the state and economic stagnation in tropical africa abstract politics while only one strand in the explanation of africa s massive economic problems is nonetheless a significant factor a central conundrum facing postcolonial political leaders is how to govern and hold together unintegrated peasant societies in the absence of legitimacy personal rule a particular mode of patrimonial governance provides an answer permitting regime survival and the advancement of political insiders but personal rule has an economically destructive tendency that only shrewd political leadership and propitious world economic conditions can check if uncontrolled certain political practices corrode bureaucratic and legal rationality and promote the misallocation of scarce public resources the result can be a downward spiral of interrelated political and economic decline that is increasingly difficult to reverse

the politics of liberalizing zambia s maize markets abstract this paper discusses the process of agricultural liberalization in zambia the central argument is that maize markets have been more quickly and fully liberalized than maize input markets because the perceived political risks of liberalizing input markets are greater than those of liberalizing maize markets and because economic interest groups benefited from maize liberalization while similar interests benefited from continued government interventions in input markets these finding imply that in order to understand the prospects for economic liberalization in new democracies we must disaggregate both civil society and markets

on the sign of the optimum marginal income tax this paper studies a central aspect of optimal income taxation as modelled in mirrlees original paper on the topic identical leisure consumption preferences qualitatively homogeneous skills in production namely whether given concave utilitarianism alone the optimal marginal income tax will be non negative a well known positive answer to this question in weak inequality form was given in the said paper which however we show requires additive separability of individual utility in the ordinal and cardinal senses our main result here is to derive the required strict positivity of the marginal tax under weak conditions slightly wider than noninferiority of consumption and leisure with preferences otherwise arbitrary

the optimal linear income tax revisited abstract this paper shows that the mirrlees seade conditions of agent monotonicity and noninferiority of leisure imply the positivity of the optimal marginal income tax rate in sheshinski s model of linear income taxation as well as in the general model the optimal marginal tax rate is bounded above by the rawlsian rate which in turn is bounded by the revenue maximizing rate the optimal marginal tax rate may be arbitrarily close to the rawlsian rate however the optimal marginal tax rate is bounded away from the revenue maximizing rate whenever the individual with the lowest ability works

political commitment institutional capacity and tax policy reform in tanzania abstract the early literature on structural adjustment programs concentrated on the types of economic reforms required and more recent literature addresses the political and institutional dimensions of economic policy reform this paper presents a framework for analyzing the interaction between politics notably the political commitment to reform and institutions especially administrative capacity in implementing reform the framework is applied to tax reform and trade liberalization in tanzania a number of conclusions are drawn regarding the appropriate design and sequence of a reform program to increase the likelihood of effective implementation given the policy environment and political and institutional changes required

an upper bound on optimal income taxes abstract the message of this paper is very simple a certain range of tax rates determined by supply and demand functions only can be disregarded in linear optimal taxation approaches before any interpersonal utility comparisons are made in particular no marginal tax rate above a certain level can be optimal with respect to pareto inclusive social orderings it is shown that is in general not larger than and sometimes strictly less than the minimal tax rate at which tax revenues are maximal conditions under which is the least upper bound are given and a comparison is made with tax rates obtained by the rawlsian maximin principle

the political economy of stabilization commitment capacity and public response abstract political pressures are generally recognized as important in determining success or failure of economic stabilization and adjustment programs but there has been little comparative analysis of the politics of stabilization this study examines the factors affecting i political leaders commitment to stabilization measures often called political will ii governmental ability to implement stabilization measures and iii the responses of key interest groups and the public at large to those measures the study also discusses political implications of the design of programs and the attempted speed of stabilization and sketches the tactics available to governments to manage political risk including partial compensation persuasion diversion or obfuscation and containment of protest the discussion is based on case studies of stabilization efforts in five fairly poor small highly trade dependent countries ghana in the late 1960s and early 1970s and zambia kenya sri lanka and jamaica in the late 1970s and early 1980s a subsidiary theme within the broader discussion is the ways in which the political economy of stabilization may differ in such countries as compared to larger semi industrialized economies

some important properties of the social marginal utility of income this paper contains an analysis of how the social marginal utilities of income assigned to different persons change in response to changes in prices the provision of public goods and other parameters faced by the individual the effect of a parameter change is interpreted as composed of a change in the real value of marginal income and a change in total real income or utility level it is implied that even if utility levels are kept constant social marginal utilities of income remain unaltered only under special conditions which are exposed and interpreted the results are useful in applied welfare economics

the structural adjustment of politics in africa abstract it has long been recognized that the structural adjustment programs currently being proposed by the world bank and the international monetary fund in africa have important political consequences however there has been almost no attention devoted to what structural adjustment if implemented means for the way that politics is actually carried out in african nations the failure to examine the long term consequences of economic reform for politics is particularly surprising given that the major instruments of structural adjustment public sector reform devaluation elimination of marketing boards threaten to change not only the constituencies that african leaders look to for support but the way in which leaders relate to their supporters in the countries south of the sahara the paper examines how structural adjustment if actually implemented would affect politics in african countries the paper finds that structural adjustment makes the political climate much riskier for leaders while weakening the central apparatus of the state on which rulers have long relied to stay in power the implications of the analysis for donors are also discussed

progressive income taxes test of efficiency upper bounds on efficient tax rates in a progressive labor income tax schedule are derived within the standard framework of optimal taxation a tax rate is efficient if it is not pareto dominated by any other tax rate the formulas derived are applied to the swedish 1982 tax schedule inefficiency is revealed for the middle income groups copyright 1990 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

agricultural price policy in tanzania abstract this paper examines agricultural price policy implementation and its strategic impact in tanzania over the period 1969 1980 trends in producer prices and the rural urban terms of trade are analysed by constructing weighted price and income indices for major categories of crops marketed through official channels the results indicate a substantial deterioration of real prices and incomes from crop sales during the 1970s when taken in conjunction with a concomitant deterioration in the efficiency of agricultural marketing the analysis suggests that price policy has had a major adverse impact both on peasant living standards and on the economic performance of tanzania since the mid 1960s

transition from a pay as you go to a fully funded pension system the case of differing individuals and intragenerational fairness abstract in recent contributions to the theory of public pension systems it was argued that a pareto improving transition from an established unfunded pension system to a funded one is possible this result is derived in an overlapping generations model with identical individuals in the present study an extended model with differing individuals of an intragenerationally fair unfunded pension scheme is introduced within this more realistic framework it is shown that in general a pareto improving transition to a funded system is not possible because any instrument applied to the financing of pensions in the transition phase involves intragenerational redistribution

a reexamination of the optimal nonlinear income tax abstract this paper investigates mirrlees model of optimal income taxation it provides a concrete example of utility and density functions for which the solution to the usual first order model is not implementable i e and example where the first order approach does not work adding second order conditions leads to an extended model and to implementable solutions if these conditions are binding one gets a kink in the optimal net income schedule and bunching of individuals occurs the properties of an optimal nonlinear income tax are reexamined within the extended model

privatization internal control and internal regulation abstract this paper develops a theory of the privatization of public enterprises the relevant decisions are modelled as a three stage process internal control internal regulation and privatization privatization is a move from an overcontrolled public firm to an overcontrolled private firm the firm never achieves the optimal extent of control because the necessary replacement of public by private managers leads not only to the desired reduction of bureaucracy but also to an undesired increase in profits moreover the reduction of overbureacratization is matched by a reduction in the quality of the supplied goods

does leadership matter in the economic reform process liberalization and governance in sri lanka 1989 1993 abstract governance assumptions of the east asian miracle may not be a sufficient or a necessary condition for effective economic reform or for solid growth to emerge in other asian economies this paper argues that in sri lanka where the state is not strong where it is not well coordinated and is neither cohesive nor disciplined in organizational terms strong political leadership proved critical in the second wave of reform from 1989 1993 even if it was essentially illiberal in the process of implementation technical and political imperatives are seen to be interrelated and parts of a single reform package

structural adjustment as a policy process the case of tanzania abstract analyses of structural adjustment in developing countries have increasingly come to emphasize the importance of grounding reforms in the political realities of the countries concerned while this approach is a step forward from the more economistic and prescriptive analyses that prevailed in the first part of the 1980s we believe that the dynamics of structural adjustment is only fully captured by an approach that treats the policy context as an explicit and independent variable on the basis of a case study of tanzania this article uses a policy process approach in which the notions of ambiguity and conflict in policy situations help us better understand the opportunities and constraints for action on structural adjustment issues

political explanations of macroeconomic management a survey abstract this paper surveys eight overlapping types of political explanation for patterns of macroeconomic management in the third world 1 historical traditions 2 socio structural determinants 3 the self interest of politically powerful sectors 4 entrenched characteristics of the political system 5 formal properties of the political institutions 6 the influence of economic ideologies 7 vicious virtuous circles and 8 a residual category of conjunctural factors it then considers the scope and limitations of such explanations and reassesses the notion of political constraints on economic optimization

how should structural adjustment programs be designed abstract more than seven years have elapsed since the onset of the generalized debt crisis of 1982 yet the affected countries have still not managed to stabilize their economies these countries must now attempt structural adjustment in the midst of pervasive macroeconomic and political instability structural adjustment packages should be designed with this reality in mind this paper argues that structural adjustment programs should strive for sustainability rather than the economic liberalization that they presently stress illiberal policies which do not damage overall macro stability are preferable to liberal policies which are inherently unsustainable or engender macro instability liberalization programs that are not sustainable are likely to bring few benefits but have high costs in terms of private investment the paper discusses some of the chief implications of this opinion for the design of adjustment programs

inequality aversion and marginal taxes the concept of a lower bound on optimal linear taxes is analyzed a marginal tax rate is defined to be optimal if the corresponding state of the economy is a welfare maximum for some social welfare function reflecting at least a minimal aversion to inequality the lower bound on optimal tax rates is proved to be strictly positive this tax rate is also calculated in a numerical example based on swedish data the value obtained is 29 per cent

the optimal linear income tax a diagrammatic analysis abstract this paper clarifies the role of the tax possibility frontier and the social indifference curve in the comparative statics analysis of the optimal linear income tax by a mostly diagrammatic derivation of the results we confirm the conventional conjecture that the optimal marginal tax rate increases with the government s inequality aversion on the other hand we cannot always confirm analytically the conventional conjecture that the optimal marginal tax rate increases with the government s budgetary needs

who makes economic policy in africa and how abstract to understand the considerable detorioration in the economic policies of many african countries during the 1970s it is essential to go beyond the economist s analytical models the pressing drive of authoritarian rulers to survive adds an important dimension to economic policy choices although constrained to varying degrees by ethnic regional and class loyalties among populations they govern african rulers enjoy a measure of autonomy in making policy they did not react speedily to the growing economic crisis during the early 1980s however most reforms were undertaken under pressure and many policy efforts failed some countries managed to sustain reforms but the important question is how to go beyond these idiosyncratic cases

equate and conflate political commitment to hunger and undernutrition reduction in five high burden countries summary as political commitment is an essential ingredient for elevating food and nutrition security onto policy agendas commitment metrics have proliferated many conflate government commitment to fight hunger with combating undernutrition we test the hypothesis that commitment to hunger reduction is empirically different from commitment to reducing undernutrition through expert surveys in five high burden countries bangladesh malawi nepal tanzania and zambia our findings confirm the hypothesis we conclude that sensitive commitment metrics are needed to guide government and donor policies and programmatic action without historically inadequate prioritization of non food aspects of malnutrition may persist to imperil achieving global nutrition targets

after the decision implementing policy reforms in developing countries abstract implicit in many reform proposals is a model of the policy process that is roughly linear a proposed reform gets on the agenda for government action a decision is made on the proposal and the new policy or institutional arangement is implemented either successfully or unsuccessfully this article presents an alternative interactive model of implementation that focuses on the conflict and reactions that are evoked by efforts to bring about changed policy or institutional contexts for development and the resources that policy makers and managers are likely to require to sustain a reform in the face of such reactions central to the analysis is the assertion that characteristics of the reform being implemented will largely determine the kind of conflict it engenders where such reaction is likely to become manifest and what resources are needed for sustainability the analysis suggests a framework for the strategic management of reform initiatives

conditions for efficient tax rates abstract in a standard model of optimal taxation and for a small open economy necessary and sufficient conditions for a tax rate to be efficient are derived those conditions are applied to swedish 1982 data marginal tax rates in sweden 1982 are the highest in the oecd countries but not inefficient as evaluated on the basis of the present model

methodological individualism and social knowledge it is a touchstone of accepted economics that all explanations must run in terms of the actions and reactions of individuals our behavior in judging economic research in peer review of papers and research and in promotions includes the criterion that in principle the behavior we explain and the policies we propose are explicable in terms of individuals not of other social categories i want to argue today that a close examination of even the most standard economic analysis shows that social categories are in fact used in economic analysis all the time and that they appear to be absolute necessities of the analysis not just figures of speech that can be eliminated if need be i further argue that the importance of technical information in the economy is an especially