forest dependence and income distribution in a subsistence economy evidence from india abstract we examine an area of northern india where forestry acts to ameliorate the incidence of poverty and destitution though it does not otherwise contribute significantly to the reduction of income inequality the poor would be doubly disadvantaged without common property access to forest products conservation measures entailing curtailment in the right to common access pose a dilemma this issue is explored here

can a raise in your wage make you worse off a public goods perspective abstract we show that a seemingly paradoxical result is possible an increase in one s wage can reduce one s welfare such outcome can occur in an economy populated by agents who value a private good bought using labor income and a public good produced by voluntary time contributions a raise in the wage in general opportunity cost of time makes each agent substitute away from contributing to the public good failing to internalize the negative externality imposed on others the result is a decrease in public good provision under quite general conditions the implied cumulative negative effect on agents welfare can more than offset the positive effect of the wage raise from increased private good consumption and lead to an equilibrium in which all agents are worse off our result is particularly relevant for developing economy settings as it holds for relatively low initial wage levels we discuss the applicability of our findings to a number of important problems in development such as market integration cooperation in common pool resource conservation and social capital

fish as the bank in the water evidence from chronic poor communities in congo abstract small scale fisheries in developing countries are often perceived as being a low productivity and backward informal sector as a result they are rarely considered in poverty reduction programmes and rural development planning in this paper we investigate the dual role of fish as a food and cash crop through data collected in river fisheries in democratic republic of congo drc fishing in this very remote rural region of drc is operated both by men and women as part of a household multiple activity livelihood strategy the data shows that poor households rely heavily on fishing for their supply of protein rich food in particular through women s subsistence catches fishing also appears to be the main source of cash income for the majority of households including local farmers based on these findings and a review of the literature the paper argues that small scale fisheries can play a fundamental role in local economies especially in remote rural areas where they strengthen significantly the livelihoods of people through their role in both food security and cash income generation

testing for poverty dominance an application to canada the paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices this helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across distributions the tests which can take into account the complex sampling procedures that are typically used by statistical agencies to generate household level surveys are implemented using the canadian survey of labour and income dynamics slid for 1996 1999 and 2002 although the yearly cumulative distribution functions cross at the lower tails of the distributions the more recent years tend to dominate earlier years for a relatively wide range of poverty lines failing to take into account slid s sampling variability as is sometimes done can inflate significantly one s confidence in ranking poverty taking into account slid s complex sampling design as has not been done before can also decrease substantially the range of poverty lines over which a poverty ranking can be inferred

changing patterns of uk poverty 1997 2004 it has been noted that the failure to meet the target set by the government for reducing the head count ratio of child poverty in britain is partly due to the success of government policy in generating economic growth apart from ignoring the argument that absolute poverty is not a meaningful idea this apology for the failure of government to meet poverty targets also misses wider problems embedded in recent trends in the household income distribution for example inequality measures sensitive to the distribution of income amongst the poor suggest that the experience of those who remained poor may have worsened

links between the local trade in natural products livelihoods and poverty alleviation in a semi arid region of south africa can the local commercialization of natural products contribute to reduced poverty and vulnerability commentary on this issue is mixed with some observers being quite optimistic while others hold a counterview this paper explores the poverty alleviation potential of four products traded in bushbuckridge south africa traditional brooms reed mats woodcraft and marula beer while key in enhancing the livelihood security of the poorest households these products were unlikely to provide a route out of poverty for most although there were exceptions incomes often surpassed local wage rates and some producers obtained returns equivalent to the minimum wage non financial benefits such as the opportunity to work from home were highly rated and the trade was found to represent a range of livelihood strategies both within and across products

ethically flexible measures of poverty this paper introduces new measures of both relative and absolute poverty using the notion of representative income of a community corresponding to the censored income distribution these new measures satisfy the monotonicity and transfer axioms proposed by sen 1976 in all cases

poverty and household size the widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy the scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view we find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0 6 this turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales by contrast some measures of child nutritional status indicate an elasticity of unity consideration of the weight attached to child versus adult welfare may help resolve the non robustness of demographic profiles of poverty excerpt

residential broadband subscription demand an econometric analysis of australian choice experiment data the recent roll out of fibre optic cable suggests that the willingness of households in passed communities to subscribe to networked services is an important issue this paper studies the determination of the demand for network subscription through a discrete choice model the effect of installation and rental price on the likelihood of subscription is analysed the logit regression is based on choice experiment stated preference subscription data obtained from a national survey of households limitations of this preliminary work and suggestions for future research are discussed

the anatomy of a corporate venturing program factors influencing success the author proposes a classification framework for factors that affect corporate venture success then a database of 37 new venture investments by exxon including 18 venture capital investments is analyzed for insight into the relative affect of these factors on venture technical and financial success this article presents a statistical analysis of those factors which were quantified as a group the venture capital investments were financially far more successful for exxon than the internally initiated ventures this striking difference stimulated the retrospective analysis reported here the author was in a position to observe the program over its entire life span and had first hand knowledge of each venture s technology markets and personnel because of the mix of venture capital and internal investments the author was also in a position to compare the two modes of investment factors affecting venture success are broadly classified as extrinsic and intrinsic extrinsic or environmental factors are those determined by the form of investment sponsorship e g corporate or venture capital and the characteristics of the investment sponsor extrinsic factors are segregated into two categories structural and procedural these factors are defined as the degree of difference between the corporate and venture environment in each category the four structural factors technology market organization and people are summed up as the overall degree of structural congruence the author postulates that the degree of congruence is directly related to venture success within the corporation to take the corporation into new markets some incongruence is required too much incongruence probably pushes the risk of failure too high the corporation s procedures for management of this incongruence will determine the degree to which it can successfully diversify its business the four procedural factors control selection of venture managers incentive compensation and financing are dealt with as differences between the corporate environment and an independent venture environment major differences in procedural factors usually exist between corporate and venture capital sponsored ventures they probably explain to some extent the relative greater financial success of the exxon venture capital investments as a group however the statistical analysis results indicate that the identified intrinsic factors are more important in explaining relative venture success intrinsic factors are those inherent to the venture itself and are subdivided into two categories product related market and technical risk levels and managerial relative experience levels each of the 37 exxon ventures was rated for success and for the intrinsic factors using a simple ordinal range of 3 to 6 values the product related risk factors showed a significant inverse correlation with financial success the level of venture managers prior experience in the venture s target market area and their level of prior general managerial experience showed an even greater correlation with financial success the sample correlation coefficient between the financial success rating sf and the sum of the ratings for prior marketing and managerial experience xs xm was 0 809 with a standard error of only 0 105 selection of the influential extrinsic and intrinsic factors is largely within the control of corporate management an approach to selection of these factors similar to that used by private venture capital fund managers should greatly improve the overall success of internal corporate ventures

information inequality and broadband network access an analysis of australian household data there has been considerable debate in australia concerning the social and economic effects of telecommunications carrier investment in broadband network infrastructure whether particular groups within networked communities are unable or unwilling to subscribe to broadband services is an important policy issue this paper sets out to identify metropolitan households that are less likely to subscribe to services and examines whether there exists a systematic link between subscription interest and measures of social disadvantage analysis of stated preference subscription intentions data obtained from an australia wide survey of 715 households shows that there is potential for the new communication technology to create information inequality

the measurement of inequality and poverty a policy maker s guide to the literature abstract mathematical measures of poverty and inequality embody values that reflect the historical political social intellectual and ethical forces prevalent at the time of their formulation so that policy makers may select measures of poverty and inequality that are consistent with their values it is important to make explicit the value judgements implicit in the measures models designed to measure poverty and inequality fall into four categories absolute poverty measures absolute income measures relative poverty measures and relative inequality measures this article examines the principal models within each category and discusses the assumptions limitations and values implicit in the models

counting and multidimensional poverty measurement this paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of an identification method k that extends the traditional intersection and union approaches and a class of poverty measures m our identification step employs two forms of cutoff one within each dimension to determine whether a person is deprived in that dimension and a second across dimensions that identifies the poor by counting the dimensions in which a person is deprived the aggregation step employs the fgt measures appropriately adjusted to account for multidimensionality the axioms are presented as joint restrictions on identification and the measures and the methodology satisfies a range of desirable properties including decomposability the identification method is particularly well suited for use with ordinal data as is the first of our measures the adjusted headcount ratio we present some dominance results and an interpretation of the adjusted headcount ratio as a measure of unfreedom examples from the us and indonesia illustrate our methodology

a dynamic perspective of internal fit in corporate venturing abstract managers of corporate parents and their ventures have long been faced with the question of how closely to tie the parent and venture a close connection may enable a venture to capitalize on the competencies and resources of the parent however venture autonomy could prevent corporate inertia and bureaucracy from constraining venture growth the lack of consensus on this issue leads us to the first of two complementary research questions that we address in this paper what is the effect of internal strategic fit between a corporate parent and its venture on venture performance we suggest that a tight fit is positively associated with venture performance because of the venture s access to its parent s resources managers and researchers alike have often observed that growing enterprises are dynamic entities in the case of corporate ventures this implies that the relationship between parent and venture evolves over time our second research question directly addresses this issue by asking does the relationship between a corporate parent and its venture s evolve over time and if so how we identify two dimensions of the fit between corporate parents and their ventures relational and economic a relational fit reflects organizational culture and structure while an economic fit is a function of the needs of the venture and the resources of the parent we develop a series of hypotheses and test them with survey data from 97 canadian corporate ventures for the purposes of this study we define success as the ability of a firm to meet internal milestones on schedule we find that the degree of fit between a corporate parent and its venture does affect the success of a venture and that success is associated with high levels of awareness commitment and connection further the relational dimension of the parent venture interface appears to have a greater association with venture success than does the economic dimension our data support the idea that the parent venture relationship is dynamic in nature as ventures in our sample generally lessened their economic connections with their parents as they matured or vice versa we did find however that the relational bonds remained more or less intact the exceptions to these general trends were an increasing emphasis on financial targets along with decreasing ceo involvement as ventures matured both of these findings make intuitive sense greater financial independence is accompanied by greater financial accountability and as a venture gains in both independence and accountability there is less need for the ceo to provide air cover these two issues aside the basic model of enduring relational ties and diminishing economic ties was supported as well the increasing accountability is consistent with our expectation that a close connection is preferable to high venture autonomy

shocks income and wealth do they affect the extraction of natural resources by rural households summary this paper examines the effects of household and village level characteristics on environmental reliance and participation in resource extraction decisions unlike previous analyses that used case studies or regional samples i use a nationally representative sample of rural households rounds i and ii of the mexico national rural household survey enhrum econometric results show that participation in resource extraction follows an inverted u shaped relationship with income and that environmental reliance decreases with income beyond income results show that relatively wealthy households in rural mexico are less likely to participate in resource extraction and have lower reliance than those with less wealth there is also clear evidence that natural resources provide some sort of insurance for households that are subjected to negative agricultural shocks

incidence of forest income on reduction of inequality evidence from forest dependent households in milieu of joint forest management abstract this study suggests that there is a narrower scope to expand income inequality with the increase in forest source of income to total income relative to non forest income irrespective of the type of forest fringe villages the addition of forest income after joint forest management jfm reduces measured income inequality by about 12 all else equal in the jfm involved households but no such perceptible decrease has been found for non jfm households during this period categorically forest income plays the dominant role in reducing measured income inequality for those households who are relatively asset poor and that also live below poverty line the study also shows that the non involvement in jfm programme by the non jfm households might bring about a major environmental shirking because illegal timber income constitutes the major part in total income for non jfm households even after jfm scenario

unveiling the ethics behind inequality measurement dalton s contribution to economics this article assesses the importance of dalton s 1920 paper in the economic journal for subsequent developments in income distribution analysis

non farm income and inequality in rural pakistan a decomposition analysis this article uses three year panel data to analyse the impact of non farm income on income inequality in rural pakistan after pinpointing the importance of rural non farm income for the poor the article decomposes total rural income among five sources non farm agricultural livestock rental and transfer this decomposition shows that non farm income represents an inequality decreasing source of income the study then decomposes the sources of non farm income this analysis reveals that while non farm unskilled labour income has an equalising effect on income distribution non farm government income has a disequalising effect

long run gasoline demand for passenger cars the role of income distribution it is commonly agreed that the level of income and prices are crucial determinants of the consumption of motor gasoline the respective long run price and income elasticities are regularly calculated using cross sectional models despite the acknowledgement of the role of income distribution it plays no role in intercountry cross sectional models this is due to a lack of appropriate data this paper shows that the omission of distributional characteristics provides misleading elasticities using available distributional measures this paper is referring to an income threshold which is crucial to the acquisition of an automobile it is shown that on the one hand in poor countries an unequal income distribution is needed to enable at least some people to buy automobiles on the other hand in wealthy countries an unequal income distribution would exclude some people from acquiring automobiles hence depending on the income level inequality has a diverging impact on the ability to buy durable goods the second part of this paper develops a pooled 90 country model to examine this approach empirically it could be shown that distribution variables are highly significant to explain the demand for automobiles and motor gasoline moreover the consideration of the distribution of income leads to a considerable decrease in income elasticity values this is mainly due to the positive correlation between income level and income equality within the sample

poverty measurement with contaminated data a robust approach we examine the sensitivity of poverty indices to data contamination using the concept of the influence function and demonstrate that an important commonly used subclass of poverty measures will be robust under data contamination this is illustrated using simulations in this respect poverty and inequality indices have fundamentally different robustness properties we investigate both the case where the poverty line is exogenously fixed and where it must be estimated from the data

commons as insurance and the welfare impact of privatization abstract it is shown here that despite the efficiency gains from privatization when markets are incomplete all individuals may be made worse off by privatization even when the resource is equitably privatized such market incompleteness is common in the developing world and can explain the often encountered resistance to efficiency enhancing privatizing reforms especially in the case of village level landholdings and forests the advantage of common held property arises because of its superior insurance properties which tend to provide income maintenance in low states sufficient conditions are established under which any feasible insurance scheme under private property cannot ex ante pareto dominate allocations under the commons

on the watts multidimensional poverty index and its decomposition summary the multidimensional extension of the watts poverty index may be expressed as a function of five determinants measuring respectively the impacts of what are defined in the paper as the watts poverty gap ratio the theil bourguignon index of inequality among the poor the overall headcount ratio the weights of the various dimensions and some measure of correlation between the various dimensions using the shapley decomposition we apply this index to world data on the per capita gdp life expectancy and literacy rates and derive the contributions of the five determinants defined above to the variation of this index during 1993 2002

facilitators of organizational innovation the role of life cycle stage abstract one of the most serious challenges facing an entrepreneurial company particularly a high technology firm is knowing how to manage innovation as the organization evolves macro level facilitators inhibitors of innovation i e organizational and environmental conditions of a firm that promote or restrain innovation such as the structure of an organization its incentive system resources provided by its environment or its ways of analyzing firm external information and their relationship to the innovativeness of the firm are considered in this study two basic arguments have been put forward previously as to why the innovativeness of an organization may change as it evolves first it has been suggested that facilitators of innovation change over time and so will firm innovativeness that is the relationship between the facilitator and innovation stays unchanged but the facilitator itself is transformed causing changes in firm innovativeness as it develops for instance it has been suggested that mature firms become less innovative because their structure becomes overly formalized to perform other functions more efficiently which then stifles innovative processes second other researchers have proposed that the relationship between a facilitator and innovation changes as firms evolve for instance a formal structure may support innovation in a younger firm because it allows the entrepreneur to focus her energy whereas it may suppress innovation later since it inhibits an innovator s interaction with other environments the results of our analysis using data from 326 u s firms in different stages of their development and involved in many kinds of high tech industries support the second theory however the results for the relationships of the individual facilitators to innovation were not always as expected we found that formally structured young firms were less innovative than informal ones and that in older organizations formalization had no negative impact on innovation this finding possibly can be explained with micro level facilitators of innovation younger firms may have more entrepreneurial personnel whose ability for innovation is more inhibited through a formal structure than the more seasoned employees in older larger firms however this finding implies that the concern for formal structures with respect to firm innovativeness does not necessarily apply as typically assumed of similar significance was our finding with respect to the relationship between financial incentives and innovation it has been suggested that younger rather than older firms use incentives such as equity to encourage an innovative environment results of this research however show that innovation is associated with stock incentives especially in older firms this may be an indication for older firms to use differentiated incentives that reflect the individual s contribution to the firm to retain innovative personnel whereas start ups might rely on the excitement of working in a new venture as an incentive for innovative behavior more in line with expectations were the results for how firms process external information environmental scanning and data analysis were positively associated with innovation and this more so in older firms presumably because they have become more remote from developments outside the organization this result confirms the notion that much innovation by a firm is initiated externally however the results also indicate that the conditions of the environment itself are of lesser importance to firm innovativeness than the firm s active pursuit of information from its environment an often discussed implication of these findings is that the boundaries of a firm must be permeable at least from the outside in and systematic information gathering from customers competition research institutions etc may be necessary to the success of a firm that depends on its product development this seems especially important for older firms as expected the centralization of power in an organization also affected innovation centralization correlated positively with innovation in new ventures and negatively in older firms this indicates the importance of the entrepreneur and strong leader in a start up it also suggests though that as the firm matures this person has to give up some of her control and may have to relinquish the job at the head of the organization to someone else finally there are some more general implications of this work to managers involved with organizational innovation first reliance on past experience may be detrimental to future performance whereas a firm evolves through different stages means that have facilitated innovation earlier may be detrimental to it now or tomorrow and vice versa second copying successful strategies for innovation from other firms may not necessarily work not because their implementation was worse but because the conditions of the other firm for instance its evolutionary stage or its micro level facilitators were different researchers who study innovation should consider including life cycle stage as a potential moderating variable factors that facilitate innovation at some point during an organization s evolution actually hinder it in another also factors that were unimportant to innovation at the inception of a firm may facilitate it in later stages this study supports the conclusion that the consideration of contingency factors such as life cycle stage may enhance the development of a theory of organizational innovation

on increasing risk inequality and poverty measures peacocks lyrebirds and exotic options we extend the rothschild and stiglitz 1970 notion of increasing risk to families of random variables and in this way link their approach to the concept of stochastic processes which are increasing in the convex order these processes have been introduced in seminal work by strassen 1965 doob 1968 and kellerer 1972 who showed that such processes have the same marginals as a martingale in fact we demonstrate that their results include the results of rothschild and stiglitz as a special case further we show that it makes sense to look at a larger class of processes which we refer to as lyrebirds we also show how these processes link up with the concept of second order stochastic dominance and are helpful in studying the dynamics of inequality and poverty measures further applications discussed include geometric and hyperbolic discounting exotic derivatives and real options

heterogeneity and collective management evidence from common forests in himachal pradesh india summary this paper conducts a statistical investigation into the impact of differences in economic benefits wealth and social classes within the community on collective management of forests there are two key results first social parochialism is not a pre requisite for collective management of forests moderate levels of social diversity are associated with low collective management but at high levels of social diversity collective management is high second moderate wealth heterogeneity is beneficial however at high levels and in the presence of benefit heterogeneity it decreases collective management similarly benefit heterogeneity reduces collective management if wealth heterogeneity also exists these results run counter to the dominant understanding of heterogeneity but may be seen as alternate explanations under a specific socioeconomic context

compensating corporate venture managers this article reports the results of a questionnaire survey addressed to ceos of fortune 500 companies concerning incentive practices for venture managers data was also collected for venture performance history in these companies highlights of the results are most companies are not providing different incentives for venture managers than for other managers companies that do and companies that do not provide special incentives seem to agree on the types of incentives which would promote improved venture performance which include milestone bonuses equity and or options in the new venture variable bonuses based on venture roi the primary obstacle to installing such incentives is reported by firms without special incentives in place to be concern about internal equity firms with special incentives already in place have less concern with this problem a moderate problem to such firms is difficulty in defining venture objectives there is no evidence from this study that special incentives for venture managers affected the outcome in venture performance when such performance was measured by the percentage of successes and failures about 50 success rate was reported by each group the article deals with these questions are performance incentives essential certainly not from the data in this sample but this was a head count of successes and failures a study of overall economic performance might yield a different result one expensive failure can wipe out the gains from many small successes are the incentives reported effective obviously not enough to show a difference between those who use them and those who don t analysis of the incentive elements used and the earnings limits imposed suggest that the special incentives are not particularly special nor very much of an incentive further the most common incentive reported based on venture roi fails to consider the time period usually required to achieve a positive roi and the many changes of management which occur during that period what criteria should be used for designing an incentive program for venture managers recognition of the probability of management change incentives which promote early identification of need for change of direction or to abort focus on event completion milestones rather than the calendar the relationship of reward potential to risk potential including job security and actual financial risk by the venture manager achievability and simplicity are factors to be considered what kind of financial incentives might be included in incentive design depending on the life cycle stage of the venture fixed and variable bonuses options for equity or shadow equity in the venture itself actual equity in the new venture and to a lesser extent salary increases and equity or equity options in the parent are suggested how can the obstacles to installation of performance incentives for venture managers be reduced to reduce perception of internal inequity relating potential risk to potential reward and extending performance incentives to other managers is suggested the problem of defining venture objectives as an obstacle is instantly solved as an incentive issue by making ownership possibility a reality for venture management especially with financial investment required by venture management

concepts of poverty and the poverty line abstract various approaches adopted in developed economies to distinguishing between the poor and non poor to setting a poverty line are reviewed these include the budget standard food ratio official subjective and relative poverty line methods as well as the analysis of indicators of deprivation there has been significant progress in recent years in the degree of sophistication involved and a movement away from approaches with a quasi absolute background however all the methods face formidable problems at conceptual and empirical levels and no single approach is likely to dominate

welfare approaches to the measurement of poverty a set of poverty indices is constructed which is based on an explicit view of the loss of social welfare which results from the existence of poverty in comparison t o a society in which poverty has been eliminated the indices are based on the entire distribution of income rather than only the incomes of the poor and thus embody the concept of relative deprivation formal properties of the indices are developed together with their relationship to welfare based inequality indices both are seen as subsets of a wider choice of measures dependent on a particular choice of reference distribution copyright 1987 by royal economic society

dynamic poverty decomposition analysis an application to the philippines summary in this paper we propose a new method of poverty decomposition our method remedies the shortcomings of existing methods and has some desirable properties such as time reversion consistency and subperiod additivity our decomposition integrates the existing methods of growth redistribution decomposition and sector based decomposition because it allows us to decompose the change in poverty into growth and redistribution components for each group e g regions or sectors in the economy our decomposition works well in cases where only partial data are available for some periods it is also flexible and can be extended to have the following six components population shift within region redistribution between region redistribution nominal growth inflation and methodological change components the empirical application of the six way decomposition to the philippines for the period 1985 2009 shows that important policies for poverty reduction may differ across regions for example the autonomous region in muslim mindanao would need growth enhancing policies whereas eastern visayas would need policies to improve the income distribution our decomposition method has a wide applicability and may complement the poverty profile approach

assessing deprivation with an ordinal variable theory and application to sanitation deprivation in bangladesh the challenges associated with poverty measurement with a cardinal variable have received due attention during the last four decades but there is a dearth of literature studying how to meaningfully assess poverty with an ordinal variable this paper first proposes a class of simple intuitive and policy relevant poverty measures for ordinal variables these measures are sensitive to depth of deprivations unlike the headcount ratio moreover under appropriate restrictions the measures ensure that priority is given to the poorest among the poor while targeting monitoring and evaluating poverty alleviation programs to assess the robustness of poverty comparisons to alternative choices of parameters various stochastic dominance tests are developed some of which are themselves novel contributions to the stochastic dominance literature the empirical illustration documenting changes in sanitation deprivation in bangladesh showcases the measures ability to identify instances in which overall sanitation deprivation improved while leaving the poorest behind

network competition and the provision of universal service as providers of basic infrastructure services telecommunications providers have traditionally been required to provide services and to serve customers that would not provide a reasonable return on investment in an unregulated marketplace today there are still important telecommunications policy goals that are unlikely to be achieved through competition alone a successful transition from monopoly to competition requires the development of new mechanisms for achieving these goals that do not impede competition in services and in geographic areas where it would otherwise be feasible this paper examines the problem of providing basic telephone service to low income households in urban areas large enough to support two or more competing providers of telephone service it shows that there are plausible circumstances under which even without public support low income households unwilling to pay the cost of connection to the public network will still be provided service by telephone companies who want to make them available to other subscribers willing to pay more this can happen if there is a mechanism that allows service providers to accurately distinguish me and high income subscribers copyright 1995 by oxford university press

poverty alleviation and tropical forests what scope for synergies abstract this paper explores the state of the art of the two way causal links between poverty alleviation and natural tropical forests microimpacts of rising poverty can increase or slow forest loss at the macrolevel poverty also has an ambiguous effect but it is probable that higher income stimulates forest loss by raising demand for agricultural land the second question is what potential forest led development has to alleviate a country s poverty in terms of producer benefits consumer benefits and economy wide employment natural forests widely serve as safety nets for the rural poor but it proves difficult to raise producer benefits significantly urban consumer benefits from forest an important target for pro poor agricultural innovation are limited and seldom favor the poor absorption of poor unskilled labor is low in forestry which tends to be capital intensive natural forests may thus lack comparative advantage for poverty alleviation there are few win win synergies between natural forests and national poverty reduction which may help to explain why the loss of tropical forests is ongoing this may have important implications for our understanding of sustainable forest development and for the design of both conservation and poverty alleviation strategies

household wealth status and natural resource use in the kat river valley south africa abstract much work has demonstrated the significant role and value of non timber forest products ntfps in the livelihoods of rural people in southern africa and elsewhere the findings provide a mean or composite picture averaged across the sample households within each community yet within any given community there is significant socio economic differentiation it is important to acknowledge such differentiation when considering policy and management interventions to support rural livelihoods and promote sustainable resource use this paper reports on a study in south africa the objective of which was to explore wealth related differences and similarities in the use and value of ntfps data on ntfp consumption purchase and sale were collected from households in three rural villages households were divided into three wealth classes and patterns of ntfps use between the classes examined there was no difference in the proportions of households in each wealth class using ntfps nor the total number of ntfps used per household yet there was some supporting evidence that poorer households derive greater benefits from ntfps than do wealthy or intermediate households one clear difference was that with increasing wealth households purchased significantly more ntfps and a greater proportion of wealthy households did so conversely a greater proportion of poor households were involved in the sale of one or more ntfps and they sold a greater number per household compared to wealthy and intermediate households detailed examination of use and value of four ntfps fuelwood wild fruits edible herbs and grass hand brushes revealed that in all instances the poorest households used more of the resource per capita than the other wealth classes this was not the case for comparisons based on the total household as the unit of analysis gross annual direct use value did not differ between the wealth classes for any of the four ntfps examined at the household level but on a per capita basis a significantly higher gross annual direct use value was evident within poorer households for fuelwood and edible herbs the significance of these differences is discussed

a theory of strategic venture investing some venture capital investors seek purely financial gains while others such as corporations also pursue strategic objectives the paper examines a model where a strategic investor can achieve synergies but can also face a conflict of interest with the entrepreneur if the start up is a complement to the strategic partner it is optimal to obtain funding from the strategic investor if the start up is a mild substitute the entrepreneur prefers an independent venture capitalist with a strong substitute syndication becomes optimal such that the independent venture capitalist is the active lead investor and the strategic partner a passive co investor the expected returns for the entrepreneur are nonmonotonic lowest for a mild substitute and higher for a strong substitute as well as for a complement the paper also explains why a strategic investor often pays a higher valuation than an independent venture capitalist

issues in measuring and modeling poverty economists have relied heavily on household incomes or expenditures normalized for differences in household specific prices and demographics in their research and policy advice related to poverty and inequality recognizing the conceptual and empirical problems that confound such measures does not mean that they should be ignored instead it indicates the need for supplementary measures to capture the missing items implementing a genuinely multidimensional approach will often make the welfare rankings of social states more difficult but that fact points to the nonrobustness of low dimensional rankings this may have its own policy ramifications with the possibility of correspondence between policy instruments and welfare objectives the model types used to understand the poverty and inequity determination processes will be affected not only will there be more dependent variables to consider but variables will have potentially complex relationships these relationships will often be hard to empirically disentangle despite richer integrated and longitudinal data sets such data open rich and relevant agenda for research into the dynamics of poverty along multiple dimensions a simultaneous attack on these issues from all three fronts measurement modeling and data offers hope of establishing a credible empirical foundation for public action in fighting poverty

food subsidies and poverty alleviation this paper formulates the problem of the optimal pattern of food subsidies in a general setting where the objective is to minimize a class of poverty indices within the framework of the mo dern public finance theory taking explicit account of the budget con straint and preferences and technologies the authors derive rules fo r retargetting food subsidies to reduce poverty many operational rul es of thumb appear as special cases of the general results the analy sis thus provides not only the microfoundations of these operational rules but also their appropriate generalizations when the conditions under which they arise are not fulfilled copyright 1988 by royal economic society

an axiomatic characterization of the watts poverty index abstract although the first distribution sensitive decomposable poverty index the watts index has long been neglected by the profession even when it was searching for a decomposable index this neglect is due partly to the lack of an axiomatic characterization for the watts index this paper adopts an axiomatic approach and complements the watts index with such a characterization under a set of reasonable axioms the watts index is the unique index if a poverty index is perceived as the absolute amount of social welfare loss due to poverty the watts index is relatively easy to apply it also satisfies all basic axioms for a good poverty index

income and the environment in rural india is there a poverty trap we study the relationships between rural income distributions and changes in environmental conditions in southern western and central india between 1994 95 and 2000 01 other than the relatively rich we find that all income strata benefit from an improved environment and intermediate expenditure households benefit more than the very poor in absolute terms higher median consumption expenditures and richness are estimated to increase environmental decline but we do not find a significant impact of income poverty on local environmental health the results do not support the poverty trap conjecture with environmental degradation driving expenditure reductions that promote offsetting aforestation which benefits the poor

measuring the intensity of poverty among subpopulations applications to the united states this paper proposes an approach to measuring the intensity of poverty within a group relative to that of the population to which the group belongs a poverty intensity index is presented which is easy to interpret and satisfies a number of desirable properties the intensity of poverty among racial and residential groups in various geographical locations is measured using 1980 united states census data

measuring poverty and differences in family composition the equivalence scales used to adjust for differences in family composition when measuring poverty exhibit considerable variation this paper suggests an alternative approach that allows for differences in social judgements regarding the treatment of different types of family and examines the relation with the choice of poverty measure the resulting dominance criteria cannot provide a complete ranking but allow the extent of disagreement to be identified their application is illustrated by the example of changes in child benefits copyright 1992 by the london school of economics and political science

measuring welfare poverty and inequality a class of poverty measures is identified the members of which satisfy strong monotonicity and transfer conditions these measures are closely related to indices of income inequality based on the notion of a mean equivalent income a restriction on the class of admissible measures allows poverty to be interpreted in terms of the loss in mean equivalent income resulting from the fact that some people are poor copyright 1987 by royal economic society

discontinuous losses from poverty generalized pα measures and optimal transfers to the poor abstract this paper examines the distributional properties of poverty measures which are discontinuous at the poverty line it is shown that among all the additive poverty measures only those measures with some discontinuous jump at the poverty line are such that it is optimal to allocate a given antipoverty budget either to the richest of the poor or to the poorest of the poor or to both a special class of such poverty measures is an extension of the well known p the properties of which are investigated

corporate venturing obstacles sources and solutions abstract there is a fundamental conflict between new venture and mature company management requirements as an enterprise evolves the focus for success shifts from sensing and seizing opportunity to protecting and utilizing the resources that have been acquired in surviving companies management practices change to accommodate this changing need the conflict arises when the mature company attempts to initiate internal new venture activities application of mature company practices to management of new corporate ventures is not only inappropriate but breeds failure to succeed with new ventures top corporate management must first understand the inherent differences in management needs for new ventures versus the mature organization and must then adapt a pluralistic management style that accommodates both needs this paper examines the rationale for ten establishment practices and the adverse effects they can have on new ventures from this analysis alternative entrepreneurial management practices are recommended the ten management practices examined are 1 enforce procedures to avoid mistakes 2 manage resources for efficiency and roi 3 control against plan 4 plan long term 5 manage functionally 6 avoid moves that risk the base business 7 protect the base business at all costs 8 judge new steps from prior experience 9 compensate uniformly and 10 promote compatible individuals some of the adverse effects of these practices include blockage of innovative solutions loss of competitive lead time entrepreneur failures high venture failure costs missed opportunities fluctuating venture strategies misread markets reduced motivation to take risks and loss of innovative employees recommended entrepreneurial management practices include restricting standard procedures to those appropriate for the venture controlling ventures by milestone planning rather than calendar budgets being more responsive to market feedback in adjusting plans focusing on critical issues for early determination of venture viability assessing and choosing affordable risks and making venturing a mainstream function of the business

aggregate poverty measures the way poverty is measured is important for an understanding of what has happened to poverty as well as for anti poverty policy evaluation sen s 1976 pathfinding work has motivated many researchers to focus on the way poverty should be measured a poverty measure argued by sen should satisfy certain properties or axioms and the desirability of a poverty measure should be evaluated by these axioms during the last two decades many researchers have adopted the axiomatic approach pioneered by sen to propose additional axioms and develop alternative poverty measures the objective of this survey is to provide a clarification on the extensive literature of aggregate poverty measures in this survey we first examine the desirability of each axiom the properties of each poverty measure and the interrelationships among axioms the desirability of an axiom cannot be evaluated in isolation and some combination of axioms may make it impossible to devise a satisfactory poverty measure some axioms can be implied by other axioms combined and so are not independent some others are ad hoc and are disqualified as axioms for poverty measurement based on the interactions among axioms we identify the core axioms which together have a strong implication on the functional form of a poverty measure we then review poverty measures that have appeared in the literature evaluating the interrelationships among different measures and examining the properties of each measure the axioms each measure satisfies violates are also summarized in a tabular form several good poverty measures which have not been documented by previous surveys are also included

on the measurement of poverty official statistics in the united states and the united kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970 s and the 1980 s but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings in particular the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism this paper re examines three basic issues in measuring poverty the choice of the poverty line the index of poverty and the relation between poverty and inequality one general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted there is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line affecting both its level and its structure in this situation we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering the first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons illustrating their application by reference to data for the united states the choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed in the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class which includes many of those proposed give the same ranking those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded the third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare

statistical tests of changes in u s poverty 1975 to 1990 since president lyndon johnson declared the war on poverty three decades ago scholars have devoted many volumes to analyzing characteristics of poverty evaluating effectiveness of antipoverty policies and measuring changes in poverty unfortunately most poverty studies have focused primarily on the incidence of poverty rather than on both the incidence of poverty and the income distribution within the poor population although a k sen s 23 seminal work on measurement of poverty demonstrated the importance of constructing and using a distribution sensitive poverty measure in evaluating poverty the u s federal government still uses the proportion of poor as virtually the only indicator of poverty with few exceptions such as bishop formby and smith 5 most recent scholarly works on poverty issues including sawhill 21 hanratty and blank 17 and slesnick 24 are also concerned exclusively with the incidence of poverty and use a single poverty line in this study we demonstrate that a more comprehensive look at poverty using distribution sensitive measures and multiple poverty lines yields a different picture of poverty changes over time compared to what official u s statistics portray practically the comparison of poverty changes can be decomposed into three parts 1 setting a poverty line an income threshold below which a person is defined as poor this step is also called the identification of the poor and is very important in poverty study 2 choosing a method to aggregate individual poverty into overall poverty different methods of aggregating may lead to different conclusions about poverty changes therefore an appropriate method is essential for poverty study and 3 statistical inference since conclusions about poverty changes are drawn from a random sample of the population it is important to know whether the estimated poverty

poverty and resource dependence in rural india abstract previous studies of rural households in developing countries have tended to find that the dependence of these households on common pool resources declines with income our study of households in jhabua india finds a more complex relationship using the share of resource income in total long run or permanent income as our dependence measure which we argue is more appropriate than the short run income based measure commonly used in the literature we find that for households that collect any resources at all dependence exhibits a u shaped relationship with income that is the poorest and richest households depend more on resources than households with intermediate incomes the poorest and richest households are also found to be least likely to collect however indicating that resource use at the income extremes is bimodal either zero or above average moreover the observed trends for resources as a whole are not mirrored in those for individual resources dependence on fuelwood and dung declines with income for example while dependence on fodder and construction wood increases these findings suggest that common pool resources are a productive source of income not just for the poor but also for the rich and that improvements in the stocks of these resources can potentially form the basis of poverty reduction efforts in these economies

supporting innovation and venture development in established companies abstract accumulated research findings call into question the ability of established corporations to develop and manage new ventures successfully this article argues that the problem comes in large part from failing to differentiate between the requirements of administrative management geared to managing existing activities and holding things in place to ensure continuation of already developed activities and the requirements of entrepreneurial management designed to create change by developing something new the two kinds of management are in tension and may interfere with each other but every established organization needs both in order to get both innovation and efficiency innovations and new ventures have four particular characteristics that account for their special management requirements uncertainty knowledge intensivity competition with alternative courses of action and boundary crossing thus entrepreneurial management to support creation of the new puts a stress on such features as visionary leadership patient money planning flexibility team continuity stability and interfunctional cooperation but the usual requirements of administrative management in established corporations contradict these principles thus some companies try to set their new ventures apart from the old to avoid conflicts in management requirements however this this only partially solves the problem all companies need both to manage ongoing activities and to create new ones with the proportions of each depending on the nature of the business they need to strike a balance between administrative and entrepreneurial management the problem of venture development in established corporations occurs when administrative management comes to dominate and innovation is not valued sufficiently the command system of administrative management needs to be replaced by a mutual adjustment system high innovation companies build mutual adjustment into their design they allow flexibility to move into an entrepreneurial mode they are characterized by broader jobs structures built around small business units or functionally complete project teams cultures stressing the ability of people to contribute more over time and easy access to the key power tools of information support and resources a more entrepreneurial corporation minimizes hard and fast rules and procedures governed by a rigidly defined command structure and emphasizes instead flexibility and broadly skilled sets of employees in flexible units that can be grouped or regrouped as changing circumstances require large corporations must institute deliberate programs to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship including removing the roadblocks of unnecessary administrative requirements encouraging integration across departments and functions changing budgeting and accounting procedures and providing internal venture capital and special project funds discretionary time and new business performance measures

equivalence scales and housing deprivation orderings an example using lebanese data housing deprivation orderings raise challenges as far as measurement is concerned the first challenge resides in the identification of an adequate variable that characterizes housing services consumed by households another challenge may arise in the comparisons of housing services consumption between households of different sizes and composition the last challenge may arise in the choice of a deprivation threshold and of a deprivation index in this article we address those challenges theoretically an empirical illustration is offered using lebanese data

the advantage chain antecedents to rents from internal corporate ventures abstract in this article we argue that the resource based perspective on strategy offers a useful basis for understanding the contributions to the firm of corporate ventures the heart of the resource based view of the firm lies in arguments set forth by penrose and by nelson and winter penrose 1959 argued that differential mechanisms for resource combination and utilization result in heterogeneity among firms even among firms with similar factor endowments nelson and winter 1982 argued that behavior in particular behavior with respect to the utilization of firm resources becomes routinized over time people are often unable to describe or reconstruct well honed repetitive routines with ease van de ven 1986 consequently no two firms are likely to develop identical routines and it is often difficult for one firm to copy routines originated in another the idea that resources may be combined in routinized but relatively idiosyncratic ways suggests that firms will develop enduring differences in resource profiles and consequently in strategic potentialities over time consider the benefits a corporate venture can offer entering new markets making a new product developing a new technology or reconfiguring internal processes all require changes to existing resource configurations and routines these changes can allow the firm to discover ways of combining its resources and to the extent that the new combinations incorporate difficult to imitate routines it will take some time before that combination can be matched by competitors in other words venturing is one mechanism through which a firm gains superior insight about and access to firm specific resources with future rent potential value so a substantive and desirable outcome of venturing is the generation of valuable new resource combinations specific to the firm which it alone may exploit the article presents a model of those conditions that are necessary antecedents to streams of ricardian rent from the venture five such conditions are proposed all of which must be met if the firm is to derive rents from its venturing activities the first antecedent to securing rent streams from venturing is the emergence of causal understanding of the drivers of the venture s performance new causal understanding creates insight into new opportunity areas next team proficiency is essential to translate causal understanding into coordinated delivery of the product or service to the market new competences emerge as a result of evolving causal understanding and team proficiency which allow the organization to achieve new purposes from these new competences there may then develop distinctive competences that will differentiate the firm from competing organizations these distinctive competences may then become competitive advantages if they can be deployed in delivering product or service attributes that are preferred by the market to the offerings of competitors and competitors cannot readily duplicate them rents can only ensue when these inimitable competitive advantages allow a firm to achieve either distinctive efficiency in the firm or distinctive value for the customers the final section of the article offers ways in which this framework could be used first for research purposes and secondly by venture management

a note on a troublesome axiom for poverty indices in a recent article in this journal clark hemming and ulph i98i henceforth chu review the recent literature on welfare indices for the measurement of poverty and propose two new such indices the axiomatic approach to the measurement of poverty which was initiated by sen 1976 has been from the very beginning plagued with difficulties with the transfer axiom and chu s paper is not altogether immune we show that one of their two indices does not satisfy the axiom and we take this opportunity to complement their review with a few remarks in particular we show that the index proposed by kakwani ig80a has the same defect let y be a non negative income vector and z the poverty line the number of people with income no larger than the poverty line is q and the total population n assuming y y2 n y gi z yi i i q are the income gaps following chu the reader is referred to their paper for the motivation let us define the equally distributed equivalent income gap as

minimum distribution sensitivity poverty aversion and poverty orderings abstract this paper introduces a measure of distribution sensitivity which is similar to arrow pratt s measure of risk aversion for a poverty index the measure also gauges poverty aversion and has a clear and straightforward interpretation using this measure we can define various classes of minimum distribution sensitive poverty indices we show that the ordering condition for such a class of poverty indices is simply a generalized poverty deprivation profile dominance properties and implications of this dominance condition are analyzed and poverty orderings by different classes of poverty measures are compared journal of economic literature classification number i32