rural transformation inequality and the origins of microfinance abstract what determines the development of rural financial markets starting from a simple theoretical framework we derive the factors shaping the market entry of rural microfinance institutions across time and space we provide empirical evidence for these determinants using the expansion of credit cooperatives in the 236 eastern counties of prussia between 1852 and 1913 this setting is attractive as it provides a free market benchmark scenario without public ownership subsidization or direct regulatory intervention furthermore we exploit features of our historical set up to identify causal effects the results show that declining agricultural staple prices as a feature of structural transformation leads to the emergence of credit cooperatives similarly declining bank lending rates contribute to their rise low asset sizes and land inequality inhibit the regional spread of cooperatives while ethnic heterogeneity has ambiguous effects we also offer empirical evidence suggesting that credit cooperatives accelerated rural transformation by diversifying farm outputs

differentiating commitments world wide global differentiation of ghg emissions reductions based on the triptych approach a preliminary assessment in the context of global climate negotiations various approaches have been proposed to distribute commitments regarding greenhouse gas emissions mitigation over different countries one of them is the triptych approach which is a sector approach that accounts for differences in national circumstances such as population size and growth standard of living economic structure and fuel mix in power generation it was successfully applied in the negotiations on differentiation of commitments in the european union in 1997 in this study we aim to see what problems we encounter when applying the approach in a wider geographical context in order to reach this aim we establish a test differentiation of co2 emission reduction obligations for a selection of 48 countries the criteria we apply comprise technical emission reduction options only according to our triptych criteria including the choice for particular growth scenarios and a convergence of co2 emissions in the domestic sectors by the year 2030 the sum of co2 emissions in the 48 countries in 2015 is estimated to increase by 8 over 1990 levels with the criteria used the average reduction objective for the oecd will be somewhere between 10 and 20 for economies in transition to a market economy our calculations indicate on average a reduction between 30 and 50 for the developing countries we established increases varying roughly from 40 to 200 the choice for a particular growth scenario as well as the assumption for the period for the convergence of per capita emissions in the domestic sectors are crucial and may effect the outcome of the calculations to a large extent if these problems can be sufficiently solved the triptych approach can serve as a valuable tool to rank countries in a global differentiation scheme

from production based to consumption based national emission inventories abstract under the united national framework convention of climate change unfccc countries are required to submit national emission inventories nei to benchmark reductions in greenhouse gas ghg emissions depending on the definition and system boundary of the nei the mitigation options and priorities may vary the territorial system boundary used by the unfccc has been critiqued for not including international transportation and potentially causing carbon leakage to address these issues past literature has argued in favour of using consumption based nei in climate policy this article discusses several issues in moving from the standard production based nei to consumption based nei first two distinct accounting approaches for constructing consumption based nei are presented the approaches differ in the allocation of intermediate consumption of imported products second a consistent method of weighting production based and consumption based nei is discussed this is an extension of the previous literature on shared responsibility to nei third due to increased uncertainty and a wide system boundary it may be difficult to implement consumption based nei directly into climate policy several alternative options for incorporating consumption based inventories into climate policy are discussed

carbon emission performance evaluation and allocation in chinese cities abstract this paper presents a dea approach with multiple abatement factors to evaluate co2 emission performance and allocate co2 emission quotas in chinese cities we first consider the difference of marginal abatement costs among cities and construct the non radial directional distance function with multiple abatement factors the total factor co2 emission performance index and its dynamic change index are then proposed to measure co2 emission performance considering equity and efficiency we develop a composite index by the hybrid method to allocate emissions quota which considers co2 emissions as well as co2 emission performance then we conduct an empirical study using inputs and outputs dataset of 71 chinese cities in 2005 2012 chinese cities have poor energy efficiency and still have high co2 emissions the eastern region outperforms the central region and the western region performs worst whereas the dynamic co2 emission performance of the central region has the largest increase the change of co2 emission performance is driven mainly by technological advances as for the co2 emission allocation the composite index method encourages cities to reduce emissions and enhance emission performance through carbon trading market it also motivates cities with high historical emissions to reduce their emissions by improving technology when they have poor co2 emission performance

failure to launch the role of land inequality in transition delays recent work in the growth literature has provided various explanations for transition delays and the great divergence this paper provides empirical support for one theory of transition delays initial land inequality our analysis is designed to elucidate the channels via which land inequality can affect long run economic performance using a new historical data set for land inequality frankema 2009 we employ duration analysis to investigate whether higher levels of land inequality lead to longer delays in the extension of primary schooling we then investigate whether such delays affect long run economic performance via their effect on contemporaneous schooling our findings suggest that land inequality is a key determinant of delays in schooling and that such delays have a significant negative impact on long run output

inequality in landownership the emergence of human capital promoting institutions and the great divergence this paper suggests that inequality in the distribution of landownership adversely affected the emergence of human capital promoting institutions e g public schooling and thus the pace and the nature of the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy contributing to the emergence of the great divergence in income per capita across countries the prediction of the theory regarding the adverse effect of the concentration of landownership on education expenditure is established empirically based on evidence from the beginning of the 20th century in the u s

carbon dioxide emissions allocation a review carbon dioxide co2 emissions allocation plays a fundamental role in determining reduction responsibility at economy level or emission permits at firm level past decades have seen the development and applications of various methods for co2 emissions allocation this paper provides a literature review of co2 emissions allocation with emphasis on the evolution of allocation methods used it begins with a summary of the most popular allocation principles and criteria that lay a foundation for the development of allocation methods we then classify the existing allocation methods into four groups namely indicator optimization game theoretic and hybrid approaches the main features and findings of past studies are identified and summarized while the fairness principle prevails in earlier studies the efficiency principle has been found to receive increasing attention recently we also present a comparison of the empirical results based on ten popular indicator methods to show how indicator choice affects the allocation results issues related to selecting appropriate methods in co2 emissions allocation are finally discussed further research may be carried out to strike a balance between fairness and efficiency so that the allocation results become more widely acceptable and economically feasible

equity implications of two burden sharing rules for stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations this paper focuses on the equity aspects of international burden sharing for global co2 emission stabilization it first summarizes and classifies equity principles proposed in the published literature of the field of these the authors selected three major equity principles i e egalitarian equity horizontal equity and proportional equality often referred to also as sovereign equity to carry out a detailed examination of two sets of quantitative emission entitlements which are based on two burden sharing rules i e the equal emissions per capita approach and the carbon intensity approach the two burden sharing rules were chosen as not only particularly popular but also because their application results in distinctly different burden sharing among countries to make the two rules comparable we used a global carbon emission path until the year 2050 that leads to an atmospheric co2 concentration of 550 ppm we then used the two rules for allocating the global emissions described by that path to allocate carbon emission entitlements to 67 countries and 9 world regions in general developing countries receive relatively higher entitlements under the equal emissions per capita approach whereas industrialized countries are relatively better off under the carbon intensity approach in some countries and regions emission entitlements as calculated by any of the two burden sharing rules are so low that it would be unrealistic to assume that actual emissions can be limited to the emission entitlements assigned to them without using flexibility mechanisms such as those defined in the kyoto protocol in this sense the calculated entitlements can be also interpreted as the initial allocation of tradable emission allowances of countries or regions nonetheless we considered any numerical determination of resulting carbon trade flows to be outside the scope of our paper

income distribution and macroeconomics this paper analyzes the role of wealth distribution in macroeconomics through investment in human capital it is shown that in the presence of credit markets imperfections and indivisibilities in investment in human capital the initial distribution of wealth affects aggregate output and investment both in the short and in the long run as there are multiple steady states this paper therefore provides an additional explanation for the persistent differences in per capita output across countries furthermore the paper shows that cross country differences in macroeconomic adjustment to aggregate shocks can be attributed among other factors to differences in wealth and income distribution across countries

the effect of protestantism on education before the industrialization evidence from 1816 prussia across prussian counties and towns protestantism led to more schooling already in 1816 before the industrial revolution this supports a human capital theory of protestant economic history and rules out a weberian explanation of protestant education just resulting from industrialization

the economic origins of the evil eye belief the evil eye belief is a widespread superstition according to which people can cause harm by a mere envious glance at coveted objects or their owners this paper argues that such belief originated and persisted as a useful heuristic under conditions in which envy was likely to trigger destructive behavior and the avoidance of other people s envy effectively prescribed by the evil eye belief was a proper response to that threat we hypothesize that in weakly institutionalized societies wealth differentiation and vulnerability of productive assets were the key factors enabling envy induced destructive behavior and contributing to the emergence and spread of the evil eye belief as a cultural defense mechanism evidence from small scale preindustrial societies shows that there is indeed a robust positive association between the incidence of the belief and measures of wealth inequality controlling for potential confounding factors such as patterns of spatial and cross cultural diffusion and various dimensions of early economic development furthermore the evil eye belief is more prevalent in agro pastoral societies that tend to sustain higher levels of inequality and where vulnerable material wealth plays a dominant role in the subsistence economy

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

effort sharing in ambitious global climate change mitigation scenarios abstract the post 2012 climate policy framework needs a global commitment to deep greenhouse gas emission cuts this paper analyzes reaching ambitious emission targets up to 2050 either 10 or 50 from 1990 levels and how the economic burden from mitigation efforts could be equitably shared between countries the scenarios indicate a large low cost mitigation potential in electricity and industry while reaching low emission levels in international transportation and agricultural emissions might prove difficult the two effort sharing approaches triptych and multistage were compared in terms of equitability and coherence both approaches produced an equitable cost distribution between countries with least developed countries having negative or low costs and more developed countries having higher costs there is however no definitive solution on how the costs should be balanced equitably between countries triptych seems to be yet more coherent than other approaches as it can better accommodate national circumstances last challenges and possible hindrances to effective mitigation and equitable effort sharing are presented the findings underline the significance of assumptions behind effort sharing on mitigation potentials and current emissions the challenge of sharing the effort with uncertain future allowance prices and how inefficient markets might undermine the efficiency of a cap and trade system

the economics of labor coercion the majority of labor transactions throughout much of history and a significant fraction of such transactions in many developing countries today are coercive in the sense that force or the threat of force plays a central role in convincing workers to accept employment or its terms we propose a tractable principal agent model of coercion based on the idea that coercive activities by employers or guns affect the participation constraint of workers we show that coercion and effort are complements so that coercion increases effort but coercion always reduces utilitarian social welfare better outside options for workers reduce coercion because of the complementarity between coercion and effort workers with a better outside option exert lower effort in equilibrium and thus are coerced less greater demand for labor increases coercion because it increases equilibrium effort we investigate the interaction between outside options market prices and other economic variables by embedding the coercive principal agent relationship in a general equilibrium setup and studying when and how labor scarcity encourages coercion general market equilibrium interactions working through the price of output lead to a positive relationship between labor scarcity and coercion along the lines of ideas suggested by domar while interactions those working through the outside option lead to a negative relationship similar to ideas advanced in neo malthusian historical analyses of the decline of feudalism in net a decline in available labor increases coercion in general equilibrium if and only if its direct partial equilibrium effect is to increase the price of output by more than it increases outside options our model also suggests that markets in slaves make slaves worse off conditional on enslavement and that coercion is more viable in industries that do not require relationship specific investment by workers

institutions and the long run impact of early development we study the role of institutional development as a causal mechanism of history affecting current economic performance several indicators capturing different dimensions of early development in 1500 ad are used to remove the endogenous component of the variations in institutions these indicators are adjusted with large scale movements of people across international borders using the global migration matrix of putterman and weil 2010 to account for the fact that the ancestors of a population have facilitated the diffusion of knowledge when they migrate the exogenous component of institutions due to historical development is found to be a significant determinant of current output by demonstrating that the relationship between early development and current economic performance works through the channel of institutions and that better institutions can be traced back to historical factors the results of this paper shed some light on how history has played a role in shaping long run comparative development

history institutions and economic performance the legacy of colonial land tenure systems in india we analyze the colonial land revenue institutions set up by the british in india and show that differences in historical property rights institutions lead to sustained differences in economic outcomes areas in which proprietary rights in land were historically given to landlords have significantly lower agricultural investments and productivity in the post independence period than areas in which these rights were given to the cultivators these areas also have significantly lower investments in health and education these differences are not driven by omitted variables or endogeneity problems they probably arise because differences in historical institutions lead to very different policy choices

the triptych approach revisited a staged sectoral approach for climate mitigation abstract the triptych approach is a method for allocating future greenhouse gas ghg emission reductions among countries under a post 2012 international climate mitigation regime based on technological criteria at the sector level and accounting for structural differences the emission allowances are decomposed according to sectors thereby enabling the link to real world emission reduction strategies to be more concrete the new triptych approach presented here is a refinement of an earlier version in terms of an increased transparency and allowing a delayed participation for developing countries initial participation of developing countries with incentives but no penalties through no lose targets or sustainable development policies and measures for this article we calculated the emission reductions for countries for two technology oriented scenarios which stabilize ghg concentrations at 450 and 550 ppm co 2 eq respectively the reductions are ambitious but nonetheless compatible with existing technical reduction potentials as growth is allowed but efficiency has to be improved

equity in international greenhouse gases abatement scenarios a multicriteria approach abstract the climate change problem involves long term global efforts through sustainable development the international burden sharing of greenhouse gases ghg abatement constitutes a controversial debate equity is an important issue to be considered in the mitigation policies to insure the participation of as many developing countries as possible the main purpose of this research is to allocate equitable international ghg emission entitlements using several criteria there are many equity definitions and some are conflicting a dynamical multicriterion method is proposed to compare various alternatives and to find a compromise solution if the decision making process can take into account interests and preoccupations of every country significant progress could be made to achieve a world consensus several burden sharing schemes are proposed then modeling abatement scenarios using the times world energy model will allow us to determine the cost effectiveness opportunities

inequality and redistribution evidence from u s counties and states 1890 1930 abstract does economic inequality affect redistributive policy this paper turns to u s county data on land inequality over the period 1890 to 1930 to help address this fundamental question in political economy redistributive policy was primarily decided at the local level during this period making county level data particularly informative examining within state variation also reduces the potential impact of latent institutional and political variables the paper also uses a variety of identification strategies including historic variables as well as county weather and crop characteristics as instruments for land inequality the evidence consistently suggests that greater inequality is significantly associated with less redistribution this negative relationship is especially large in heavily rural counties where concentrated landownership implied that landed elites also controlled the majority of economic production

regional allocation of co2 emissions allowance over provinces in china by 2020 the mitigation efforts of china are increasingly important for meeting global climate target since the rapid economic growth of china has led to an increasing share in the world s total co2 emissions this paper sets out to explore the approach for realizing china s national mitigation targets submitted to the unfccc as part of the copenhagen accord that is to reduce the intensity of co2 emissions per unit of gdp by 40 45 by 2020 as well as reducing the energy intensity and increasing the share of non fossil fuel consumption through regional allocation of emission allowance over china s provinces since the realization of china s mitigation target essentially represents a total amount emission allowance allocation problem an improved zero sum gains data envelopment analysis optimization model which could deal with the constant total amount resources allocation is proposed in this study by utilizing this model and based on several scenarios of china s economic growth co2 emissions and energy consumption a new efficient emission allowance allocation scheme on provincial level for china by 2020 is proposed the allocation results indicate that different provinces have to shoulder different mitigation burdens in terms of emission intensity reduction energy intensity reduction and share of non fossil fuels increase

abatement costs of post kyoto climate regimes abstract this article analyses the abatement costs of three post kyoto regimes for differentiating commitments compatible with stabilising atmospheric greenhouse gases concentrations at 550 ppmv co 2 equivalent in 2100 the three regimes explored are 1 the multi stage approach assumes a gradual increase in the number of parties involved who are adopting either emission intensity or reductions targets 2 the brazilian proposal approach i e the allocation or reductions based on countries contribution to temperature increase 3 contraction convergence with full participation in convergence of per capita emission allowances in 2050 the global costs increase up to about 1 of the world gdp ranging from 0 5 to 1 5 depending on baseline scenario and marginal abatement costs four groups of regions can be identified on the basis of similar costs expressed as the percentage of gdp these are 1 oecd regions with average costs 2 fsu the middle east and latin america with high costs 3 south east asia and east asia incl china with low costs and 4 south asia incl india and africa with net gains from emissions trading for most regimes the brazilian proposal approach gives the highest costs for groups 1 and 2 the distribution of costs for the contraction convergence approach highly depends on the convergence year the multi stage approach and contraction convergence convergence year 2050 seem to result in relatively the most even distribution of costs amongst all parties

self confirming equilibrium and the lucas critique we examine the role of off path superstitions in macro economics and show how a false belief about off path play is the key element underlying both the lucas critique and the game theoretic concept of self confirming equilibrium however the impact of false beliefs in these two cases is different in the lucas case a policy maker s incorrect beliefs about off path play can lead to the adoption of mistaken policy innovation however the consequences of such an innovation provide evidence that the belief that motivated them was wrong in contrast play may never escape an undesirable self confirming equilibrium as the action implied by the mistaken belief does not generate data that contradicts it escape from the self confirming equilibrium requires that players do a sufficient amount of experimentation with off path actions

on the origins of gender roles women and the plough the study examines the historical origins of existing cross cultural differences in beliefs and values regarding the appropriate role of women in society we test the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution of gender norms we find that consistent with existing hypotheses the descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture today have less equal gender norms measured using reported gender role attitudes and female participation in the workplace politics and entrepreneurial activities our results hold looking across countries across districts within countries and across ethnicities within districts to test for the importance of cultural persistence we examine the children of immigrants living in europe and the united states we find that even among these individuals all born and raised in the same country those with a heritage of traditional plough use exhibit less equal beliefs about gender roles today jel codes d03 j16 n30 copyright 2013 oxford university press

emission allowances and mitigation costs of china and india resulting from different effort sharing approaches to meet ambitious global climate targets mitigation effort in china and india is necessary this paper presents an analysis of the scientific literature on how effort sharing approaches affect emission allowances and abatement costs of china and india we find that reductions for both china and india differ greatly in time across and within approaches and between concentration stabilisation targets for china allocated emission allowances in 2020 are substantially below baseline projections moreover they may be below 2005 emission levels particularly for low concentration targets below 490 ppm co2 eq effort sharing approaches based on allocating reduction targets lead to relatively lower reductions for china than approaches that are based on allocating emission allowances for 2050 emission allowances for china are 50 80 below 2005 levels for low concentration targets with minor differences between approaches still mitigation costs of china including emissions trading remain mostly below global average according to literature chinese emission allowances peak before 2025 2030 for low concentration targets india s emission allowances show high increases compared to 2005 levels if emission trading is allowed financial revenues from selling credits might compensate mitigation costs in most approaches even for low concentration targets india s emission allowances peak around 2030 2040 for all concentration targets c 2012 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

between ostrom and nordhaus the research landscape of sustainability economics abstract we survey the emerging research area of sustainability economics through a quantitative full text analysis of peer reviewed journal publications from 1987 to 2013 to identify relevant contributions we draw on existing definitions of sustainability economics for a keyword based identification strategy a combined focus on a the human nature relationship b the long term uncertain future c normative orientation towards sustainability and d economic analysis our analysis of a random subsample of 343 relevant papers reveals that i sustainability economics is a rapidly developing research area ii while theoretical contributions shaped the area in earlier years applied work now constitutes the largest share of contributions iii the research landscape can be clustered into eleven research clusters these range from participatory governance of social ecological systems associated with the work of elinor ostrom to questions of intertemporal allocation and distribution applied to climate economics associated with the work of william nordhaus iv the research area is broad in scope and heterogeneous and there is relatively little interaction between important clusters v relevant contributions are published in more than 100 journals ten journals publish half of all contributions led by ecological economics and 40 appear in non economics journals underscoring the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue

history lessons institutions factor endowments and paths of development in the new world the explanations offered for the contrasting records of long run growth and development among the societies of north and south america most often focus on institutions the traditional explanations for the sources of these differences in institutions typically highlight the significance of national heritage or religion we in contrast argue that a hemispheric perspective across the wide range of colonies established in the new world by the europeans suggests that although there were many influences factor endowments or initial conditions had profound and enduring effects on the long run paths of institutional and economic development followed by the respective economies

slavery and other property rights the institution of slavery is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development and less often among hunter gatherers and advanced agrarian societies we explain this pattern in a growth model with land and labor as inputs in production and an endogenously determined property rights institution the economy endogenously transits from an egalitarian state with equal property rights to a despotic slave society where the elite own both people and land thereafter it endogenously transits into a free labor society where the elite own the land but people are free

landownership concentration and the expansion of education we study the relationship between large landownership concentration and the expansion of mass education in nineteenth century prussia cross sectional estimates show a negative association between landownership concentration and enrollment rates fixed effects panel estimates indicate that regions with an initially stronger landownership concentration exhibit increasing enrollment rates this relationship is not driven by differences in the supply of schooling we argue that the implementation of agricultural reforms including the stepwise abolition of serfdom is an important driver of the change in enrollment the results are consistent with the interpretation that emancipation from labor coercion increased the private demand for education

inequality does cause underdevelopment insights from a new instrument consistent with the provocative hypothesis of engerman and sokoloff 1997 2000 this paper confirms with cross country data that agricultural endowments predict inequality and inequality predicts development the use of agricultural endowments specifically the abundance of land suitable for growing wheat relative to that suitable for growing sugarcane as an instrument for inequality is this paper s approach to problems of measurement and endogeneity of inequality the paper finds inequality also affects other development outcomes institutions and schooling which the literature has emphasized as mechanisms by which higher inequality lowers per capita income it tests the inequality hypothesis for development institutional quality and schooling against other recent hypotheses in the literature while finding some evidence consistent with other development fundamentals the paper finds high inequality to independently be a large and statistically significant barrier to prosperity good quality institutions and high schooling

was weber wrong a human capital theory of protestant economic history max weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of protestant regions to a protestant work ethic we provide an alternative theory protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity we test the theory using county level data from late nineteenth century prussia exploiting the initial concentric dispersion of the reformation to use distance to wittenberg as an instrument for protestantism we find that protestantism indeed led to higher economic prosperity but also to better education our results are consistent with protestants higher literacy accounting for most of the gap in economic prosperity

dynamics and stagnation in the malthusian epoch this paper examines the central hypothesis of the influential malthusian theory according to which improvements in the technological environment during the pre industrial era had generated only temporary gains in income per capita eventually leading to a larger but not significantly richer population exploiting exogenous sources of cross country variations in land productivity and the level of technological advancement the analysis demonstrates that in accordance with the theory technological superiority and higher land productivity had significant positive effects on population density but insignificant effects on the standard of living during the time period 1 1500 ce

why did the west extend the franchise democracy inequality and growth in historical perspective during the nineteenth century most western societies extended voting rights a decision that led to unprecedented redistributive programs we argue that these political reforms can be viewed as strategic decisions by the political elite to prevent widespread social unrest and revolution political transition rather than redistribution under existing political institutions occurs because current transfers do not ensure future transfers while the extension of the franchise changes future political equilibria and acts as a commitment to redistribution our theory also offers a novel explanation for the kuznets curve in many western economies during this period with the fall in inequality following redistribution due to democratization i introduction the nineteenth century was a period of fundamental political reform and unprecedented changes in taxation and redistribution britain for example was transformed from an oligarchy run by an elite to a democracy the franchise was extended in 1832 and then again in 1867 and 1884 transferring voting rights to portions of the society with no previous political representation the decades after the political reforms witnessed radical social reforms increased taxation and the extension of education to the masses moreover as noted by kuznets inequality which was previously increasing started to decline during this period the gini coefficient for income inequality in england and wales had risen from 0 400 in 1823 to 0 627 in 1871 but fell to 0 443 in 1901 two key factors in the reduction in inequality were the increase in the proportion of skilled workers williamson 1985 and the redistribution of income toward the poorer segments of the society for example taxes rose from 8 12 percent of national product in 1867 to 18 8 percent by 1927 and the progressivity of the tax system increased substantially see lindert 1989

allocation of co2 emission permits economic incentives for emission reductions in developing countries the economic impacts on developing regions following a global cap and trade system for carbon dioxide are assessed through the use of an energy economy systems model both an equal per capita allocation and a contraction and convergence allocation with convergence of the per capita emissions by 2050 are shown to offer economic incentive for africa india and probably also latin america to accept binding emissions commitments under a 450 ppm carbon dioxide stabilization scenario the gain for latin america is mainly a result of increased export revenues from sales of bio fuels as a result of the climate policy it is on the other hand unlikely that these allocation approaches would offer an economic incentive for china to join the regime because of its high economic growth present higher per capita emissions than india and africa and more costly mitigation options than latin america a more stringent allocation for developing countries such as contraction with convergence of the per capita emissions by the end of this century is estimated to generate reduced net gains or increased net losses for the developing regions though africa is still expected to gain

economic backwardness in political perspective government policies and institutions shape economic incentives and via this channel have a first order impact on economic development why then do many societies adopt policies that discourage investment and maintain institutions that cause economic backwardness perhaps politically powerful groups elites are not in favor of economic growth but why it would appear that economic growth would provide more resources for these groups to take over or tax increasing their economic returns so why don t powerful groups always support economic development in this paper we develop a theory of inefficient government policies and institutions all else equal politically powerful groups would welcome superior institutions and technologies but in practice all else is not equal because superior institutions and technologies may reduce their political power and make it more likely that they will be replaced at the center of our theory is therefore the idea that changes in institutions or the introduction of new technologies often create turbulence eroding the political advantages and future economic rents of incumbent elites alternatively new technologies may enrich competing groups increasing their threat to incumbents these considerations make politically powerful groups fear losing power and oppose economic and political change even when such change will benefit society as a whole to understand the mechanism at work and its potential applications consider a concrete example industrialization in the nineteenth century bairoch 1982 estimates that between 1830 and 1913 world manufacturing output increased by a factor of 5 see table 1 panel a nevertheless this process was highly uneven across regions and countries bairoch also calculates that over the same period manufacturing output in developed countries europe and north america increasedbyafactorofover10 whereasitdeclinedinthe third world among developed countries there were

oligarchic land ownership entrepreneurship and economic development abstract this paper develops a theory in which oligarchic ownership of land or other natural resources may impede entrepreneurship in the manufacturing sector and may thereby retard structural change and economic development we show that due to oligopsony power of owners in the agricultural labor market higher ownership concentration depresses entrepreneurial investments by landless credit constrained households whose investment possibilities depend on the income earned in the primary sector we discuss historical evidence from latin america india taiwan and south korea which supports our theory

behavioural and material determinants of production relations in agriculture in this essay we develop a framework for analysing the major institutions governing the production and exchange of output and the primary factors of production in rural areas the analysis incorporates general considerations of risk and information constraints jointly with the principal material attributes of agriculture and of agricultural production factors the framework is used to analyse barriers to the existence of the major intertemporal and factor markets it is applied specifically to land scarce environments for which it provides an internally consistent explanation for many of the well documented institutional features of such settings in addition the analysis provides new implications for among other phenomena the inter relationships among ownership holdings operational scale family size and factor productivity for the scarcity of animal rental markets and use of animals as collateral for the renting out of land by small landowners and for the existence of plantations for certain crops

distributive politics and economic growth a crude distinction between economics and politics would be that economics is concerned with expanding the pie while politics is about distributing it in this paper we analyze the relationship between the two we focus on how an economy s initial configuration of resources shapes the political struggle for income and wealth distribution and how that in turn affects long run growth our main conclusion is that inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth retarding policies we derive this result from a simple political economy model of growth and present cross country evidence consistent with it the key feature of our model is that individuals differ in their relative factor endowments we distinguish between two types of factors an accumulated factor called capital and a nonaccumulated factor called labor growth is driven by the expansion of the capital stock which is in turn determined by individual saving decisions long run growth is endogenous as the aggregate production function is taken to be linearly homogeneous in capital and productive government services taken together the provision of government services is financed by a tax on capital because government services are productive a small tax on

can unobserved land quality explain the inverse productivity relationship abstract an inverse relationship between both farm productivity and labor intensity and farm size is a common empirical finding in developing country agriculture the traditional explanation has been imperfect labor markets recently it has been suggested instead that the inverse relationship is a statistical artifact resulting from omitted land quality using a farm level data set from java i investigate whether omitted variable bias can explain the inverse relationship i show that the inverse relationship and accompanying wage responses are inconsistent with a model of neoclassical farm behavior that ignores omitted variable bias instrumental variables techniques yield parameter estimates in which the inverse relationship is eliminated and the estimated wage elasticities are more in line with economic theory further econometric investigation hints that a model of omitted land quality may be a possible source of the inverse relationship these results emphasize the importance of considering the sources of cross sectional variation in estimating microeconomic relationships