stacking up the ladder a panel data analysis of tanzanian household energy choices energy use statistics in tanzania reflect the country s low level of industrialization and development in 2016 only 16 9 of rural and 65 3 of urban inhabitants in mainland tanzania were connected to some form of electricity we use a nationally representative three wave panel dataset 2008 2013 to contribute to the literature on household energy use decisions in tanzania in the context of the stacking and energy ladder hypotheses we firstly adopt a panel multinomial logit approach to model the determinants of household cooking and lighting fuel choices secondly we focus explicitly on energy stacking behaviour proposing various ways of measuring what is inferred when stacking behaviour is thought of in the context of the energy transition and presenting household level correlates of energy stacking behaviour thirdly since fuel uses have gender differentiated impacts we investigate women s bargaining power in the decision making process of household fuel choices we find that whilst higher household incomes are strongly associated with a transition towards the adoption of more modern fuels especially lighting fuels this transition takes place in a context of significant fuel stacking in tanzania government policy has been aimed mostly at connecting households to the electric grid however the public health environmental and social benefits of access to modern energy sources are likely to be diminished in a context of significant fuel stacking lastly we present evidence that the educational attainment of women in the household is an important aspect of household fuel choices

national institutions and subnational development in africa we investigate the role of national institutions on subnational african development in a novel framework that accounts both for local geography and cultural genetic traits we exploit the fact that the political boundaries in the eve of african independence partitioned more than two hundred ethnic groups across adjacent countries subjecting similar cultures residing in homogeneous geographic areas to different formal institutions using both a matching type and a spatial regression discontinuity approach we show that differences in countrywide institutional structures across the national border do not explain within ethnicity differences in economic performance as captured by satellite images of light density the average non effect of national institutions on ethnic development masks considerable heterogeneity partially driven by the diminishing role of national institutions in areas further from the capital cities

the political economy of state failure rapid decolonization created many arbitrary countries in contrast to those states which had emerged through a quasi darwinian process of selection some of these new countries had structural characteristics which gravely impeded the provision of public goods their lack of a unifying sense of shared identity made cooperation difficult and their tiny economic size left them unable to reap scale economies two public goods security and accountability are particularly important for development and so where they could not be provided states failed the cause of a problem is not necessarily a guide to its solution darwinian struggle among failing states is not something to be encouraged solutions lie partly in a phase of international provision of the key public goods partly in enhanced regional pooling of sovereignty and partly in institutional innovation to make the domestic provision of public goods less demanding of the state copyright 2009 oxford university press

government impartiality and sustained growth in sub saharan africa many studies suggest that one of the main reasons for africa s dismal growth performance over most of the 20th century is its degree of ethnic fragmentation yet there is still insufficient knowledge about whether ethnic diversity necessarily entails large economic costs or whether the implications of diversity depend inter alia on the government s approach toward the ethnic question we note that economic growth tends to increase average incomes but it also affects the income distribution then if growth is accompanied by growing economic inequality the perception of the impartiality of the government toward different ethnic groups is likely to be important for whether growth can be sustained or whether sparks of growth will evaporate because of rising political divisions and internal conflicts in this paper we study whether the degree of ethnic impartiality in the government s policies is related to the emergence of sustained growth in sub saharan africa irrespective of the actual content of the policies we measure perceptions about the impartiality of the government with survey data from the afrobarometer covering 20 countries starting in the late 1990 s our main definition of sustained growth is when there is a gdp per capita growth rate of at least 2 for at least five consecutive years our empirical results suggest that countries whose governments are perceived as impartial are more likely to experience sustained growth we conclude that in order to ensure economic development it is not only important to choose the right policies but also to implement these policies in a fair manner

the institutional and psychological foundations of natural resource policies abstractthe pressures of political interests which drive the resource curse are well understood but ordinary citizens are usually cast both as the innocent victims of this process and as the potential solution if only governments could be made more accountable to them this paper draws upon recent developments in social psychology to discuss the formation of mass opinions on two aspects of resource ownership one is the spatial assignment of ownership between local and national claims which has been a significant cause of conflict the other is the assignment of revenues between current consumption and future investment which has usually been excessively biased towards the former i suggest why in the absence of an active government communications policy to offset them known psychological biases may interact with resource discoveries to generate mass opinions which contribute to these problems

relatively weak increases in risk and their comparative statics abstract we propose in this paper a new condition on increases in risk to obtain the desirable comparative statics properties for non linear payoffs our new concept of relatively weak increases in risk extends the definition of relatively strong increases in risk black and bulkley international economic review 1989 30 119 130

the harambee movement and efficient public good provision in kenya abstract those familiar with kenya since independence will know of the importance of the harambee system the term harambee has come to mean the provision of goods usually social infrastructure through the voluntary cooperation of members of the community provision of public goods in this way is an important alternative to the more normal method provision through tax finance here we compare these two methods of provision with a view towards determining first the circumstances under which harambee might be more effective and second what policies might be pursued to best utilize this system

fractionalization and the size of government i study the effect of voters with a group based social conscience voters care more about the well being of those belonging to their own group than the rest of the population within a model of political tax determination both fractionalization and group antagonism reduce the support for redistribution whereas within group inequality increases support for redistribution inequality between groups has the opposite effect these results hold even if a poor group forms a majority using a panel constructed from us micro data i find support for the hypothesis that within race inequality increases redistribution while between race inequality decreases redistribution

the determinants of trade credit use the case of the tanzanian rice market most small businesses in the developing economies suffer from a lack of access to formal external finance one important alternative source of finance for these entrepreneurs is trade credit applying a unique data set containing data on specific trade relations between rice wholesalers and rice retailers in tanzania we analyse the determinants of trade credit demand and supply in this market using a simultaneous equation modelling approach the analysis shows that while the demand for trade credit is primarily determined by the extent to which retailers need external funds supply is mainly driven by wholesalers incentives to attract and keep clients moreover wholesalers willingness to provide credit increases if they have better information about the possibility that the customer will fail to repay the credit

comparative statics predictions for the cross effects of central dominance changes in risk with quasilinear payoffs abstract we examine cross effects for central dominance changes in the random payoff to one activity on the willingness of a risk averter to undertake or expand a second this willingness is enhanced for quasilinear payoffs when activities are cost substitutes

local political business cycles evidence from philippine municipalities abstract this paper establishes the existence of short term political business cycles in the philippines over the period 2003 2009 examining a balanced panel of 1143 municipalities shows that employment levels increase in the two pre electoral quarters and drop sharply in the two quarters following elections further results are consistent with the cycles being generated by incumbents attempts to increase their chances of re election cycles are stronger in sectors that incumbents are more able to influence and when they expect stronger electoral competition evidence suggests that these cycles are detrimental to development

managing a mega city learning the lessons from lagos africa is urbanizing at a remarkable rate generating a host of new challenges for those in charge of its towns and cities this paper assesses the potential for local and regional governments to implement innovative solutions to the demands of managing urban spaces through a case study of the much talked about case of lagos state in nigeria drawing on over 100 elite interviews and a representative panel survey of lagosians we explain how political leaders at the sub national level were able to embark on a process of impressive statebuilding and institutional transformation more specifically the article develops a comparative analysis of the tax and transport sectors to identify the conditions required for sub national innovation demonstrating how federal democracy strong economic potential political competition the ability to mobilize public support and elite commitment to build a functional mega city combined to enable state level politicians to overcome a number of potential barriers to reform while this suggests that empowering regional and local actors can facilitate more responsive and effective government we argue that the necessary conditions for sub national statebuilding are rare and can only be found in a small number of african states as a result the lessons from lagos cannot easily be applied elsewhere

racing to the bottom or to the top decentralization revenue pressures and governance reform in china summary china s decentralization has been praised for promoting inter jurisdictional competition that incentivizes local officials to promote economic development the downside of decentralization is that it enables these same local authorities to slow or block implementation of centrally mandated governance reforms especially when these may negatively affect local development goals we suggest that china s fiscal system and promotion system have created mismatched incentives that encourage cash strapped local authorities to disregard central governance reforms specifically we show that cities with weaker revenue bases were slower to implement new centrally mandated environmental transparency regulations additional evidence points to a bifurcation in development strategies in fiscally strong cities increased foreign investment leads to greater compliance in fiscally weak cities foreign investment is associated with decreased disclosure suggesting they aim to promote local development by becoming pollution havens similarly high levels of pollution induce fiscally strong cities to increase pollution disclosures while the opposite holds in fiscally weak cities these findings imply that mismatched decentralization policies can undermine other important governance reforms even ones that might be expected to be complementary to decentralizing initiatives

outside risk aversion and the comparative statics of increasing risk in quasi linear decision models necessary and sufficient conditions are derived to determine the effect of increases in rothschild stiglitz risk on optimal decisions in a class of competitive models with price uncertainty outside risk aversion and composite outside risk aversion are defined the effect of increased risk on the optimal decision is controlled by composite outside risk aversion it is decomposed into a wealth effect controlled by downside risk aversion and an uncertainty effect controlled by outside risk aversion composite outside risk aversion is shown to be equivalent to outside risk aversion so that the uncertainty effect controls the overall effect copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

social capital as a product of class mobilization and state intervention industrial workers in kerala india abstract this paper argues that state intervention and class mobilization in the state of kerala india have produced two forms of social capital kerala s high level of social development and successful redistributive reforms are a direct result of mutually reinforcing interactions between a programmatic labor movement and a democratic state this synergy between state and labor has also created the institutional forms and political processes required for negotiating the class compromises through which redistribution and growth can be reconciled these dynamics are explored through a close examination of both the organized factory sector and the unorganized informal sector

environmental performance in socially fragmented countries social fragmentation is often associated with reduced co operative behaviour which undermines public goods provision such as environmental protection the few studies linking social fragmentation and environmental performance have been confined to using ethnic fractionalisation as the only measure of social heterogeneity in this paper we contribute to the literature in a twofold manner first we bring into the analysis alternative measures of social fragmentation i e religious fractionalisation ethnic religious polarisation that have received considerable attention in development economics in recent years second this is the first study to our knowledge that makes use of a large panel dataset of several environmental indicators to explore links between ethnic religious diversity and the environment we find that all indices of social fragmentation are negatively linked to measures of environmental quality although for some of them the size of the effect is larger in the case of polarisation

inequality and group participation theory and evidence from rural tanzania abstract this paper investigates the determinants of group membership and in particular the effect of income inequality on individual incentives to join economic groups drawing on a simple model we show that an increase in inequality has an ambiguous effect and that the type of access rule open versus restricted access is key in determining what income categories are represented in the group furthermore the shape of the income distribution can be crucial to determine whether increased inequality leads to more or less group participation using survey data from rural tanzania we find that inequality at the village level has a negative impact on the likelihood that the respondents are members of any group this effect is particularly significant for relatively wealthier people both when relative wealth is objectively measured and when it is subjectively defined however when we disaggregate groups by type of access rule we find that inequality decreases participation in open access groups when there are wide disparities at the bottom of the distribution while it increases participation in restricted access groups when the disparities are around the middle and top part of the distribution finally we assess the impact of inequality on various dimensions of group functioning

ethnic heterogeneity and public goods provision in zambia evidence of a subnational diversity dividend the diversity debit hypothesis that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on social economic and political outcomes has been widely accepted in the literature indeed with respect to public goods provision the focus of this article the conventional wisdom holds that a negative relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and public goods provision is so well established empirically that future research should abandon examination of whether such a relationship exists and focus instead on why it exists that is on the mechanisms underlying a negative relationship this article challenges the conventional wisdom on empirical grounds it demonstrates at the sub national level strong evidence for a diversity dividend that is a positive relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and some measures of public goods provision in particular welfare outcomes related to publicly provided goods and services building on the literature the article draws on new analysis at district level for zambia using a new dataset compiled by the authors from administrative budget and survey data which cover a broader range of public goods outcomes than previous work including information on both budgetary and welfare outcomes the article explores why relationships may differ for sub national budgetary and welfare outcomes considering separate models for each analysis shows results to be robust across a variety of alternative specifications and models given the more nuanced relationship between ethnic diversity and public goods provision documented the article argues that the key task for future work is not to address why the relationship is negative but to study under what conditions such direction holds true and the mechanisms that underlie a diversity dividend it concludes by considering key explanatory hypotheses against the zambian data to identify promising areas for such theory development more broadly while the diversity debit hypothesis highlights the costs of diversity and could be interpreted as providing support for polices that minimize it the findings in this article are consistent with a view that diversity can be good for communities not only for normative reasons but also because under some conditions it can support concrete welfare gains

ethnic diversity social sanctions and public goods in kenya abstract this paper examines ethnic diversity and local public goods in rural western kenya the identification strategy relies on the stable historically determined patterns of ethnic land settlement ethnic diversity is associated with lower primary school funding and worse school facilities and there is suggestive evidence that it leads to poor water well maintenance the theoretical model illustrates how inability to impose social sanctions in diverse communities leads to collective action failures and we find that school committees in diverse areas do impose fewer sanctions on defaulting parents we relate these results to the literature on social capital and economic development and discuss implications for decentralization in less developed countries

collective action in diverse sierra leone communities scholars have identified ethnic divisions as a leading cause of underdevelopment due partially to their adverse effects on public goods we investigate this issue in post war sierra leone one of the world s poorest and most ethnically diverse countries to address concerns over endogenous local ethnic composition we use an instrumental variables strategy using earlier census data on ethnicity and include several historical and geographic covariates perhaps surprisingly we find that local diversity is not associated with worse public goods provision across multiple outcomes and specifications with precisely estimated zeros we investigate the role of historical factors in generating the findings

community composition and collective action analyzing initial mail response to the 2000 census this paper analyzes how community heterogeneity influences resident decisions to undertake actions generating public benefits the decision in question is completing and returning the 2000 census questionnaire an action which secures a significant amount of federal grants for the community the model developed to explain this action allows members of societal groups to differentially value public benefits that accrue to other group members racial generational and socioeconomic class heterogeneity all predict significantly lower response rates at the county level the potential for endogenous sorting into heterogeneous counties implies that the magnitude of true behavioral effects exceeds these estimates

the winds of change how wind firms assess germany s energy transition abstract in september 2010 the german government initiated a plan to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energies with nuclear power as a bridging fuel following the fukushima nuclear disaster however the government decided to immediately shut down almost half of germany s reactors and phase out the rest by 2022 the outcome of germany s energy transition energiewende from high carbon and nuclear sources of power to renewable energies has implications for germany s prosperity and may serve as either a positive or negative model for other countries achieving the energiewende will require the commitment of germany s renewable energy companies whose opinions on the transition have not yet been reported this article seeks to help fill this gap by relating the views of over 80 percent of germany s wind industry per market share the firms in our study are mostly optimistic about the government s ambitious targets but express concern over the prospects for offshore wind lagging network expansion and the efficacy of extant legislation to support the transition from the government s side cost concerns have already led to discussions of slowing the transition leading to a push pullback policy approach for the transition to proceed smoothly fundamental issues such as market design must be resolved

traditional governance citizen engagement and local public goods evidence from mexico summary we study the governance of public good provision in poor communities in oaxaca mexico we estimate the effect of usos y costumbres a form of participatory democracy prevalent in indigenous communities on the provision of local public goods because governance is endogenous we address selection effects by matching on municipal characteristics and long term settlement patterns using a first differences design we show that these municipalities increase access to electricity sewerage and education faster than communities ruled by political parties we also show they are places of vibrant political participation not authoritarian enclaves protecting the political monopoly of local bosses 2013 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

the long term effects of africa s slave trades can part of africa s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades to explore this question i use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during africa s slave trades i find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance to better understand if the relationship is causal i examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades and use instrumental variables together the evidence suggests that the slave trades have had an adverse effect on economic development

what can be learned from practical cases of green economy studies from five european countries the transition to green economies has been mediated by concrete cases and experiments in a variety of different industrial and social sectors what is lacking is research that would synthesize key findings and lessons learned across a variety of cases in this study we explore ten cases of green economy of different sectors and approaches from five european countries and identify factors that have had critical importance for the success or failure of the cases our paper reveals similarities across small and large scale cases and different approaches for implementing green economy we identified critical factors related to economic viability public funding technological development impact assessments public policies and regulation social capital leadership and coordination as well as public acceptability and image according to our results transition to green economies requires negotiation between potential trade offs among multiple goals and interests of various stakeholders the mutual benefits can be communicated through valid impact assessments and the integration of r d into the practical implementation securing the continuity of funding and leadership is crucial in successful experiments and attention should be paid to fostering social capital among stakeholders instead of any single critical factor the practical implementation of green economy is related to a multiplicity of factors and causalities depending on the context the challenges with the practical implementation of green economy can only be met with patient careful and far sighted planning of green economy initiatives as well as continuous learning from past experiences

does political competition lessen ethnic discrimination evidence from sri lanka abstract the impact of political competition on ethnic discrimination remains largely unexplored to address this gap this paper explores the relationship between the level of political competition and the probability of receiving government transfers among ethnic minorities in sri lanka in the run up to the national elections of 2000 the paper shows that making politicians dependent on the votes of members of ethnic groups other their own can encourage moderation in discriminatory practices towards ethnic minorities specifically we find that political competition positively influenced the distribution of government food stamps among sri lankan tamils who otherwise are less likely to receive food stamps relative to the sinhalese majority the negative impact of political competition on discrimination is higher when minorities form part of swing constituencies than when they form part of the base support for political parties lessons learnt here suggest that having built in incentives in the design of the electoral process for intergroup bargaining and cooperation in countries with ethnically heterogeneous societies can be an effective restraint on ethnic discrimination this is consistent with other research that considers political institutions to be a key lever for making ethnically divided societies more inclusive

tribe or nation nation building and public goods in kenya versus tanzania this article examines how government policies affect ethnic relations by comparing outcomes across two nearby districts one in kenya and one in tanzania using colonial era boundary placement as a natural experiment despite similar geography and historical legacies governments in kenya and tanzania have followed radically different language education and local institutional policies with tanzania consistently pursuing more serious nation building the evidence suggests that nation building has allowed diverse communities in rural tanzania to achieve considerably better local public goods outcomes than diverse communities in kenya to illustrate while kenyan communities at mean levels of diversity have 25 percent less local school funding than homogeneous communities on average the comparable figure in the tanzanian district is near zero the kenya tanzania comparison provides empirical evidence that serious reforms can ameliorate social divisions and suggests that nation building should take a place on policy agendas especially in africa

does foreign aid target the poorest to examine the extent to which foreign aid reaches people at different levels of wealth in africa i use household surveys to measure the subnational distribution of a country s population by wealth quintiles and match this information to data on the location of aid projects from two multilateral donors within countries aid disproportionately flows to regions with more of the richest people aid does not favor regions with more of the poorest people these findings violate the stated preferences of the multilateral donors under study suggesting that the donors either cannot or are not willing to exercise control over the location of aid projects within countries the results also suggest that aid is not being allocated effectively to alleviate extreme poverty

increases in risk and linear payoffs this paper is concerned with the effect of increases in risk on optimal decision variables for the class of linear payoffs the authors show that for this class of payoffs one can extend the class of admissible increases in risk and obtain the desirable comparative statics properties they propose the definition of a relatively weak increase in risk and apply it to the case of the competitive firm with constant marginal costs the standard portfolio model and the coinsurance problem copyright 1993 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

green energy market development in germany effective public policy and emerging customer demand this paper reviews the development of renewable energy in germany from 1973 to 2003 it investigates the relative importance of energy policy and green power marketing in shaping the renewable energy market more than a decade of consistent policy support for renewables under the feed in law streg and its successor eeg has been an important driver for increasing renewable electricity generation to date putting the country in a better position than most of its peers when it comes to achieving european union targets for renewable energy green power marketing driven by customer demand on the other hand is growing but has had limited measurable impact so far we discuss potential intangible benefits of green power marketing and scenarios for future market development the paper concludes with lessons that can be learned from the german case for policy design and market development in other countries

economics and identity this paper considers how identity a person s sense of self affects economic outcomes we incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behavior in the utility function we propose identity is associated with different social categories and how people in these categories should behave we then construct a simple game theoretic model showing how identity can affect individual interactions the paper adapts these models to gender discrimination in the workplace the economics of poverty and social exclusion and the household division of labor in each case the inclusion of identity substantively changes conclusions of previous economic analysis

education social cohesion and economic growth analysis of the contribution of education to growth through its role in promoting a common culture indicates that when different cultural groups separately determine the social content of their school curricula excessive polarization can result with less than optimal growth the optimal trajectory involves a gradual reciprocal convergence of school curricula towards the middle ground this may be difficult to implement in a political context in which all agents are identified with one group or another when curricula are determined by legislative bargaining centralization of schooling may result in overly rapid homogenization in some cases and perhaps surprisingly excessive polarization in others this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a conceptual framework for community based health insurance in low income countries social capital and economic development summary the international policy model linking community based health insurance cbhi and universal coverage for health care in low income countries is implicitly determined by the development of mutual health insurance in 19th century europe and japan the economic and health system frameworks employed in cbhi policy have not sufficiently taken into account contextual considerations social capital theories could contribute to understanding why generally cbhi does not achieve significant and sustainable levels of population coverage a framework of social capital and economic development is used to organize and interpret existing evidence on cbhi this suggests that solidarity trust extra community networks vertical civil society links and state society relations affect the success of cbhi aligning schemes to social determinants of cbhi could result in structures that differ from those proposed by current analytic frameworks

segregation and the quality of government in a cross section of countries we provide a new compilation of data on ethnic linguistic and religious composition at the subnational level for a large number of countries using these data we measure segregation of groups within the country to overcome the endogeneity problem that arises because of mobility and endogenous in ternal borders we construct an instrument for segregation we find that more ethnically and lin guistically segregated countries i e those where groups live more spatially separately have a lower quality of government there is no relationship between religious segregation and governance trust is an important channel of influence it is lower in more segregated countries jel hi 1 h77 j15 017 z12 z13 racial and religious conflicts are often associated with poor politicoeconomic performance especially in developing countries economists have recently turned their attention to ethnolinguistic fractionalization as an explanation of differences in the pace of development starting with an influential paper by william easterly and ross levine 1997 since then many others have shown that fractionalization is negatively correlated with a host of policy outcomes and the quality of government 1 however many ethnically diverse countries the united states for instance are quite successful what makes different countries more or less capable of handling

the german energy transition as a regime shift abstract in this paper i use the resilience framework to interpret the project of transforming the german energy system into a renewable energy sources res based system the so called energiewende as a regime shift this regime shift comprises several transformations which are currently altering the technological political and economic system structure to build my argument i first sketch how technological political and economic developments reduced the resilience of the conventional fossil nuclear energy regime and created a new res regime second i depict recent changes in german public discourse and energy policy as the shift to the res regime third i highlight the challenges involved with increasing the resilience of the res regime in particular sufficient resilience of the electricity transmission grid appears to be crucial for facilitating the transformation of the whole energy system

tribal mobilization fragmented groups and public goods provision in jordan diversity has been blamed for poor public goods provision in a number of different contexts it is associated with reduced spending on services meager rates of tax collection and poor policies i argue in this article however that in semidemocratic or authoritarian countries where political parties are weak diversity can be an important source of electoral competition leading to better services in diverse communities where multiple identity groups are politically mobilized candidates are forced to seek the support of voters outside of their group who are more likely to vote based on qualifications than on group affiliation resulting in better public officials who provide superior services moreover i find internal group fragmentation to be important in understanding the impact of heterogeneity on public goods provision candidates in areas where only one identity group is politically mobilized but where that group is politically fragmented will also seek votes from other groups within the comm

steering innovations towards a green economy understanding government intervention in this paper we analyse institutional conditions facilitating the transition towards a green economy by encouraging investment in the enhancement of natural capital and social equity focussing especially on government interventions presenting a conceptual institutional model how innovation generally occurs we depict system levels that can be influenced by government interventions to facilitate societal innovations towards a green economy we hypothesize that the transition to a green economy is about extending the possibility frontier outwards towards a greener economy while at the same time limiting the action space at the brown economy end a normative evaluation framework is presented to assess transitions correspondingly we elaborate on the emerging lessons for governance by examining evidence from five selected european case studies and provide a non exhaustive list of impacts that government intervention may have on the action spaces available at different system levels

development at the border policies and national integration in cote d ivoire and its neighbors regression discontinuity designs applied to a set of household surveys from the 1980 90s allow to examine whether cote d ivoire s aggregate wealth was translated at the borders of neighboring countries at the border of ghana and at the end of the 1980s large discontinuities are detected for consumption child stunting and access to electricity and safe water border discontinuities in consumption can be explained by differences in cash crop policies cocoa and coffee when these policies converged in the 1990s the only differences that persisted were those in rural facilities in the north cash crop cotton income again made a difference for consumption and nutrition the case of mali on the one hand large differences in welfare can hold at the borders dividing african countries despite their assumed porosity on the other hand border discontinuities seem to reflect the impact of reversible public policies rather than intangible institutional traits

do formula based intergovernmental transfer mechanisms eliminate politically motivated targeting evidence from ghana abstract various countries have adopted formulas for determining intergovernmental transfers as a strategy to limit the role of political considerations in resource allocation in this paper we investigate a formula based system of allocating resources from a central government to local governments to determine whether the political characteristics of recipient areas have any bearing on their allocation specifically we study the sharing of resources of the district assemblies common fund dacf in ghana amongst the country s district governments over the period 1994 to 2005 we find evidence that the mechanism does not eliminate politically motivated targeting of the grants per capita dacf grants were higher in districts where vote margins in the previous presidential election were lower suggesting that swing districts were targeted we find evidence that dacf formula indicators and their weighting were chosen and amended to produce politically desired patterns of transfers

renewable energy costs potentials barriers conceptual issues renewable energy can become the major energy supply option in low carbon energy economies disruptive transformations in all energy systems are necessary for tapping widely available renewable energy resources organizing the energy transition from non sustainable to renewable energy is often described as the major challenge of the first half of the 21st century technological innovation the economy costs and prices and policies have to be aligned to achieve full renewable energy potentials and barriers impeding that growth need to be removed these issues are also covered by ipcc s special report on renewable energy and climate change to be completed in 2010 this article focuses on the interrelations among the drivers it clarifies definitions of costs and prices and of barriers after reviewing how the third and fourth assessment reports of ipcc cover mitigation potentials and commenting on definitions of renewable energy potentials in the literature we propose a consistent set of potentials of renewable energy supplies