivation by a household increases with the extent of land owned by males while the income generated from high value crop production decreases with the amount of land owned by females and the cultivation of high value crops increases household welfare the policy implication is that facilitating female ownership of assets through informal and formal institutions does not on its own increase welfare when appropriate complementary resources and institutions are absent

nutrition and labor producvivity in agriculture estimates for rural south india using panel data for rural south india a fixed effects individual wage equation and farm production function are estimated that have calorie intake and nutritional status weight for height of workers as their arguments neither market wages nor farm output are observed to be responsive to changes in the daily energy intake of workers however both are highly elastic with respect to weight for height these results suggest that while the human body can adapt to inadequate nutrition in the short run it cannot adapt as readily to chronic malnutrition that eventually results in loss of weight for height copyright 1988 by mit press

is land titling in sub saharan africa cost effective is land titling in sub saharan africa cost effective a cost benefit analysis suggests that the current system of formal titling should not be extended in rural madagascar and that any new system of land registration would have to be quite inexpensive to be worthwhile indeed establishing a modern property rights system without legally recognizing informal rights may expand the scope for rent seeking thus creating additional insecurity atwood 1990 purchasing a titled plot without easily being able to update the name on the document exposes the buyer to the risk that a relative of the seller sharing the family name might subsequently claim the plot or challenge the transfer analyses omitted here for brevity indicate that there is no significant advantage to owning titled land in terms of a household s access to formal credit after controlling for the household s landholdings within the mailles such land being much more likely to be titled and titled plots are no more likely to be used as collat

exporting does sales volume make a difference reply while it is intuitively logical that different types of firms need different types of export assistance the difficulty comes in developing and testing various approaches to segmenting firms for export development purposes to date four types of possible segmentation schemes have been developed in the export assistance literature one deals with grouping firms according to their size the others segment firms by grouping them into various international stages according to their export experience by attitudes of management within the firms and by the degree to which firms are product or manufacturing oriented in research reported earlier czinkota and johnston 1981 we have empirically tested each of these approaches and found that the stages of internationalization best segment firms with respect to exporting the size of a firm as an export determinant is a distant second in usefulness yet the effect of the structural variable of firms size on exporting is worth continued research because current policy uses size as the criterion for export promotion assistance

where do property rights matter more explaining the variation in demand for property titles across cities in mexico this paper examines the variation in the value of property rights to housing in mexico focusing specifically on differences between urban housing markets roughly 30 of owner occupied houses in mexico do not have a proper deed houses with no deed are estimated to be five percent less valuable than otherwise similar houses with a full deed yet this premium varies widely across cities i match data from the 2012 and 2014 national survey of household incomes and expenditures to different sources of city level data in order to examine hypotheses explaining this variation in a multilevel regression framework i find that deeds are valued more in cities with more highly educated residents more political competition and more voting measures of local economic activity degree of informality and the regulatory bureaucracy are not associated with higher value to full property rights additionally i find that more educated households value deeds more and having a deed is more valuable for larger houses in neighborhoods with less vacancy and higher infrastructure quality based on these results i suggest funds to subsidize titling should be redirected to places where titles are worth more more broadly i suggest policymakers reconsider framing property titling programs as poverty alleviation low income households would benefit more from subsidies for improvements to housing and residential infrastructure at the same time the federal government should further push to reduce the costs of transferring property

the relationship between firm size and export behavior revisited many academic studies and government leaders are asking small and medium sized firms to become more involved in exports unfortunately the role that can be played by smaller firms is unclear despite the vast number of studies on size and export behavior discrepancies in study findings and the absence of variance statistics prevent researchers from understanding the importance of size this study has sought to examine the direct and indirect effects of firm size by examining three dimensions of export behavior propensity of export countries exporting to and export attitudes for 14 072 canadian manufacturers the results indicate that while firm size is positively related to all dimensions of export behavior its importance is limited as the amount of variance explained is modest

projects for women in the third world explaining their misbehavior abstract a large number of income generation projects for poor women in the third world designed during the women s decade 1975 85 have misbehaved that is their economic objectives have evolved into welfare action during implementation project misbehavior and the prevalence of welfare interventions can be explained by three factors first particular project characteristics define the typical intervention for women and facilitate the achievement of social rather than production aims second these characteristics are a result of the expertise in the welfare sector of women based institutions that execute women s projects finally the choice of women based implementing agencies and the more generalized preference for welfare action are determined by the comparatively lower financial and social costs derived from the implementation of welfare vs economic based policies for women in developing countries

does electoral accountability affect economic policy choices evidence from gubernatorial term limits this paper analyzes the behavior of u s governors from 1950 to 1986 to investigate a reputation building model of political behavior we argue that differences in the behavior of governors who face a binding term limit and those who are able to run again provides a source of variation in discount rates that can be used to test a political agency model we find evidence that taxes spending and other policy instruments respond to a binding term limit if a democrat is in office the result is a fiscal cycle in term limit states which lowers state income when the term limit binds

property rights and intra household bargaining abstract this paper examines whether an individual level transfer of property rights increases the individual s bargaining power within the household the question is analyzed in the context of a housing reform that occurred in china that gave existing tenants the opportunity to purchase the homes that they had been renting from their state employers the rights to each housing unit were granted to a particular employee so property rights were defined at the individual level rather than the household level the results indicate that transferring ownership rights to men increased household consumption of some male favored goods and women s time spent on chores transferring ownership rights to women decreased household consumption of some male favored goods

male female differences in agricultural productivity methodological issues and empirical evidence abstract most estimates of male female differences in technical efficiency from production function studies show that male and female farmers are equally efficient farm managers controlling for levels of inputs and human capital there is some evidence however of allocative inefficiency within households marginal products of labor depend on the relative scarcities of labor and the gender division of labor in specific farming systems many of these studies however are methodologically flawed greater attention needs to be given to appropriate estimation methods endogenous input choice the use of headship as a stratifying variable and the implications of intrahousehold resource allocation

the impact of export strategy on export sales performance export sales are an important route to growth for the small to medium sized firm this article reports the results of an extensive empirical study of the export strategies of a large sample of high technology electronics firms and the performance results of adopting alternate export strategies six strategy scenarios were identified the results show that the types of foreign markets selected segmentation strategies and product strategies all have a pronounced impact on export sales and export growth the best performers a group of firms called the world marketers and representing 13 5 of the sample achieved a dramatic 188 annual growth in exports and exported 52 5 of their output the profiles of firms that elected each strategy scenario were determined also

gender poverty and deprivation evidence from the republic of guinea the article examines the relationship between gender and consumption poverty and between gender and deprivation in the republic of guinea national household survey data reveal that women are not more likely than men to be consumption poor or to suffer greater consumption poverty participatory poverty assessment data from the village of kamatiguia reveal that women are worse off than men when deprivation includes inter alia excessive work load and reduced decision making authority when consumption poverty poorly correlates with other dimensions of deprivation it should not be the sole guide for equity based policy intervention

alternative definitions of headship and the feminisation of income poverty in post apartheid south africa abstract in measuring gender differences in the risk of income poverty many studies use female headship as a proxy for gender however a number of well documented concerns with the use of self reported headship as an analytical category have suggested that headship is often a relatively blunt unit of analysis against the backdrop of a large and growing difference in income poverty rates between self reported female and male headed households in post apartheid south africa this study considers several alternative definitions of headship that have been proposed in the development literature the findings suggest that there is an association between self reported female headship and a female household member being identified as the main breadwinner however the conventional definition of headship is likely to underestimate the growing risk of income poverty in female headed households relative to male headed households compared with several alternative definitions the findings also suggest that alte

fairness concepts and the intrahousehold allocation of resources abstract how do parents allocate scarce resources among their children while much research has focused on investment strategies parents preferences for equity may also play a role in the household allocation of resources while the studies that incorporate equity define it in limited terms in this paper several fairness concepts are applied to the problem of intrahousehold distribution comparing food allocations and health outcomes across fairness concepts indicates that each concept results in a different allocation of food and a different health outcome the implications of this result for empirical studies of intrahousehold distribution and policy interventions are discussed

women heading households some more equal than others abstract this paper explores the validity of the statement that one third of the world s households are headed by women it examines the implications of using economic criteria to define household headship and of recent interest in woman maintained households and concealed woman headed households there is a danger of underplaying the diversity of woman headed households and of marginalizing older women by identifying woman headed households with single mothers of dependent children ultimately too narrow a focus on particular household types undermines our ability to further a truly gendered analysis of the household in development research and practice

on the road marriage and mobility in malaysia migration choices of husbands and wives in a dynamic and developing country are studied in the context of an economic model of the household data are drawn from the second wave of the malaysia family life survey exploiting the retrospective histories we compare moves that take place before marriage with those made during the marriage among the latter moves that are made with the spouse are distinguished from those made alone the evidence indicates that male mobility is primarily economic in motivation and related to labor market factors moves by women however seem to be more closely related to fertility or family considerations migration is apparently not simply an individual decision the attributes of the spouse are an important influence on mobility albeit in an asymmetric manner moving toward a broader definition of the household we find the characteristics of the parents parents in law and also the relative age and gender of siblings all influence mobility in a rich if complex way

the effects of migration on collective action in the commons evidence from rural china summary over the past three decades scholars have studied the effects of more than three dozen factors on collective action in the commons but little is known about the effects of rural to urban migration we examine this question with the case of china which has the world s most extensive levels of rural to urban migration using ols logit and probit models and data from a survey of 1 780 households from 18 provinces we find that migration has a statistically significant adverse effect on collective irrigation controlling for a large number of theoretically relevant variables the effects of migration on collective action in the commons are possibly mediated by a number of factors frequently identified in the literature including leadership social capital sense of community economic heterogeneity and dependence on resources we speculate that massive out migration partly explains the significant drop in the use of collective canal irrigation and exacerbated the significant increase in groundwater irrigation since the start of reforms in 1980s these findings have important policy implications for commons governance in china given that massive rural to urban migration will continue in the next decade because of the increasing rural to urban migration worldwide especially in developing countries the findings could also partly explain the deteriorating state of rural village infrastructure natural common pool resources and ecological systems in many developing countries

as a husband i will love lead and provide gendered access to land in ghana summary improving women s access to land is high on the agricultural policy agenda of both governmental and non governmental agencies yet the determinants and rationale of gendered access to land are not well understood this paper argues that gender relations are more than the outcomes of negotiations within households it explains the importance of social norms perceptions and formal and informal rules shaping access to land for male and female farmers at four levels 1 the household family 2 the community 3 the state and 4 the market the framework is applied to ghana using the results from qualitative field work norms on household and family organization and on men s and women s responsibilities and capabilities play a key role in gendered allocation of resources however these norms and perceptions are dynamic and evolve jointly with the development of markets and changes in values of inputs such as labor and land theoretical models that represent the gendered distribution of assets as the result of intrahousehold bargaining should be revised and extrahousehold factors should be included from a policy perspective laws that ensure gender equality in terms of inheritance and a more gender equitable distribution of property upon divorce can play a key role in improving women s property rights yet their impact may be limited where customary rights dominate and social norms and rules continue to discriminate according to gender

common factors underlying barriers to export studies in the u s paper industry this paper identifies five factors that cluster belief about the importance of barriers to export held by executives in strategic business units involved in export of paper products or contemplating such export these factors were evaluated in respect to the international business literature and labeled as national export policy comparative marketing distance lack of export commitment exogenous economic constraints and competitive rivalry this analysis revealed a minor appreciation of the importance of competitive rivalry and a high appreciation of the barrier provided by exogenous economic constraints the other three factors assumed intermediate positions of importance among the five factors

an empirical investigation of the factors influencing exporting success of brazilian firms one hundred and fifty two brazilian companies that were exporting in 1978 were interviewed again six years later in 1984 to determine the factors that were correlated with the continuance of exporting firm characteristics export management practices and manager perceptions were each found to be correlated with exporting success thus supporting the basic contention that it is possible to predict export performance firms that discontinued exporting relied more on the brazilian government export incentives possibly to be competitive in international markets without making the necessary structural changes thereby raising important questions about the long run impact of the brazilian export programs

the government of chronic poverty from exclusion to citizenship development trustees have increasingly sought to challenge chronic poverty by promoting citizenship amongst poor people a move that frames citizenship formation as central to overcoming the exclusions and inequalities associated with uneven development for sceptics this move within inclusive neoliberalism is inevitably depoliticising and disempowering and our cases do suggest that citizenship based strategies rarely alter the underlying basis of poverty however our evidence also offers some support to those optimists who suggest that progressive moves towards poverty reduction and citizenship formation have become more rather than less likely at the current juncture the promotion of citizenship emerges here as a significant but incomplete effort to challenge poverty that persists over time

land reform as commenced business the evidence against stopping abstract in the new paradigm institutions are long term endogenous thus the aims of land reform must be compatible with replace or substitute for initial incentives and power structures many reforms e g compulsory collectives are not redefinition of land reform is therefore needed yet the case for private land redistribution with ceilings remains the inverse relationship rests firmly on lower cost labor transactions in small farms though large but competitive transport or processing firms which enjoy lower cost capital transactions may be needed crucial is the impact of the postreform structure on livelihoods especially for the growing rural majority near landless workers new style market based reforms have potential probably best combined with old style ceilings substantial compensation with urban taxpayers sharing costs alternative off farm prospects and progressive taxes on large landholdings or bequests

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

untitled a study of formal and informal property rights in urban ecuador we explore the substitutability of formal and informal property rights using new survey data from ecuador where households have both formal and informal claims to urban residential property we develop a model of property transactions that distinguishes between transferable and non transferable claims and show how this distinction affects the interpretation of hedonic price regressions the unconditional effect of title is to raise properties value by 23 5 however we also find that informal property rights can substitute effectively for formal property rights and suggest that titling programmes should be targeted at young disorganised communities if they are to benefit the recipients

land tenure and agricultural productivity in africa a comparative analysis of the economics literature and recent policy strategies and reforms summary this paper examines the convergence and divergence of results from economic studies of the relationships between land tenure security and agricultural productivity in africa and how these results have been incorporated into recent agricultural poverty alleviation and land policy documents the paper finds that there are both areas of convergence and divergence in the economics literature similarly the attention given to land tenure and its perceived effects on productivity varies considerably in the policy literature the significant heterogeneity in findings itself suggests that policy responses must pay attention to local context and the overarching macro and sectoral conditions within which tenure systems operate

market knowledge diversification and export expansion the research focuses on the export expansion process of small and middle sized manufacturing firms and some of its correlates diversification and geographical market distribution means of acquiring information and modes of international distribution the study reveals the overwhelming influence on export expansion of information acquired from business transactions as opposed to reliance on private or public information services the impact of market diversification and its nature is confirmed policy implications are suggested

promises and conventions an approach to pre play agreements abstract i analyze how informal agreements can be sustained by moral emotions with regard to a large class of two player games specifically i assume that people feel guilty if they breach an agreement and that the guilt increases according to the degree of the harm inflicted on the other a central insight is that it is easier to sustain efficient informal agreements if actions are strategic complements than if they are strategic substitutes i complement this general insight by studying two specific cases where negotiators face uncertainty about the breach of the agreement i show that while the optimal agreement in a game with strategic substitutes must compromise on surplus maximization and efficiency the optimal agreement in a game with sufficiently strong strategic complements tends to maximize both the surplus and the probability of compliance especially if the game is symmetric

is land titling in sub saharan africa cost effective evidence from madagascar formalizing land rights has been promoted as a way to encourage agricultural investment and stimulate land markets yet little is known about the benefits of such policies in sub saharan africa where the preconditions for success are less favorable the analysis uses a large sample of plots from an intensively titled rice growing area of madagascar and compares land specific investments land productivity and land values for titled and untitled plots cultivated by the same household having a title has no significant effect on plot specific investment and correspondingly little effect on land productivity and land values these results are broadly consistent with a simulation of a theoretical model of investment under expropriation risk calibrated to the same data a cost benefit analysis suggests that the current system of formal titling should not be extended in rural madagascar and that any new system of land registration will have to be quite inexpensive to be worthwhile

poverty and famines an essay on entitlement and deprivation this book focuses on the causes of starvation in general and famines in particular the traditional analysis of famines is shown to be fundamentally defective and the author develops an alternative analysis

peasants or bankers the american electorate and the u s economy t he usual model of electoral reaction to economic conditions assumes the retrospective economic voter who bases expectations solely on recent economic performance or personal economic experience voter as peasant a second model assumes a sophisticated economic voter who incorporates new information about the future into personal economic expectations voter as banker using the components both retrospective and prospective of the index of consumer sentiment ics as intervening variables between economic conditions and approval we find that the prospective component fully accounts for the presidential approval time series with aggregate consumer expectations about long term business conditions in the approval equation neither the usual economic indicators not the other ics components matter moreover short term changes in consumer expectations respond more to current forecasts than to the current economy the qualitative result is a rational expectations outcome the electorate anticipates the economic future and rewards or punishes the president for economic events before they happen economics moves political behavior with hard times administrations lose support with good times they gain it we know this to be true but when we ask how by what processes the political translation of economic experience occurs the an

household food security and child nutrition the interaction of income and gender of household head abstract data from kenya and malawi suggest that food security and preschooler nutritional status are influenced by the interaction of income and gender of the head of household rather than simply one or the other not only is household food security influenced by total household income but the proportion of income controlled by women has a positive and significant influence on household caloric intake households were disaggregated not simply in male and female headed households but female headed households were further disaggregated into de jure legal head of household is a woman and de facto female headed households male head of household is absent more than 50 of the time in both kenya and malawi the de facto female headed households had the lowest income despite this low income preschoolers nutritional status was significantly better than in the higher income male headed and de jure female headed households the ability to improve nutritional status in a low income environment in the de facto female headed households is related to a combination of child feeding practices and other nurturing behavior the findings suggest that interventions that exploit incentives to invest in children can provide more immediate improvements in child health and nutrition where sustained income growth is possible only in the long term

comparative politics and public finance we propose a model with micropolitical foundations to contrast different political regimes compared to a parliamentary regime the institutions of a presidential congressional regime produce fewer incentives for legislative cohesion but more separation of powers these differences are reflected in the size and composition of government spending a parliamentary regime has redistribution toward a majority less underprovision of public goods and more rents to politicians a presidential congressional regime has redistribution toward powerful minorities more underprovision of public goods but less rents to politicians the size of government is smaller under a presidential regime this last prediction is consistent with cross country data

electoral rules and corruption is corruption systematically related to electoral rules recent theoretical work suggests a positive answer but little is known about the data we try to address this lacuna by relating corruption to different features of the electoral system in a sample of about eighty democracies in the 1990s we exploit the cross country variation in the data as well as the time variation arising from recent episodes of electoral reform the evidence is consistent with the theoretical priors larger voting districts and thus lower barriers to entry are associated with less corruption whereas larger shares of candidates elected from party lists and thus less individual accountability are associated with more corruption individual accountability appears to be most strongly tied to personal ballots in plurality rule elections even though open party lists also seem to have some effect because different aspects roughly offset each other a switch from strictly proportional to strictly majoritarian elections only has a small negative effect on corruption jel e62 h3

a model of electoral competition with incomplete information a model of two candidate electoral competition is developed in which voters are uncertain about the policy either candidate would implement if elected candidates simultaneously announce policy positions from which voters attempt to infer the true positions the candidates would adopt announcing a position different from the true position is costly to the winning candidate with these costs increasing as the difference between the true policy and the announced policy increases a refinement of the sequential equilibrium concept is used to describe the behavior of candidates and voters

women and structural transformation development is at a relatively early stage 2 analysis of women s role as economic actors as distinct from being part of the labor force in general is still rudimentary 3 the extent to which and the conditions under which gender may influence a variety of economic outcomes are not well researched the nature and the extent of segmentation of economic activity between males and females and their changing roles in different socioeconomic settings and during the course of economic development are inadequately investigated in economic literature 4 consequently whether the efficiency and welfare losses from women s low participation in economic activity are significant in static and dynamic contexts is inadequately articulated much of the research on women in developed countries has been in a comparative static context 5 the changes in incomes technology demography and tastes with regard to women s roles however are not only much more rapid but also simultaneous in developing countries making research in a comparative static context of relatively little value the implications of the dynamic factors are analytically complex to handle but are critical for public policy even where policy implications are obvious from the existing limited research however these have not always been effectively incorporated by governments in their actions this article first summarizes the major themes of the various types

allocation of land tenure rights in tigray how large is the gender bias this study investigates gender differences in land ownership and use in northern ethiopia female headed households have 23 smaller owned landholdings and 54 smaller operational landholdings household endowments of nonland productive inputs are important but decomposition analysis shows that differences in observable characteristics such as labor and oxen explain less than half of these differences whereas the remaining differences can be attributed to differences in returns to these characteristics the latter suggests a gender bias in land allocation the main policy recommendation is to strengthen women s opportunities to cultivate their land and continue the process of securing women s tenure rights

the demand for tenure security in developing countries abstract we use survey data for manila the philippines to estimate hedonic functions for formal and squatter housing values we show that on average a rented squatter unit in manila would rent for 15 percent more if it were a formal sector unit an owned squatter unit would sell for 25 percent more if it were a formal sector unit these percentages are interpreted as eviction risk discount for squatter dwellings we conclude that assistance projects that provide secure tenure over a wide area will bestow comparatively greater benefits on lower income households and to those in newer less established settlements since the risks that they bear initially are greater

corporate social responsibility product differentiation strategy and export performance this article argues that corporate social responsibility csr may contribute to product differentiation in export markets and thus improve export performance we test this argument by observing a period of decreasing export competitiveness in a leading emerging economy brazil using a large scale survey design with 252 questionnaires completed by medium and large sized brazilian exporters we used structural equations modelling to test our hypotheses the results suggest that csr product differentiation predicts export performance better than product quality differentiation and almost as well as product innovation differentiation multi group analysis further revealed that the positive and significant effect of csr product differentiation on export performance is likely to be contingent on the number and type developing vs developed of countries that are targeted our study contributes to the literature on csr and export performance by developing and empirically validating a model that explains under which conditions csr based product differentiation may lead to improved export performance

gender property rights and natural resources abstract attention to gender differences in property rights can improve the outcomes of natural resource management policies and projects in terms of efficiency environmental sustainability equity and empowerment of resource users although it is impossible to generalize across cultures and resources it is important to identify the nature of rights to land trees and water held by women and men and how they are acquired and transmitted from one user to another the paper particularly examines how the shift from customary tenure systems to private property in land trees and water has affected women the effect of gender differences in property on collective action and the implications for project design

property rights regimes and natural resources a conceptual analysis the term common property resource is an example of a term repeatedly used to refer to property owned by a government or by no one it is also used for property owned by a community of resource users such usage leads to confusion in scientific study and policy analysis in this paper we develop a conceptual schema for arraying property rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights ranging from authorized user to claimant to proprietor and to owner we apply this conceptual schema to analyze findings from a variety of empirical settings including the maine lobster industry

gender headship and intrahousehold resource allocation abstract household head as reported in household surveys may not always identify the main economic provider and decision maker within the household research based on this definition of headship may lead to misleading conclusions on the link between gender and poverty treating female headed households as a homogenous group can also be inappropriate results from jamaica show that it is not female headedness per se that is associated with child welfare but the absence of a potential female decision maker within the household

the man of the house how the use of household head characteristics may lead to omitted variable bias abstract household heads are defined in many micro data sets and are usually male this paper illustrates potential consequences of the common practice of using only the household head s characteristics in empirical research

does better nutrition raise farm productivity household level data from sierra leone are used to test whether higher caloric intake enhances family farm labor productivity this is the notion behind the efficiency wages hypothesis which has found only weak empirical support a farm production function is estimated accounting for the simultaneity in input and calorie choice instruments include prices household demographic characteristics and farm assets the latter two sets of instruments are later dropped to explore the robustness of the results to different specifications of exogeneity the exercise shows a highly significant effect of caloric intake on labor productivity providing solid support for the nutrition productivity hypothesis the marginal effect on productivity falls drastically as calorie consumption rises but remains positive at moderately high levels of intake one result is a fall in the effective price of food a decline that is larger for households that consumer fewer calories

women s income and household expenditure patterns gender or flow evidence from niger be targeted for credit and small enterprise programs not only because their income boosts household income but also because it meets global societal objectives such as increased spending on food and children s goods some researchers however have speculated that the observed impact of female income share on household expenditure patterns does not reflect gender differentiated preferences but rather reflects the differential lumpiness seasonality of male and female income flows that is women may earn income in flows that ensure a higher propensity to purchase certain items

moral political economy and moral reasoning about rural india four theoretical schools compared this paper explores a pluralist approach to moral economy in two ways firstly as a review four major schools of thought on the rental of land in india are described i focus on their normative and ontic assumptions secondly noting that none of these schools is value neutral a plurality of six complex moral reasoning strategies emerge from this review the advantage of the social researcher doing an overview of these normative positions is that we can compare and contrast the meta criteria that are used the six moral reasoning strategies are a neoliberal growth strategy a human capabilities approach a redistribution approach a transformative approach a social equality approach and a pareto optimality approach the study of these six strategies leads toward the conclusion that more research on complex moral reasoning strategies is called for because combining them rapidly leads to difficulties scientific research can provide evidence to underpin and shape the moral reasoning that takes place in real world dialogues and debates

the influence of the management team s international experience on the internationalization behaviors of smes why are some small and medium sized enterprises smes more successful in selling outside their domestic markets than are other smes in the same industry although the traditional explanation is that firms can gain valuable knowledge and resources as they become older and larger small and young firms are not necessarily disadvantaged if they develop other mechanisms to acquire the requisite knowledge and resources we examine the role of the management team s international experience as such a mechanism for the internationalization of canadian software product firms we show that internationally experienced management teams have a greater propensity to develop foreign strategic partners and to delay less in obtaining foreign sales after start up and that these behaviors are associated with a higher degree of internationalization

exporting does sales volume make a difference comment this paper examines a recent investigation of the relationship between firm size and exporting it illustrates how and why neglect of critical conceptual and methodological issues continues to confound research on the impact that firm size has on exporting

firm size and export intensity solving an empirical puzzle this paper presents a transaction costs analysis of the firm size and export intensity relationship we submit that relation specific investments and the costs of safeguarding these investments play a significant role in export relationships firm size related differences with respect to these factors are used to explain the different relationships between firm size and export intensity that have been found in previous studies the theoretical framework is tested empirically and support is found for different industries

the mobilization of women s labor for cash crop production a game theoretic approach in the last decade or so economists have modeled phenomena such as household labor supply fertility behavior and child survival rates using the household as the unit of analysis this paper presents data that call into question the assumption that the household is a joint decision making unit which maximizes a neoclassical household utility function the data come from a study of the mobilization of women s labor by their husbands for irrigated rice production in north cameroon the first section of this paper describes briefly the massa rice and sorghum farming system and then considers the relationship between the amount of compensation women receive from their husbands for their labor on rice production and the amount of labor they allocate to rice production the findings suggest that a bargaining model may describe the intrahousehold relations of production and distribution better than the neoclassical model the second section specifies a nash bargaining model and contrasts it with the neoclassical model of the household using the bargaining framework the third section explores in more detail possible explanations of the allocative inefficiency which seems to characterize many of the rice cultivating households

economics party and the vote causality issues and panel data conventional wisdom argues that national economic perceptions generally have an important impact on the vote choice in democracies recently a revisionist view has arisen contending that this link regularly observed in election surveys is mostly spurious according to the argument partisanship distorts economic perception thereby substantially exaggerating the real vote connection these causality issues have not been much investigated empirically despite their critical importance utilizing primarily american and secondarily british and canadian election panel surveys we confront directly questions of the time dynamic and independent variable exogeneity we find after all economics clearly matters for the vote indeed once these causality concerns are properly taken into account the impact of economic perceptions emerges as larger than previously thought as well the actual impact of partisanship is clearly reduced

property rights and investment in urban slums this paper examines the effect of changes in tenure security on residential investment in urban squatter neighborhoods to address the endogeneity of property rights i make use of variation in ownership status induced by a nationwide titling program in peru in a difference in difference analysis i compare the change in housing investment before and after the program among participating households to the change in investment among two samples of nonparticipants my results indicate that strengthening property rights in urban slums has a significant effect on residential investment the rate of housing renovation rises by more than two thirds of the baseline level the bulk of the increase is financed without the use of credit indicating that changes over time reflect an increase in investment incentives related to lower threat of eviction jel o12 o18 p25 p26

electoral accountability and corruption evidence from the audits of local governments we show that political institutions affect corruption levels we use audit reports in brazil to construct new measures of political cor ruption in local governments and test whether electoral account ability affects the corruption practices of incumbent politicians we find significantly less corruption in municipalities where mayors can get reelected mayors with reelection incentives misappropriate 27 percent fewer resources than mayors without reelection incentives these effects are more pronounced among municipalities with less access to information and where the likelihood of judicial punish ment is lower overall our findings suggest that electoral rules that enhance political accountability play a crucial role in constraining politician s corrupt behavior jel d72 k42 017

mexico after the debt crisis is growth sustainable the story of mexico s involvement in international capital markets is one of riches to rags and back to riches again four periods can be distinguished stable steady international borrowing through the 1950s and 1960s heavy reliance on international loans through commercial bank syndicates from the mid 1970s until 1982 massive capital flight zero access to private lenders and complete reliance on official sources from 1982 to 1990 and massive return of flight capital a continued drought in syndicated loans but heavy expansion of foreign direct investment portfolio investment and bond placement easing the transition from the third to the fourth period was the restructuring of mexico s external debt under the brady deal which ultimately reduced and smoothened the net transfer to foreign creditors the authors argue that smoothening the external transfer had far more impact on the domestic economy than the reduction of debt and debt servicing per se the financing of the expansion that ensued in the fourth period differs dramatically from what was observed earlier in mexico s history foreign capital inflows were dominated by foreign direct investment and especially portfolio investment and unlike in the second period most inflows financed the domestic private sector are the current rate and pattern of borrowing at levels unforeseen at the time of the brady deal a cause for concern is growth sustainable to answer these questions the authors analyze the domestic macroeconomic counterpart of the large capital inflows and high current account deficits of the early 1990s whether growth is sustainable depends on the level of domestic saving but even if domestic saving increases the transition to sustainable growth is unlikely to be smooth because the slowdown in consumption growth associated with improved saving is likely to be contractionary the outcome depends on how investment and net exports respond the authors analyze cyclical and structural factors of investment and the external sector and their interactions with mexico s exchange rate and monetary policy to interpret the recession in the second half of 1993 they emerge from their analysis with cautious optimism about mexico s medium term prospects

subdividing the commons distributional conflict in the transition from collective to individual property rights in kenya s maasailand summary this paper suggests that explanations of property rights transformation need to move beyond models of relative price change and state enforcement to include accounts that accommodate conflict and competition among actors and the possibility that state actors may not provide the enforcement that is often taken for granted the transition from collective to individualized holdings in kenya s maasailand is burdened with politics and procedural problems that can undermine the gains anticipated in that move moreover in semi arid ecological settings individualization results in unstable land holdings necessitating re contracting and reaggregation by individual parcel owners

globalization and the connection of remote communities a review of household effects and their biodiversity implications abstract the remote regions of the world provide refuge to a disproportionate amount of the earth s biodiversity as globalization continues isolated human communities in these regions are increasingly connected to global market migration and technology networks we review the diffuse literature on the household effects of changing market access migration and technology adoption in remote regions and implications for native biodiversity market access affects biodiversity in remote communities through changes in household economics and social networks migration either to or from remote settlements affects biodiversity through changes in population remittances human capital and social networks finally we consider effects due to production public infrastructure and information and communication technologies there is much ambiguity surrounding these causal pathways and thus we also examine the roles of various ecological household community and institutional mediating factors in determining the impacts of global connection finally we explore the limitations of our current knowledge and research practices and propose directions for future work to address key uncertainties in theory and evidence as well as weaknesses in methodological approaches we recommend a broad and interdisciplinary mode of inquiry as the best means toward clarifying globalization s impacts on human settlements and the biodiversity harbored in the earth s remaining remote regions

selection vs accountability an experimental investigation of campaign promises in a moral hazard environment abstract we examine retrospective and prospective voting considerations in an experiment implementing a simple voting model in each period the official chooses how much rent to appropriate from a social endowment announcement of this choice is followed by an election between the official and a randomly selected challenger with the winner becoming the official in the next period we vary two features of the setting a the discount factor and b whether candidates can make costless non binding campaign promises about their behaviour if elected consistent with the model s predictions both raising the discount factor and introducing campaign promises lead to lower rent appropriation by officials and worse electoral outcomes other things equal for incumbents campaign promises despite being cheap talk have real effects promising less appropriation is rewarded by voters but breaking such promises is punished finally we find a weak positive association between campaign promises and officials subsequent behaviour

a downward spiral research evidence on the relationship between poverty and natural resource degradation abstract many observers have conceptualised the link between rural poverty and environment as a downward spiral with population growth and economic marginalisation leading to environmental degradation recent micro scale empirical research challenges this model showing striking heterogeneity in environmental management by the rural poor their success in adapting to environmental change and the efficacy of policies in influencing outcomes local endowments conditions affecting the adoption of resource conserving technologies and local institutions supportive of the poor are key factors that condition poverty environment interactions and outcomes in relation to agriculture the main strategies to jointly address poverty and environmental improvement are to increase poor people s access to natural resources enhance the productivity of poor people s natural resource assets and involve local people in resolving public natural resource management concerns research is needed to support these strategies particularly to explore poverty environment agriculture interactions develop technologies for poor farmers and partner with local communities for action research on policies and programmes

the price of land for housing in jakarta in spite of its potential value to governments detailed information as to how land prices vary spatially within third world cities is usually lacking this paper discusses the distribution of land prices in jakarta using information provided on a neighbourhood basis by experienced real estate brokers appraised prices were given for different types of residential plot distinguished by tenure and infrastructural provision analysis of the data in jakarta shows the relative importance of infrastructural provision and tenure land title for land prices examination of such data over time makes it possible to test whether and where there has been a spiralling of land prices and in the case of jakarta it is found that recent price increases have been consistently greater in suburban areas and in informal sector plots arising from the massive demand from low income households for affordable housing the paper concludes by drawing out policy implications

gender and multidimensional poverty in nicaragua an individual based approach most existing empirical papers concerned about multidimensional poverty use the household as the unit of analysis so that the multidimensional poverty status of the household is equated with the multidimensional poverty status of all its members this assumption ignores intra household inequalities additionally households containing both a female and a male cannot contribute to a gender gap in poverty so gender differentials in poverty cannot be estimated but the sustainable development goals have put special emphasis on gender equality therefore new measures able to capture the gender differences are needed consequently in this paper we propose an individual based multidimensional poverty measure in order to estimate the three i s of multidimensional poverty incidence intensity and inequality in nicaragua as well as the gender differentials we also estimate logit regressions to better understanding the determinants of multidimensional poverty in this country overall we find that there are statistically significant gender differences in multidimensional poverty in nicaragua but they are estimated to be small and lower than 5 however the gender differential in inequality is larger than 10 and it suggests that multi dimensionally poor women are living in very intense poverty when compared with multi dimensionally poor men we also find that the elderly and children are the most vulnerable people in terms of multidimensional poverty in this country furthermore when information on employment domestic work and social protection is considered in the analysis the gender gaps become more substantial and women are more likely to be poor than men

gender and property formalization conventional and alternative approaches securing property rights in both rural landholdings and urban housing is a much debated feature of current development policy providing title for the household does not guarantee security for women and legal equality may fail to prevent gender differences in property ownership a pro active approach to women s property rights is needed disenchantment with state programs delivering individual titles has led to calls for alternative strategies emphasizing local or customary authorities and procedures this paper questions the ability of either approach to address gender inequalities effectively without affirmative action but suggests that informal responses within state institutions can help c 2007 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

work intensity gender and sustainable development abstract is labour intensive employment compatible with social justice and environmental sustainability this paper examines the question of how far small scale intermediate technology based on energy intensive human work which is central to prescriptions for poverty alleviation and sustainable development is compatible with development objectives emphasizing gender equity work intensity is a neglected characteristic of labour but significant in the determination of human well being and in the intra household distribution of welfare the intensification of energy expenditure does not affect men and women in a uniform way and needs to be gender disaggregated in order to reveal potential trade offs between development strategies based on labour intensive growth and the well being of men and women the paper draws upon the experience with treadle pumps for irrigation in bangladesh as an illustration of such potential trade offs and argues for more rigorous analyses of gender divisions of labour which include work intensity in combination with time allocation

democratic accountability and retrospective voting a laboratory experiment understanding the incentives of politicians requires understanding the nature of voting behavior i conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning if voters are forward looking but uncertain about politicians unobservable characteristics then it is rational to focus on selection but doing so undermines democratic accountability because selection renders sanctioning an empty threat in contrast to rational choice predictions the experimental results indicate a strong behavioral tendency to use a retrospective voting rule additional experiments support the interpretation that retrospective voting is a simple heuristic that voters use to cope with a cognitively difficult inference and decision problem and in addition suggest that voters have a preference for accountability the results pose a challenge for theories of electoral selection and voter learning and suggest new interpretations of empirical studies of economic and retrospective voting

land rights gender equality and household food security exploring the conceptual links in the case of india this paper seeks to critically examine the conceptual linkages between the issue of land rights for women with household food security on the one hand and gender equality on the other after a brief analysis of shifts in both international and national policy discourse and practice in terms of control over land as vital for food security it seeks to analyse the implications of this for gender relations the paper argues that in a context of diversified rural livelihoods the contribution of agricultural production to household subsistence has been declining this trend has been reinforced by a decline in public investment stagnant growth and fluctuating prices for agricultural products men have been able to access the better paid non farm jobs while leaving women behind to manage agricultural production the renewed link between production and food security in agricultural policy has however meant allowing men not to have responsibility for household food security while a right to land for women is a positive development it appears also to be leading to an enhancement of work burdens without much change in terms of status or decision making authority

the aversion to lying abstract we experimentally investigate the effect of cheap talk in a bargaining game with one sided asymmetric information a seller has private information about her skill and is provided an opportunity to communicate this information to a buyer through a written message four different treatments are compared one without communication one with free form communication and two treatments with pre specified communication in the form of promises of varying strength our results suggest that individuals have an aversion towards lying about private information and that the aversion to lying increases with the size of the lie and the strength of the promise freely formulated messages lead to the fewest lies and the most efficient outcomes