every little helps esg news and stock market reaction stories about corporate social responsibility have become very frequent over the past decade and managers can no longer ignore their impact on firm value in this paper we investigate the extent and the determinants of the stock market s reaction following ordinary news related to environmental social and governance issues the so called esg factors to that purpose we use an original database provided by covalence ethicalquote our empirical analysis is based on about 33 000 esg news positive or negative targeting one hundred listed companies over the period 2002 2010 on average firms facing negative events experience a drop in their market value of 0 1 whereas companies gain nothing on average from positive announcements we find also that market participants are responsive to the media but they do not react to firms press releases or to ngos disclosures moreover our results indicate that sector s reputation mitigates the loss the goodwill hypothesis and that cultural proximity and lexical contents of esg disclosures play a significant role in the magnitude of the impact

proposal for a methodology to monitor sustainability in the production of soft drinks in ref pet this study proposes a methodology to view and monitor the economic social and environmental impacts of operational and strategic decisions in reverse logistics rl industries factor analysis was conducted to form indexes in these three dimensions of an integrated rl process unlike other research the proposed methodology is oriented towards managers decisions on all aspects of the triple bottom line simultaneously and is adaptable to various industries the methodology was tested in a retail company in brazil that markets the world s largest carbonated soft drink brand in ref pet the results provide a holistic view of the impact of decisions on the use of economic social and environmental resources enabling direct operational decisions and strategies in the search for a better balance of the triple bottom line thus managers can seek improvements in the inputs of the rl process avoiding undesirable outputs this study contributes to the implementation of the concept and the adoption of sustainability practices in the corporate strategy improving the communication flow between operational activities and economic performance regarding the consumption of scarce resources and reducing the negative social and environmental impacts for the benefit of the company the business community society and nature

tax structure and corruption cross country evidence one common feature of the current literature on corruption especially the empirical contributions to it is the emphasis on the exogenous determinants of corruption which are generally beyond the direct control of governments to date little is known about how the design of government policy potentially affects the level of corruption in a country even though there is growing recognition that the design and administration of tax and spending policies play important roles in promoting or discouraging corrupt practices using a large sample of countries over the 1995 2009 period this paper fills the gap by conducting the first analysis in the literature to examine the significance of the tax structure as measured by both tax mix and tax complexity in determining corruption our results suggest the following 1 countries relying more heavily on direct taxes tend to exhibit less corruption than countries that rely more heavily on indirect taxes and 2 countries with more complex tax systems tend to be more corrupt than countries with less complex tax systems these results are robust across alternative measures of corruption and tax structure and alternative estimations with and without correcting the potential endogeneity issue of the tax structure variables

the ambiguous impact of inequality on local resource management abstract the impact of inequality on the ability of human groups to undertake successful collective action is investigated with special reference to overexploitation of common property resources in voluntary provision problems on the one hand inequality has an ambiguous impact on the feasibility of the efficient outcome even though better endowed agents contribute more to collective action in regulated settings on the other hand inequality tends to reduce the acceptability of available regulatory schemes and therefore to make collective action more difficult

fuel demand elasticities for energy and environmental policies indian sample survey evidence india has been running large scale interventions in the energy sector over the last decades still there is a dearth of reliable and readily available price and income elasticities of demand to base these on especially for domestic use of traditional fuels this study uses the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids using micro data of more than 100 000 households sampled across india the la aids model is expanded by specifying the intercept as a linear function of household characteristics marshallian and hicksian price and expenditure elasticities of demand for four main fuels are estimated for both urban and rural areas by different income groups these can be used to evaluate recent and current energy policies the results can also be used for energy projections and carbon dioxide simulations given different growth rates for different segments of the indian population

corruption and inflation abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between corruption and inflation using alternative indicators of corruption i find a significant positive association between corruption and inflation even after controlling for a variety of other determinants of the latter

reducing bureaucratic corruption interdisciplinary perspectives on what works abstract this article offers the first comprehensive review of the interdisciplinary state of knowledge regarding anti corruption policies with a particular focus on reducing corruption among civil servants drawing on the work of economists political scientists sociologists and anthropologists we examine seven policy categories 1 rewards and penalties 2 monitoring 3 restructuring bureaucracies 4 screening and recruiting 5 anti corruption agencies 6 educational campaigns and 7 international agreements notably rigorous empirical evaluation is lacking for the majority of commonly prescribed anti corruption policies nevertheless we find growing evidence of the effectiveness of policies based on monitoring including anti corruption audits and e governance in addition adequate civil service wages seem to be a necessary but insufficient condition for control of corruption an emerging skepticism regarding the effectiveness of anti corruption agencies also is apparent in the literature we conclude with broader lessons drawn from our review such as the recognition that when corruption is a systemic problem it cannot be treated in the long term with individual level solutions

aid remittances medical brain drain and child mortality evidence using inter and intra country data this article analyses the respective impact of aid remittances and medical brain drain mbd on child mortality using panel and cross country quintile level data on respectively 84 and 46 developing countries our results show that remittances reduce child mortality while mbd increases it health aid also significantly reduces child mortality but its impact is less robust than the impact of remittances remittances seem to be more effective in reducing mortality for children belonging to households from the upper classes whereas neither a pro poor nor anti poor effect is found for health aid

household fuelwood demand and supply in nepal s tarai and mid hills choice between cash outlays and labor opportunity abstract subsistence households are a leading source of deforestation and their consumption of fuelwood in particular is important in many developing countries yet the empirical economic examinations of fuelwood consumption are sparse particularly for rural areas where the deforestation occurs and we would argue that forest policy is often designed without a good understanding of the potential responses of subsistence households to the new policy this paper addresses these issues with household evidence from the two major populated regions of nepal market prices labor opportunities the availability of substitutes and measure of access to the basic resource are the most reliable predictive variables for fuelwood consumption and production there are however regional differences and important distinctions between the elasticities of fuelwood collecting or purchasing households with respect to these predictive variables the difference between collecting and purchasing households is notable it recommends forestry policies that target the labor opportunity and the physical resource in regions where collecting households dominate and policies that affect the fuelwood market itself in regions where purchasing households are important a second interesting finding is that fuelwood is relatively scarcer prices are higher in the mid hills and both collecting and purchasing households in this region are beginning to respond to deforestation by using their own land for fuelwood production

does conditionality work a test for an innovative us aid scheme performance based aid has been proposed as an alternative to the failed traditional approach whereby donors make aid conditional on the reform promises of recipient countries however hardly any empirical evidence exists on whether ex post rewards are effective in inducing reforms we attempt to fill this gap by investigating whether the millennium challenge corporation mcc was successful in promoting better control of corruption we employ a difference in difference in differences ddd approach considering different ways of defining the treatment group as well as different time periods during which incentive effects could have materialized we find evidence of strong anticipation effects immediately after the announcement of the mcc while increasing uncertainty about the timing and amount of mcc aid appears to have weakened the incentive to fight corruption over time

equity externalities and energy subsidies the case of kerosine in indonesia abstract this paper examines two arguments used to justify the subsidy provided kerosine the primary commercial fuel of indonesian households one argument holds that the subsidy reduces deforestation externalities resulting from wood gathering econometric analysis of a large cross section of households finds that firewood kerosene substitution is very limited in java where the deforestation problem is most severe so that kerosene subsidy is not an effective means of alleviating the problem the second argument holds that social equity requires the subsidization of basic needs such as kerosene it is found that the kerosene subsidy disproportionately benefits urban and wealthier households

does participation in common pool resource management help the poor a social cost benefit analysis of joint forest management in jharkhand india abstract joint forest management jfm has succeeded in halting forest degradation in india but its poverty reduction objective has not fully been evaluated previously this paper compares jfm forests and government managed forests to assess their respective net social benefits to different groups of local villagers it shows that the jfm regime reflects the social preference of the rural nonpoor and that the poor are net losers over a 40 year time horizon future plans for jfm need to include suitable compensatory mechanisms to reduce the poverty of the poorest within a village

the effect of foreign aid on corruption a quantile regression approach abstract this paper investigates the effect of foreign aid on corruption using a quantile regression method we show that foreign aid generally reduces corruption and its reduction effect is greater in less corrupt countries moreover this effect is different by different donor countries

sustainable design of renewable energy supply chains integrated with district heating systems a fuzzy optimization approach abstract this study aims to develop a comprehensive decision model for sustainable design of biomass based renewable energy supply chains and district heating systems dhs with thermal energy storages the model integrates the strategic decisions such as location and capacity selection for energy plants dhs thermal storages and biomass storages with tactical decisions related to biomass production supply and transportation planning inventory management and energy production the main purpose is to find the optimum configuration of the supply chain and dhs to meet the heat demand of a particular locality the model combines cost and service level objectives and accounts for biomass supply material flow capacity demand and technical constraints the problem is formulated as a fuzzy mixed integer linear programming milp model that comprises multiple biomass types and system uncertainties to explore the viability of the proposed model computational experiments are performed on a real world case sensitivity analyses are conducted to examine the impacts of cost and capacity limit of thermal energy storage as well as heat demand on the objective functions and thermal storage capacity the results reveal that the proposed model can effectively be used in practice to assist the decision makers in planning energy production systems in a sustainable and effective manner

the cost of carbon abatement through community forest management in nepal himalaya this paper estimates the economic returns to carbon abatement through biological sequestration in community managed forest under future redd policy and compares these for three possible management scenarios for the estimation the research relies on forest inventory data together with other socio economic and resources use data collected from forest users in three sites of nepal himalaya the paper estimates the incremental carbon from forest enhancement on a yearly basis over a five year period using the value of 1 and 5 per tco2 for conservative analysis the results based on the three sites indicate that community forest management may be one of the least cost ways to abate carbon with a break even price under scenario 2 which ranges from 0 55 to 3 70 per tco2 however bringing community forests into the carbon market may entail high opportunity costs as forests provide numerous non monetary benefits to the local population who regard these as the main incentive for conservation and management an important finding of the research is that if forest resources use by local communities is not permitted then carbon trading will not be attractive to them as revenue from carbon will not cover the cost foregone by not harvesting forest resources

does quality of openness affect corruption abstract we propose and construct a quality of openness index and demonstrate its impact on corruption the results indicate that the quality as well as the level of openness can have a significant impact on corruption

nepali fuelwood production and consumption regional and household distinctions substitution and successful intervention this article uses household data from nepal s two major populated regions and 27 of 59 districts within those regions to examine fuelwood consumption and production in contrast with a purely market assessment household analysis includes production which is consumed in the producing household the household regressions yield coefficients and elasticities that are very different from and more reliable than a comparable assessment of market demand and supply household results generally support the hypotheses that expenditures on fuelwood are a small share of total household activity and that fuelwood is not sufficiently scarce to alter household behaviour fuelwood is sufficiently scarce however to alter behaviour for those households in the hill region that do not participate in market exchange these households may be the best targets for public market interventions designed to alter fuelwood supply and deforestation

foreign aid and domestic absorption this paper introduces a new supply push instrument for foreign aid to be used together with an instrumental variable estimator that filters out unobserved common factors we use this instrument to study the effects of aid on macroeconomic ratios and especially the ratios of consumption investment imports and exports to gdp we cannot reject the hypothesis that aid is fully absorbed rather than used to build foreign reserves or exiting as capital flight nor do we find evidence of dutch disease effects aid leads to higher consumption while the evidence that it promotes investment is less robust

can the west save africa in the new millennium the western aid effort toward africa has surged due to writ ings by well known economists a celebrity mass advocacy campaign and decisions by western leaders to make africa a major foreign policy priority this survey contrasts the predominant transformational approach west comprehensively saves africa to occasional swings to a marginal approach west takes one small step at a time to help individual africans evaluation of one step at a time initiatives is generally easier than that of transformational ones either through controlled experiments although these have been oversold or simple case studies where it is easier to attribute outcomes to actions we see two themes emerge from the literature survey 1 escalation as each successive western transformational effort has yielded disappointing results as judged at least by stylized facts since again the econometrics are shaky the response has been to try an even more ambitious effort and 2 the cycle of ideas rather than a progressive testing and discarding of failed ideas we see a cycle in aid ideas in many areas in africa with ideas going out of fashion only to come back again later after some lapse long enough to forget the previous disappointing experience both escalation and cyclicality of ideas are symptomatic of the lack of learning that seems to be characteristic of the transfor mational approach in contrast the marginal approach has had some successes in improving the well being of individual africans such as the dramatic fall in mortality

joint production and consumption in traditional households fuelwood and crop residues in two districts in nepal forest conversion by agricultural households is the leading cause of deforestation yet we know little about agricultural household use of forest and tree products this article measures household production of and demand for fuelwood and fuel substitutes in two districts in nepal women play a larger role in collection in the district dependant on production from common forestlands men and agricultural capital are more important inputs in the district dependant on production from private lands the article also measures demand elasticities for fuelwood combustible agricultural residues and improved stoves a technological substitute each by household income group all price and income demand elasticities are less than one the substitution elasticities between residues and fuelwood are less than one residues are more important substitutes for low income households and improved stoves are more important substitutes for high income households

does foreign aid distort incentives and hurt growth theory and evidence from 75 aid recipient countries foreign aid transfers can distort individual incentives and hence hurt growth by encouraging rent seeking as opposed to productive activities we construct a model of a growing small open economy that distinguishes two effects from foreign transfers i a direct positive effect as higher transfers allow the financing of infrastructure ii an indirect negative effect as higher transfers induce rent seeking competition by self interested individuals in this framework the growth impact of aid is examined jointly with the determination of rent seeking behavior we test the main predictions of the model for a cross section of 75 aid recipient countries there is evidence that aid has a direct positive effect on growth which is however significantly mitigated by the adverse indirect effects of associated rent seeking activities this is especially the case in recipient countries with relatively large public sectors

a novel closed loop supply chain based on the quality of returned products abstract closing an existing real world supply chain and modelling the resultant network are challenging practices this paper investigates the possibility of closing the chain in a textile company and the effects of such a decision on the profits of the chain the paper addresses one of the common problems in modelling the return rates of backward chain since inaccuracy in estimation of such rates leads to incorrect results the present model forgoes the need for commonly used predetermined rates by proposing a conditional quality based segmentation policy addition of a secondary chain as a recovery option quality dependent incentive rates and flexibility of the model in defining quality are also among novel points of this paper first a bi objective model is proposed to formulate the chain which includes the manufacturers distributors and customers in the forward chain and remanufacturing repairing and recycling centers in the backward chain this model is applicable to industries with zero waste strategy and similar recovery facilities second an extensive sensitivity analysis is carried out on a case study from textile industry the results reveal that increase in rate of returns with low medium qualities leads to higher profits since they create more suitable environmental economical business opportunities moreover closing the supply chain of the company increases the impact of distributors collectors performance on the final profits hence managers of the company need to adopt a pricing policy in favor of the distributors collectors which equals to lower repairing remanufacturing and purchase costs from manufacturers and higher sales prices to customers manufacturers and recycling center

aid effectiveness and the politics of personalism this article examines how political institutions that provide an incentive to cultivate a personal vote condition the relationship between foreign aid and economic growth in developing country democracies politicians in aid recipient countries with high levels of personalism are more likely to pursue corruption and target government spending to narrow constituencies because personalism affects these outcomes it provides incentives to use foreign aid for politically motivated spending at the expense of investing foreign aid in growth promoting public goods using panel data from 61 aid recipient democracies from 1961 to 2001 the author finds that aid increases growth in democracies with less personalist institutions but decreases growth in countries with high personalism the author also shows that personalism conditions the relationship between aid and the composition of government spending aid increases spending on public goods relative to narrow particularistic goods in countries with low person

postconflict monetary reconstruction during civil wars governments typically resort to inflation to raise revenue a model of this phenomenon is presented estimated and applied to the choices and constraints faced during the post conflict period the results show that far from there being a fiscal peace dividend post conflict governments tend to face even more pressing needs after than during war as a result in the absence of post conflict aid inflation increases sharply frustrating a more general monetary recovery aid decisively transforms the path of monetary variables in the post conflict period enabling the economy to regain peacetime characteristics post conflict aid thus achieves a monetary reconstruction analogous to its more evident role in infrastructure

aid effectiveness the role of the local elite we study the importance of the local elite as a determinant of the effectiveness of foreign aid in developing countries the local elite serves as an intermediary between aid donors and aid recipients through its control of the government and major firms the likelihood of misusing aid is large if the elite is characterized by extensive economic and political power and little concern for social groups besides itself to determine which countries have this type of elite we use a historically determined variable the percentage of european settlers in total population in colonial times we provide strong empirical evidence that the level of european settlement in colonial times is negatively related to the effectiveness of foreign aid as measured in a growth regression framework our results are robust to the inclusion of a wide set of alternative explanatory factors advanced in the aid effectiveness literature

a robust fuzzy optimization model for carbon efficient closed loop supply chain network design problem a numerical illustration in electronics industry abstract environmentalism has become an important global issue in the present century during the recent years the closed loop green supply chain management has been increasingly a center of attention as a result of governmental laws and legislations regarding the environmental effects of any activity and the soaring consumers expectations in this study effort has been made to investigate a facility location allocation model for a multi product closed loop green supply chain network consisting of manufacturing remanufacturing and collection inspection centers as well as disposal center and markets to design the network we have proposed a mixed integer linear programming model capable of reducing the network total costs the model has been so developed as to consider such environmental objectives as reducing the rate of carbon dioxide emission in the environment throughout the network in question moreover the model has been developed using a robust fuzzy programming approach to investigate the effects of uncertainties of the variable costs as well as the demand rate on the network design to solve the bi objective programming model use has been made of the e constraint approach and a numerical illustration of copiers industry is used to show the applicability of the proposed optimization model results have revealed that the model is capable of controlling the network uncertainties as a result of which a robustness price will be imposed on the system

stochastic economic assessment of afforestation on marginal land in irrigated farming system we analysed the economic viability of afforestation on marginal irrigated croplands in irrigated drylands of uzbekistan the revenues derived from a combination of diversified agricultural production carbon sequestration nitrogen fixation and avoided irrigation water use were analysed considering uncertainty associated with on farm activities such as crop production and short rotation forestry at the per hectare scale variability in land use revenues would necessitate substantial increases in carbon prices for afforestation to be as profitable as crop cultivation on marginal lands assuming an abundant irrigation water supply in contrast at the farm scale the analysis results revealed that afforestation can be attractive financially even without carbon payments due to farm production constraints variable land use returns and the benefits of land use diversification increased carbon prices would promote carbon sequestration by motivating farmers to plant high biomass producing tree species but would have an ecosystem service trade off by reducing the appeal of nitrogen fixing species that are essential for nitrogen self sufficiency of afforestation efforts given the modest irrigation needs of afforestation efforts compared to the cultivation of annual crops tree plantations could become a primary income source for farms during periods of drought irrigation water saved from replacing crops with trees on marginal farmland would enhance the cultivation of commercial crops on productive lands thus increasing farm income

the dynamics of aid and political rights using cross country panel data we explore the extent to which the variation over time in measures of democracy and political rights can be explained by changes in aid inflows thus providing direct evidence on the impact of innovations in donor policy on the quality of recipient governance we distinguish between the short run and long run effects of changes in aid our results are very different from those based on cross country variation in aid inflows we find evidence of large differences between the effect of aid for political reform and the effect of other types of aid in aggregate these effects also depend on the recipient country s initial level of political development there is no evidence that aid intended for political reform has achieved its objective and in some countries it may be counterproductive however aggregate aid can have a beneficial effect on political rights

aid policies and growth the authors of this paper use a new database on foreign aid to examine the relationships among foreign aid economic policies and growth of per capita gdp in panel growth regressions for 56 developing countries and 6 four year periods 1970 93 they find that the policies that have a great effect on growth are those related to fiscal surplus inflation and trade openness they construct an index for those three policies and have that index interact with foreign aid they have instruments for both aid and aid interacting with policies they find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies in the presence of poor policies aid has no positive effect on growth this result is robust in a variety of specifications which include or exclude middle income countries include or exclude outliers and treat policies as exogenous or endogenous they examine the determinants of policy and find no evidence that aid has systematically affected policies either for good or for ill they estimate an aid allocation equation and show that any tendency for aid to reward good policies has been overwhelmed by donors pursuit of their own strategic interests in a counterfactual they reallocate aid reduce the role of donor interests and increasing the importance of policy such a reallocation would have a large positive effect on developing countries growth rates

willingness to pay for forest property rights and the value of increased property rights security this paper studies the willingness to pay wtp for forest property rights in viet nam we do so by asking respondents to estimate the value of two different forest property rights regimes where only the level of property security differs and all other forest plot characteristics are constant we use this information to identify the value of the property rights security our results reveal that a significant number of individuals are willing to pay for an additional area of forestland but that the amount offered appears to be inadequate to compensate sellers as very few land market transactions actually take place the results further indicate that income relates positively to wtp irrespective of forest property regime wealth age and ethnicity also have an impact on the amount households are willing to pay as expected there was a significant mark up on the more secure right econometric estimates of the difference between the wtp for secure and insecure property rights show that a higher level of female education and household age decrease the difference between the two wtp measures while the difference tends to increase as income improves this has important policy implications as it indicates that households tend to evaluate the property rights institutions differently

aid dependence and the quality of governance cross country empirical tests aid dependence can potentially undermine the quality of governance and public sector institutions by weakening accountability encouraging rent seeking and corruption fomenting conflict over control of aid funds siphoning off scarce talent from the bureaucracy and alleviating pressures to reform inefficient policies and institutions analyses of cross country data in this paper provide evidence that higher aid levels erode the quality of governance as measured by indices of bureaucratic quality corruption and the rule of law these findings support the need for donors to develop less costly and less intrusive ways of disseminating state of the art knowledge on public sector reform in developing countries

aid growth and devolution considering aid modality and different types of decentralization in this paper we provide further evidence on the relationship between decentralization and foreign aid effectiveness our previous work has shown that decentralization decreases aid effectiveness i e the impact of aid on economic growth is negative in decentralized countries however our previous work has not taken different types of aid and different types of decentralization into account which is at the heart of our current analysis we consider different measures of decentralization in particular measures of fiscal decentralization derived from government finance statistics and measures of political decentralization that are constructed based on countries constitutional rules in addition we take different types of aid into account grants loans technical assistance total net oda and we distinguish between multi lateral and bi lateral aid in order to consider differences in the donor structure our empirical analysis is based on panel data of up to 53 developing countries in our growth regressions we combine all types of decentralization with the different types of aid we find important differences between different types of decentralization i fiscal decentralization negatively affects aid effectiveness in line with our previous work ii employment decentralization may increase aid effectiveness and iii political decentralization does not hamper aid effectiveness or may even have positive effects

participatory exclusions community forestry and gender an analysis for south asia and a conceptual framework abstract the idea of people s participation has long been part of development thinking but today the management of local natural resources by village communities is widely accepted as an institutional imperative it is therefore essential to examine how these institutions perform especially from the perspective of the more disadvantaged based on extensive fieldwork among community forestry groups in india and nepal and existing case studies this paper demonstrates how seemingly participatory institutions can exclude significant sections such as women it provides a typology of participation spells out the gender equity and efficiency implications of such exclusions and analyzes what underlies them it also outlines a conceptual framework to help analyze the process of gender exclusion and how it might be alleviated

does foreign aid corrupt abstract we estimate the impact of foreign aid on corruption using geographical and cultural distance to the donor countries as instrumental variables to assess causality aid decreases corruption our results are statistically and economically significant and robust to different controls

effect of fuelwood scarcity and socio economic factors on household bio based energy use and energy substitution in rural ethiopia abstract in ethiopia biomass is predominantly utilized for household energy needs often using inefficient rudimentary stoves which cause adverse environmental and welfare effects this paper examined the contribution of biomass resources to rural household energy use and energy substitution the analysis applied the ordinary least square in the final stage estimation of fuelwood and overall biomass energy consumption by using predicted shadow prices the paper used tobit model to estimate charcoal and agricultural fuel consumption due to the presence of censoring an increase in fuelwood shadow price was associated with reduced household fuelwood consumption with price elasticity of 0 38 the cross price elasticity between fuelwood and agricultural fuels revealed no evidence of energy substitution which conforms to the findings of previous studies household access to electricity was associated with lower household biomass energy utilization but kerosene was not fuelwood substitute household energy use conformed to the fuel stacking or multiple fuel use concept but households preferred modern energy options as welfare increased in areas where modern energy is available this suggests that there is a promising prospect for fuel transition but access to modern energy and economic growth have key roles the findings suggest that a concerted policy effort is required that would help diversify rural livelihoods improve living standards and encourage economic growth encourage inter fuel substitution through improved modern energy access and afforestation to increase biomass supply

resource windfalls political regimes and political stability abstract we study theoretically and empirically whether natural resource windfalls affect political regimes we show that windfalls have no effect on democracies while they have heterogeneous political consequences in autocracies in deeply entrenched autocracies the effect of windfalls is virtually nil while in moderately entrenched autocracies windfalls significantly exacerbate the autocratic nature of the political system to frame the empirical work we present a simple model in which political incumbents choose the degree of political contestability and potential challengers decide whether to try to unseat the incumbents the model uncovers a mechanism for the asymmetric impact of resource windfalls on democracies and autocracies as well as the the differential impact within autocracies

corruption and the composition of government expenditure abstract this paper asks whether predatory behavior by corrupt politicians distorts the composition of government expenditure corruption is found to reduce government spending on education in a cross section of countries

assessing foreign aid s long run contribution to growth in development this paper confirms recent evidence of a positive impact of aid on growth and widens the scope of evaluation to a range of outcomes including proximate sources of growth e g physical and human capital indicators of social welfare e g poverty and infant mortality and measures of economic transformation e g share of agriculture and industry in value added focusing on long run cumulative effects of aid in developing countries and taking due account of potential endogeneity a coherent and favorable pattern of results emerges aid has over the past forty years stimulated growth promoted structural change improved social indicators and reduced poverty

woodfuels livelihoods and policy interventions changing perspectives in the 1970s it appeared that fuelwood use was growing rapidly and this could have major adverse impacts on the resource and poor users by the mid 1980s revised assessments indicated that there was less of a problem than had been foreseen and much less of a need for forestry interventions to maintain supplies as a result many of the latter were sharply scaled back additional information and analysis that has become available since the 1980s support the view that there is no need for large scale interventions devoted just to provision of fuelwood however declining access to supplies or markets can raise significant problems in some areas and for particular categories of user growing urban demand for charcoal can also cause local problems in particular in africa the potentials for appropriate forms of intervention are discussed

do remittances diminish social violence abstractthis paper represents the first attempt to formalise the relationship between remittances and social violence by developing a model that predicts that migrants remittances lead to the reduction of social violence in the recipient economy under the condition that remittances increase the average product of labour using homicide data as an indicator of social violence we tested our model s prediction controlling for the endogeneity problem with appropriate instruments we found that remittances tend to reduce social violence we performed sensitivity analysis on remittances in the empirical specification and found it robust with an unchanged negative sign

bioenergy consumption in rural china evidence from a survey in three provinces abstract biomass in the form of crop residues and firewood is a major energy source for rural households in china a survey conducted in the provinces of shanxi zhejiang and guizhou shows that 37 percent of rural households use bioenergy for heating and cooking and that bioenergy accounts for 18 percent of their total energy consumption most of the biomass used for energy is burned in traditional stoves contributing to indoor air pollution in rural homes crop residues also are commonly burned in the fields contributing to the high level of outdoor air pollution in china our econometric analysis of the key determinants of bioenergy use shows that bioenergy consumption falls modestly with income growth increased time required for biomass collection and less farmland hence open burning of some biomass is an optimal choice and is likely to become more of a problem without policy intervention these findings suggest that a more sustainable use of biomass requires policies that promote cleaner more efficient bioenergy combustion technologies and increase the economic value of biomass such that local households can benefit from biomass collection

aid and growth what does the cross country evidence really show abstract we examine the effects of aid on growth in cross sectional and panel data after correcting for the possible bias that poorer or stronger growth may draw aid contributions to recipient co

the small blessing of foreign aid further evidence on aid s impact on democracy in an empirical contribution to the literature of foreign aid we estimate the impact of foreign aid on democracy in a panel of 93 developing economies during 1971 2010 we find that foreign aid promotes democracy with the result robust to different estimation methodologies and control variables and to instrumenting for foreign aid

aid growth and devolution summary this paper examines whether the degree of fiscal decentralization in aid receiving countries matters in explaining aid effectiveness the decentralization theorem predicts that the devolution of powers should increase aid effectiveness since local decision makers are better informed about local needs thereby decentralization may also have reverse effects e g through coordination problems excessive regulation administrative costs and local capture we use panel data for up to 60 countries and find that aid contributes to economic growth in centralized developing economies whereas it is less effective or even harmful in decentralized countries the cases of indonesia the philippines and uganda support our findings our results imply that donor countries should carefully consider how the two development instruments foreign aid and decentralization interact

food versus fuel examining tradeoffs in the allocation of biomass energy sources to domestic and productive uses in ethiopia rural households in ethiopia have limited options to meet their domestic energy needs because they lack access to modern fuels and technologies domestic use of certain fuel sources such as cow dung can hinder agricultural outcomes and productivity this article explores the tradeoffs between domestic and productive uses of biomass energy sources in the nile basin of ethiopia using a nonseparable farm household model where labor allocation to energy collection and farming are analyzed simultaneously we estimate a system of five structural equations using three stage least squares and find that the use of dung as a domestic fuel source has negative implications for the value of harvested crops while use of on farm fuelwood is associated with increased value of agricultural output on farm production of fuelwood appears to increase the value of crop output and provide labor savings by making fuelwood collection more convenient for households policy interventions to support the expansion of agroforestry and increase access to new energy efficient technologies are needed to ensure that agricultural productivity can be both increased and sustained

do corrupt governments receive less foreign aid critics of foreign aid programs argue that these funds often support corrupt governments and inefficient bureaucracies supporters argue that foreign aid can be used to reward good governments this paper documents that there is no evidence that less corrupt governments receive more foreign aid on the contrary according to some measures of corruption more corrupt governments receive more aid also we could not find any evidence that an increase in foreign aid reduces corruption in summary the answer to the question posed in the title is no

aiding violence or peace the impact of foreign aid on the risk of civil conflict in sub saharan africa abstract this paper considers the impact of foreign aid flows on the risk of civil conflict we improve on earlier studies on this topic by addressing the problem of the endogenous aid allocation using gdp levels of donor countries as instruments a more structural addition to the literature is that we efficiently control for unobserved country specific effects in typical conflict onset and conflict continuation models by first differencing the literature often overlooks the dynamic nature of these types of models thereby forcing unlikely i i d structures on the error terms implicitly 1 as a consequence malfunctioning institutions deep rooted political grievances or any other obvious yet unobserved and time persistent determinants of war are simply assumed away we find a statistically significant and economically important negative effect of foreign aid flows on the probability of ongoing civil conflicts to continue the continuation probability such that increasing aid flows tends to decrease civil conflict duration we do not find a significant relationship between aid flows and the probability of civil conflicts to start the onset probability

does competition kill corruption corrupt agents officials or gangsters exact money from firms corruption affects the number of firms in a free entry equilibrium the degree of deep competition in the economy increases with lower overhead costs relative to profits and with a tendency toward similar cost structures increases in competition may not lower corruption the model explains why a rational corrupt agent may extinguish the source of his bribe income by causing a firm to exit assessing the welfare effect of corruption is complicated by the fact that exit caused by corruption does not necessarily reduce social welfare

socioeconomic impacts of public forest policies on heterogeneous agricultural households nepal has a long history of returning public forests to local people as part of its community forestry programme in principle the community forestry programme is designed to address both environmental quality and poverty alleviation however concern has been expressed that forest policies emphasise environmental conservation and that this has a detrimental impact on the use of community forests in rural nepal where households require access to public forest products to sustain livelihoods to study the effect of government policies on forest use an economic model of a typical small community of economically heterogeneous households in nepal was developed the model incorporates a link between private agriculture and public forest resources and uses this link to assess the socioeconomic impacts of forest policies on the use of public forests socioeconomic impacts were measured in terms of household income employment and income inequality the results show that some forest policies have a negative economic impact and the impacts are more serious than those reported by other studies this study shows that existing forest policies reduce household income and employment and widen income inequalities within communities compared to alternative policies certain forest policies even constrain the poorest households ability to meet survival needs the findings indicate that the socioeconomic impacts of public forest policies may be underestimated in developing countries unless household economic heterogeneity and forestry s contribution to production are accounted for the study also demonstrates that alternative policies for managing common property resources would reduce income inequalities in rural nepalese communities and lift incomes and employment to a level where even the poorest households could meet their basic needs