civil unrest in north africa risks for natural gas supply abstract the uprising and military confrontation in libya that began in february 2011 has led to disruptions of gas supplies to europe an analysis of how europe has compensated for these missing gas volumes shows that this situation has not affected security of supply however this situation would change if the north african uprising were to spread to algeria since algeria is a much more important gas supplier to europe than is libya more severe consequences would be likely applying a natural gas infrastructure model we investigate the impact of supplier disruptions from both countries for a summer and winter period our analysis shows that disruptions in the low demand summer months could be compensated for mainly by lng imports into several european countries an investigation of a similar situation at the beginning of the winter shows that security of supply would be severely compromised and that disruptions to italian consumers would be unavoidable the analysis thereby highlights the importance of taking the political stability of supply countries into account when assessing the security of european gas imports

ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty strong sustainability according to the common definition requires that different natural and economic capital stocks be maintained as physical quantities separately yet in a world of uncertainty this cannot be guaranteed to therefore define strong sustainability under uncertainty in an operational manner we propose to use the concept of viability viability means that the different components and functions of a dynamic stochastic system at any time remain in a domain where the future existence of these components and functions is guaranteed with sufficiently high probability we develop a unifying and general ecological economic concept of viability that encompasses the traditional ecological and economic notions of viability as special cases it provides an operational criterion of strong sustainability under a mild form of uncertainty and for medium spatial and temporal scales we illustrate this concept and demonstrate its usefulness by applying it to livestock grazing management in semi arid rangelands publication ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty available from https www researchgate net publication 46490456 ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty accessed apr 3 2017

economic viability and small scale fisheries a review abstract globally over 90 of all fishing vessels and about 22 million fishers are considered small scale despite their high numbers small scale fisheries are often understudied they are usually economically and politically marginalized and therefore vulnerable to large scale threats e g globalized markets to support this sector and contribute to its sustainability we argue that it is fundamental to understand how economically viable small scale fisheries are hence the main objective of this article is to critically review and describe the current discourse on the economic viability of small scale fisheries we find that currently economic viability is mainly equated with financial viability where profitability is the goal in consideration of socio economic aspects the maintenance of nonnegative net benefits to society is often not considered in current notions of economic viability while these shortcomings have been acknowledged in some of the existing literature our review shows that they have not yet been addressed comprehensively we therefore conclude that it is necessary to develop or expand current methods to better take into account social aspects when assessing the economic viability of small scale fisheries this would help find solutions to make these fisheries less vulnerable and better equipped to face large scale processes of change

environment technology and the social articulation of risk in west african agriculture two preoccupations are not mutually exclusive superficially they share the common concern that liberalization is insufficient to resolve the subsaharan food crisis at a deeper level the two preoccupations are more intimately interrelated via the correspondence that links initial wealth to risk exposure and to behavior in both production and asset accumulation a number of recent empirical studies of risk in low income countries find that households are able to employ their accumulated assets to smooth consumption in the face of adverse agricultural production shocks 3 missing from these studies is explicit attention to the fact that the effective risk from which households insulate consumption is not that of production shocks directly but of those shocks as socially articulated by institutions and property rights this article explores the creation and distribution of effective risk estimating how environment technology and social factors interact to construct it endogenously 4 put differently this article develops the notion that the risk from which households ex post try to insulate consumption is not an immutable natural or technical feature of the landscape as michael watt s contrast between precolonial and colonial nigeria forcefully demonstrates the effective risk presented by an unchanged set of environmental and technical circumstances can

energy security and renewable electricity trade will desertec make europe vulnerable to the energy weapon abstract solar power imports to europe from the deserts of north africa as foreseen in the desertec concept is one possible way to help decarbonising the european power sector by 2050 however this approach raises questions of threats to european energy security in such an import scenario particularly in the light of increasing import dependency and russia s use of the energy weapon in recent years in this paper we investigate the threat of north african countries using the desertec electricity exports as an energy weapon we develop and use a new model to assess the interdependence the bargaining power symmetry operationalised as costs of a disruption in a future renewable electricity trade between north africa and europe if europe maintains current capacity buffers some demand response capability and does not import much more than what is described in the desertec scenario it is susceptible to extortion and political pressure only if all five exporter countries unite in using the energy weapon europe is not vulnerable to extortion by an export cut from only one country as the european capacity buffers are sufficient to restore the power supply no single exporter country would have sustained bargaining power over europe

the relationship between resilience and sustainability of ecological economic systems resilience as a descriptive concept gives insight into the dynamic properties of an ecological economic system sustainability as a normative concept captures basic ideas of intergenerational justice when human well being depends on natural capital and services thus resilience and sustainability are independent concepts in this paper we discuss the relationship between resilience and sustainability of ecological economic systems we use a simple dynamic model where two natural capital stocks provide ecosystem services that are complements for human well being to illustrate different possible cases of the relationship between resilience and sustainability and to identify the conditions under which each of those will hold a resilience of the system is necessary but not sufficient for sustainability b resilience of the system is sufficient but not necessary for sustainability c resilience of the system is neither necessary nor sufficient for sustainability and d resilience is both necessary and sufficient for sustainability we conclude that more criteria than just resilience have to be taken into account when designing policies for the sustainable development of ecological economic systems and vice versa the property of resilience should not be confused with the positive normative connotations of sustainability c 2011 elsevier b v all rights reserved

vulnerability to terrorist attacks in european electricity decarbonisation scenarios comparing renewable electricity imports to gas imports the decarbonised future european electricity system must remain secure reliable electricity supply is a prerequisite for the functioning of modern society scenarios like desertec which partially rely on solar power imports from the middle east and north africa may be attractive for decarbonisation but raise concerns about terrorists interrupting supply by attacking the long unprotected transmission lines in the sahara in this paper i develop new methods and assess the european vulnerability to terrorist attacks in the desertec scenario i compare this to the vulnerability of today s system and a decarbonisation scenario in which europe relies on gas imports for electricity generation i show that the vulnerability of both gas and electricity imports is low but electricity imports are more vulnerable than gas imports due to their technical characteristics gas outages and potentially resulting blackouts are the very unlikely consequence even of very high number attacks against the gas import system whereas short blackouts are the potential consequence of a few attacks against the import electricity lines as the impacts of all except extreme attacks are limited terrorists cannot attack energy infrastructure and cause spectacular fear creating outages both gas and electricity import infrastructure are thus unattractive and unlikely terrorist targets

migration remittances and the family remittances by migrants along with migration itself are elements in a migrant familys intertemporal contractual arrangement the reasons why the migrant and his family voluntarily enter into a mutually beneficial contractual arrangement with each other rather than with a 3rd party are discussed and the conditions under which the contractual arrangement is self enforcing are identified both parties can usually benefit from a number of pareto efficient mutual contractual arrangements this gives rise to an indeterminacy problem solved through a bargaining process between the parties who consequently converge to a contractual arrangement implying a specific flow of migrant to family remittances the chosen contractual arrangement reflects the relative bargaining powers of the parties and variables impinging upon these powers thus bear upon remittances in the light of these arguments tests are conducted on observed remittance behavior across individual migrants in botswana authors

the triple bottom line meeting ecological economic and social goals with individual transferable quotas this paper deals with the sustainable management of a renewable resource based on individual and transferable quotas itqs when agents differ in terms of harvesting costs or catch capability in a dynamic bio economic model we determine the feasibility conditions under which a fishery manager can achieve sustainability objectives which simultaneously account for stock conservation economic efficiency and maintenance of fishing activity for the agents along time we show how the viability of quota management strategies based on itq depends on the degree of heterogeneity of users in the fishery the current status and the dynamics of the stock together with the selection of tac schedules in particular for a given stock we compute the maximin effort for a given set of agents and we derive the maximal number of active agents for a given guaranteed effort an application to the nephrops fishery in the bay of biscay illustrates the results

storage and viability of a fishery with resource and market dephased seasonalities in this study we analyse the role of the storageregulation in a fishery s production process when theresource exploited and the market to which theproduction is exported are characterized by seasonaldephased oscillations for this purpose we built up adynamic model drawn from the french guyana shrimpfishery example the underlying objective of the modelis not the maximisation of a given criterion as wouldbe in the optimal control approach but merely themaintenance of the fishery s economical viability thefundamental principle is here to try to preserve asmany as possible viable control options theconditions to achieve and maintain this viability arecaptured in a certain number of constraints theanalysis points out periods and situations within theseason where the fishermen must anticipate theevolution of their storage to avoid violating thoseviability constraints the study also indicates howthe fishery s viability can be ensured even if theexploitation costs exceed the commercial value of thelandings for a finite part of the year however whenthe resource s and or market s oscillations are toolarge the fishery may be not viable any longer and itappears that the crisis can not be removed byinvesting in larger storage capacities

regional growth linkages from agriculture pioneering research on downstream linkages from agriculture is said to demonstrate that consumption links rather than production links are the main source of indrect growth effects that these consumption links take the form of labour intensive goods and services produced locally and that the largest farm enterprises are most locally multiplicative of activities mopping up surplus rural labour this article has two purposes first the methodologies assumptions and data base for the quantification of the local and non local regional multiplier effects from agricultural development are examined second the contradictory interpretations for agricultural policy which have arisen from these exercises of quantification are discussed and an attempt made to explain their bases

defining viable recovery paths toward sustainable fisheries this paper develops a formal analysis of the recovery process for a fishery from crisis situations to desired levels of sustainable exploitation using the theoretical framework of viable control we define sustainability as a combination of biological economic and social constraints which need to be met for a viable fishery to exist biological constraints are based on the definition of a minimum resource stock to be preserved economic constraints relate to the existence of a guaranteed profit per vessel social constraints refer to the maintenance of a minimum size of the fleet and to the maximum speed at which fleet adjustment can take place using fleet size adjustment and fishing effort per vessel as control variables we first identify the states of this bioeconomic system for which sustainable exploitation is possible i e for which all constraints can be dynamically met such favorable states are called viable states we then examine possible transition phases from non viable to viable states we characterize recovery paths with respect to the time of crisis of the trajectory which is the number of periods during which the constraints are not respected the approach is applied to the single stock of the bay of biscay nephrops fishery the transition path identified through the viability approach is compared to the historical recovery process and to both open access and optimal harvesting scenarios

hearts and spades paradigms of household economics abstract this paper explains why the feminist critique of inequalities within the family poses a serious challenge to conventional economic theories of the household but it also discusses those aspects of both neoclassical and marxian theory that are useful to an analysis of conflict within the family arguing that the bargaining power models being developed by some neoclassical theorist are complementary to marxist influenced structural accounts

modeling agricultural growth multipliers agriculture s potential as an engine of third world growth depends in large part on the size of the production and consumption linkages it stimulates in rural regions current estimates of agricultural growth multipliers within rural regions vary widely not only because economic structures differ across regions but also because the array of fixed price models most commonly used embody widely differing basic assumptions among fixed price models the semi input output formulation projects the most plausible multipliers but even they overstate the magnitude of growth multipliers by 10 to 25 according to the price endogenous model developed here

a viability analysis for a bio economic model abstract this paper presents a simple dynamic model dealing with the management of a marine renewable resource but instead of studying the ecological and economic interactions in terms of equilibrium or optimal control we pay much attention to the viability of the system or in a symmetric way to crisis situations these viability crisis situations are defined by a set of economic and biological state constraints the analytical study focuses on the compatibility between the state constraints and the controlled dynamics using the mathematical concept of viability kernel we reveal the situations and if possible management options to guarantee a perennial system going further we define overexploitation indicators by the time of crisis function in particular we point out irreversible overexploitation configurations related to the resource extinction

quantifying the supplier portfolio diversity of embodied energy strategic implications for strengthening energy resilience this paper investigates energy resilience of countries by quantifying the supplier diversification of both direct and embodied energy import in particular we quantify two approaches to diversify a country s supplier portfolio by lowering the dependency on each supplier portfolio diversification and by having embodied energy suppliers that are different from its direct energy suppliers portfolio differentiation we examine possibilities for strategic utilization of embodied energy trade to compensate for low diversity of direct energy trade for three types of fossil resources coal oil and gas we find that the diversity of embodied energy import is much greater than that of direct energy import of the three energy resources coal enables countries to adopt portfolio diversification and portfolio differentiation more than gas and oil our results suggest embodied energy can be considered as a transfer of energy resources across national borders that can directly benefit from the diversity of the world energy production by skipping the limited diversity of the world energy export

tomatoes land and hearsay property and history in asante in the time of structural adjustment abstract after a decade of advocating market based solutions to poverty and underdevelopment in sub saharan africa policy analysts have begun to reexamine the actual and potential role of african states and institutions in promoting sustainable development while stressing the importance of flexibility in policies and institutions much of this debate rests on ahistorical approaches to understanding african institutions which portray them as inflexible and fragile beleaguered by economic and political change rather than contributing to it after reviewing some of the assumptions which inform recent debates this essay argues for a more processual approach which takes account of the negotiability and ambiguity of many institutional arrangements drawing on a case study of recent changes in land rights and agricultural practices in a rural community in ghana

strategies against shocks in power systems an analysis for the case of europe abstract electricity systems are constantly exposed to geopolitical techno economic and natural uncertainties that may endanger security of supply therefore it is crucial that policy makers concerned about it consider a variety of possible futures and not only the one that is perceived as the most likely in particular they should account for the possibility of sudden shocks in their decisions with the goal of making the system more robust however long term power system models which are an important pillar of policy decision making are typically designed to determine the cost minimal power system for a specific expected future such a system is not necessarily the most robust one by combining the classic investment optimization approach with the tools of robust decision making we analyze the viability of different strategies that may potentially increase the robustness of a power system for the case of the european power system we pursue a dedicated analysis with the european power system model limes eu based on a total of more than 40 000 model runs we find that strategies promoting the ability of countries to always produce at least 95 of their electricity demand domestically significantly help to reduce the loss of load in case of shocks such a strategy is not cost optimal for the expected future without shocks but the additional costs about 0 1 of total system costs are low compared to the benefits of significantly increasing the power system s robustness

haddad lawrence john hoddinott and harold alderman eds intrahousehold resource allocation in developing countries models methods and policy baltimore md johns hopkins university press 1997 384 pp 55 00 in this volume economists demographers sociologists and anthropologists collaborate in the study of how resources are allocated within households in developing countries and why it matters from a policy perspective surveying a broad range of theory and evidence the contributors examine the many social and cultural factors that influence decisions about the family and household level about the allocation of time income assets and other resources ths contributors show that a more complete understanding of intrahousehold behaviour can increase the likelihood that policies will reach the people they are intended to affect

risk and sustainability assessing fishery management strategies we develop a theoretical framework to assess the sustainability of fishery management strategies when the bioeconomic dynamics are marked by uncertainty and several conflicting objectives have to be accounted for stochastic viability ranks management strategies according to their probability to sustain economic and ecological outcomes over time the approach is extended to build stochastic sustainable production possibility frontiers representing the trade offs between sustainability objectives at any risk level given the current state of the fishery this framework is applied to a chilean fishery faced with el nino uncertainty we study the viability of effort and quota strategies when catch and biomass levels have to be sustained we show that 1 for these sustainability objectives whatever the level of the outcomes to be sustained quota based management results in a better viability probability than effort based management and 2 the fishery s historical quota levels were not sustainable given the stock levels in the early 2000s

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

thinking big politics progress and security in the management of asian and european energy megaprojects this article examines four energy megaprojects two in europe and two in asia for each region a large natural gas pipeline project and an international project involving solar power from the desert is studied the natural gas projects are the nabucco project in europe and the trans asean gas pipeline network in asia the solar power from the desert projects are desertec in europe and gobitec in asia the article probes explanations of megaproject failure along social technical economic political and psychological dimensions we find that these projects though they are very different in nature and pertain to different regions all suffer from a similar set of problems too many stakeholders and stakeholder fragmentation cost overruns and the risk of accidents and attacks massive externalization of costs to third party stakeholders concentration of wealth and corruption and inflated expectations and biased projections we conclude by reflecting on lessons for not only the involved institutions and investors but energy analysts and the public at large

drought transfer entitlements and income distribution the botswana experience abstract using 1974 75 and 1985 86 income distribution survey data with the latter supplemented by drought relief data this paper presents an analysis of intertemporal rural household income distribution in botswana despite the fact that the 1974 75 survey was conducted during one of the best agricultural production periods on record and the 1985 86 survey was conducted in the midst of one of the worst after the rural income economy had been weakened by a severe and prolonged drought botswana s rural income inequality did not appear to have increased significantly there was no marked reduction in rural household real incomes the explanation for this outcome is found to lie in the income maintenance strategy pursued by rural households with strong support from transfer entitlement guarantees from private and public sources supplementing rural household incomes

vessel entry exit behavior in the gulf of mexico shrimp fishery given the heterogeneous nature of the fishing fleet and complex vessel behavior traditional marginalist supply models are not well suited for modeling vessel mobility a discrete choice model is utilized here to predict the probability that a vessel will enter exit or remain in the gulf of mexico shrimp fishery based on a myopic profit maximization criterion the multinomial logit model indicates that fisherman behavior is not influenced by stock variability the crowding externality as represented by size of fishing fleet exhibits a strong negative impact on the probability of entry independent of changes in abundance exvessel prices or harvest costs the gulf of mexico shrimp fishery was not an autonomous system of fishing vessels as initially believed

groundwater management in a food security context this article analyzes the sustainability of market based instruments such as tradable permits for the management of a renewable aquifer used for irrigated agriculture in our dynamic hydro economic model a water agency aims at satisfying a food security constraint within a tradable permit scheme in the presence of myopic heterogeneous agents we identify analytically the viability kernel that defines the states of the resource yielding inter temporal feasible paths able to satisfy the set of constraints over time and the associated set of viable quota policies we then illustrate the theoretical results of the paper with numerical simulations based on the western la mancha aquifer

the hidden hand of economic coercion why do policymakers consistently employ economic sanctions even though scholars consider them an ineffective tool of statecraft game theoretic models of economic coercion suggest the success rate may be understated because of selection effects when the targeted country prefers conceding to incurring the cost of sanctions it has an incentive to acquiesce before the imposition of sanctions the bulk of successful coercion episodes should therefore end with sanctions threatened but not imposed this contradicts the recent literature on sanctions which assumes that sanctions rarely if ever work at generating significant concessions from the targeted country and are imposed for domestic or symbolic political reasons if the game theoretic argument is correct the crucial cases to study are those in which coercion is threatened but not implemented a statistical analysis of data on sanctions in pursuit of economic or regulatory goals strongly supports the gametheoretic argument these results suggest that the significance of economic coercion has been undervalued in the study of statecraft and international relations more generally

a model of regulated open access resource use abstract this paper develops a model of regulated open access resource exploitation the regulatory model assumes that regulators are goal oriented choosing target harvest levels according to a safe stock concept these harvest quotas are implemented by setting season lengths conditioned on the industry fishing capacity the industry enters until rents are dissipated conditioned on season length regulations harvest levels fishing capacity season length and biomass are determined jointly using parameter estimates from the long regulated north pacific halibut fishery predictions of these variables from the regulated open access model are compared to predictions that arise from the gordon model

income portfolios in rural ethiopia and tanzania choices and constraints the article analyses the different income portfolios of households using survey data from rural ethiopia and rural tanzania it suggests that the different portfolios held by households cannot be e

interpreting transnational infrastructure vulnerability european blackout and the historical dynamics of transnational electricity governance recent transnational blackouts exposed two radically opposed interpretations of europe s electricity infrastructure which inform recent and ongoing negotiations on transnational electricity governance to eu policy makers such blackouts revealed the fragility of europe s power grids and the need of a more centralized form of governance thus legitimizing recent eu interventions yet to power sector spokespersons these events confirmed the reliability of transnational power grids and the traditional decentralized governance model the disturbances were quickly contained and repaired this paper inquires the historic legacies at work in these conflicting interpretations and associated transnational governance preferences it traces the power sector s interpretation to its building of a secure transnational power grid from the 1950s through the era of neoliberalization next it places the eu interpretation and associated policy measures against the historical record of eu attempts at transnational infrastructure governance uncovering the historical roots and embedding of both interpretations we conclude that their divergence is of a surprisingly recent date and relates to the current era of security thinking finally we recommend transnational interpretative and historical analysis to the field of critical infrastructure studies

farm nonfarm linkages in rural sub saharan africa this paper is an accumulation over the past 25 years of a body of detailed work examining the structure of africa s rural nonfarm economy first it systematically reviews empirical evidence on the nature and magnitude of the african rural nonfarm economy it then explores differences across locality and size across countries and over time in an effort to assess likely patterns of growth a subsequent review of key production and consumption parameters allows an estimate of the magnitude of the agricultural growth multipliers in africa the paper concludes with a brief discussion of policies and programs that will be necessary if farm nonfarm growth linkages are to achieve their full potential

when do imposed economic sanctions work previous research has documented only a modest success rate for imposed sanctions by contrast the success rate is higher in cases that are settled at the threat stage in this article the authors provide new insights about the circumstances under which sanctions cause behavioral change only after being imposed first the target must initially underestimate the impact of sanctions miscalculate the sender s determination to impose them or wrongly believe that sanctions will be imposed and maintained whether it yields or not second the target s misperceptions must be corrected after sanctions are imposed a game theoretical model with incomplete information is used to develop and clarify the argument

decentralized regulation of a common property renewable resource industry with irreversible investment abstract the effectiveness of output controls for rationalizing a common property renewable resource has been called into question by the theoretical work of j r gould economica nov 383 402 1972 a proper examination of this question requires an intertemporal analysis one that takes into account that asymmetries between persistent factors of production immaleable capital and factors that are instantaneously consumed labor or ldharvest effort we present here a nonlinear intertemporal model of a renewable resource industry under conditions of irreversible capital investment and undertake to analyze its dynamics both at open access and under centralized optimal management we then examine the theoretical possibility of decentralized regulation by pigouvian taxes and reconsider the proposition of gould

household strategies and rural livelihood diversification this article reviews the recent literature on diversification as a livelihood strategy of rural households in developing countries with particular reference to sub saharan africa livelihood diversification is defined as the process by which rural families construct a diverse portfolio of activities and social support capabilities in order to survive and to improve their standards of living the determinants and effects of diversification in the areas of poverty income distribution farm output and gender are examined some policy inferences are summarised the conclusion is reached that removal of constraints to and expansion of opportunities for diversification are desirable policy objectives because they give individuals and households more capabilities to improve livelihood security and to raise living standards

a stochastic viability approach to ecosystem based fisheries management academia and management agencies show a growing interest for ecosystem based fishery management ebfm however the way to operationalize this approach remains challenging the present paper illustrates how the concepts of stochastic co viability which accounts for dynamic complexities uncertainties risk and sustainability constraints can be useful for the implementation of ebfm in the present case this concept is used to identify fishing strategies that satisfy both ecological conservation and economic sustainability in a multi species multi fleet context economic viability analysis eva and the broader co viability analysis cva are proposed to expand the usual population viability analysis pva and precautionary approach an illustration is proposed using data on the fisheries of bay of biscay france exploiting the stocks of nephrops and hake stochastic simulations show how cva can guarantee both ecological stock and economic profit sustainability using 2008 as a baseline the model is used to identify fishing efforts that ensure such co viability c 2012 elsevier b v all rights reserved