sons daughters and parental behaviour the prevalence of son preference and its implications for family behaviour in developing countries have received a great deal of scholarly attention but child gender bias is believed to be empirically unimportant in wealthy non traditional societies studies by sociologists and psychologists during the past 30 years however have documented consistent discrepancies between the behaviour of parents of sons and parents of daughters boys tend to increase marital stability and marital satisfaction relative to girls and fathers spend more time with and are more involved with sons than daughters in recent years economists have begun to contribute to the child gender literature re examining the effects of sons and daughters on family structure and parental involvement with larger samples and greater concern for possible sources of selection bias other economic outcomes such as market work and earnings have also been studied and some investigators have exploited the randomness of child gender as a source of exogenous variation in parental behaviour in general recent results suggest that child gender does affect family stability and the time allocation of parents but it is not clear whether these responses reflect parental preferences for boys rather than girls or differences in the constraints parents face copyright 2005 oxford university press

child fostering in africa when labor and schooling motives may coexist abstract the paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding purposive child fostering in africa whereby a non orphaned child is sent to live temporarily with relatives in the model adults decide whether to foster in or out a child in conjunction with other household choices e g own time allocation between market and non market activities children s amount of work and schooling by allowing for positive externalities from fostering and thus asymmetric motives for fostering in labor and out human capital the proposed framework predicts that school age children are sent to better off households and that some families may foster in and out simultaneously the model identifies the conditions under which all actors involved children included may benefit from fostering arrangements but also points to situations where fostering may become an opportunity to marginalize a subset of children the paper aims to provide a sound theoretical foundation that sheds light on why there exists mixed empirical evidence on the effects of fostering on children s well being and cautions against demonizing non parent residence as unequivocally detrimental to children

tracing the impacts of a northern open economy on the global environment the globalization of the world economy has increased resource flows around the planet raising pressures on the environment historically northern industrialized economies have been responsible for the majority of resource consumption while developing countries have suffered the associated social and environmental impacts this article analyzes the extra territorial responsibility of the basque economy europe to illustrate the responsibility of northern open economies towards the global environment to do this we i analyze the material and energy flows of the basque economy their source and impacts on other regions of the world ii study the impact of the economic and investment activities of basque companies abroad and iii examine together with other paradigmatic examples three case studies from latin america east africa and southeast asia that represent the liabilities of northern economies in the global south this approach allows us to connect production and consumption processes in affluent countries with associated socio ecological impacts in the extraction frontiers in order to better understand and potentially transform current economic patterns and their consequences in addition the study indicates how to bridge the gap between local and global scales creating a useful approach to raising social awareness and informing public policies in resource intensive societies

the influence of household composition on household expenditure patterns theory and spanish evidence a concept of demographic separability is proposed that formalizes the notion that there are groups of goods adult goods that have little or no relationship to specific classes of household demographics the numbers or ages of children that there exist adult goods demographically separable from children is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the validity of rothbarth s method for measuring child costs we propose two different methods for testing demographic separability and present results from a 1981 survey of spain the econometric evidence is in fair agreement with the theoretical presuppositions

intra household gender disparity in school choice evidence from private schooling in india abstractthis paper explores gender inequality within households in the decision of private versus government school choice in india using a three period longitudinal dataset on rural households from uttar pradesh a northern state of india this paper estimates a household fixed effects model and finds that there is an intra household gender bias of 6 percentage points in private school enrolment among children aged 6 16 years contrary to the trend in overall enrolment the gender gap in private school choice is rising over time and is more pronounced in villages with a larger cost difference between private and government schooling this finding remains robust even after controlling for average school quality and considering potential endogeneity of the cost variables

input choices in agriculture is there a gender bias summary this paper examines evidence of gender biases in the decisions of agricultural households utilizing data from international crops research institute for the semi arid tropics s village level studies in india 1975 85 the main empirical finding is that households with a high proportion of boys tend to use some agricultural inputs including fertilizers and irrigation services more intensively than households with girls this pattern is more pronounced among wealthier households but does not appear to be driven solely by bequest motives or male child labor productivity

footprints in the cotton fields the industrial revolution as time space appropriation and environmental load displacement this paper offers a method for quantifying the global exchange of natural space and labor time underlying the economic success of the british textile industry in the late 18th and early 19th century using historical statistics on inputs of land and labor embodied in cotton and wool production respectively estimates are made of the amount of british land and labor that were saved by displacing fibre production to north america by comparing inputs of land and labor in the textile exports of england with those in some commodities imported from its colonial periphery and juxtaposing these data with exchange rates estimates are also made of unequal exchange using such methods it is possible to bring together the marxist concern with unequal exchanges of labor time on one hand with the more recent concern with ecological footprints on the other

adoption of agricultural innovations in developing countries a survey this paper reviews various studies which have provided a description and possible explanation to patterns of innovation adoption in the agricultural sector the survey points out that the tendency of many studies to consider innovation adoption in dichotomous terms adoption nonadoption may not be appropriate in many cases where the actual decisions are defined over a more continuous range more attention needs to be given to the socio cultural and institutional environment in area studies so that their interrelation with economic factors affecting adoption can be inferred the presence of several interrelated innovations is another aspect that needs to be considered more carefully in future research since a number of simultaneous decisions may be involved furthermore the possibility of regular sequential patterns in adopting components of a new technological package should be specifically addressed in future studies finally the impact of differential adoption rates on land holding distribution merits attention in future research

the effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and wages in this paper we estimate the effects of children and the differential effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and hourly wage rates the responses to fatherhood of two cohorts of men from the psid sample are examined separately and we use fixed effects estimation to control for unobserved heterogeneity we find that fatherhood significantly increases the hourly wage rates and annual hours of work for men from both cohorts most notably men s labor supply and wage rates increase more in response to the births of sons than to the births of daughters

productivity health and inequality in the intrahousehold distribution of food in low income countries a model is formulated incorporating linkages among nutrition labor market productivity health heterogeneity and the intrahousehold distribution of food and work activities in a subsistence economy empirical results based on a sample of households from bangladesh indicate that despite considerable intrahousehold disparities in calorie consumption households are averse to inequality furthermore consistent with the model the results also indicate that both the higher level and greater variance in the calories consumed by men relative to women reflect in part the greater participation by men in activities in which productivity is sensitive to health status copyright 1990 by american economic association

real income equivalence among one earner and two earner families in an earlier paper we proposed a technique for making income comparisons across various household sizes in this paper we employ a modified version of that method to convert nominal income to some real equivalent comparable across families of a given size but with one or two family earners we begin with a discussion of some of the conceptual difficulties involved in making cross family size or structure comparisons in income we then describe spending pattern differences between one and two earner families the final section discusses our effort to convert nominal income into comparable real income units we conclude that nominal income differences between two and one earner families far overstate differences in standards of living excerpt

implications of the international reduction pledges on long term energy system changes and costs in china and india this paper analyses the impact of postponing global mitigation action on abatement costs and energy systems changes in china and india it compares energy system changes and mitigation costs from a global and two national energy system models under two global emission pathways with medium likelihood of meeting the 2 c target a least cost pathway and a pathway that postpones ambitious mitigation action starting from the copenhagen accord pledges both pathways have similar 2010 2050 cumulative greenhouse gas emissions the analysis shows that postponing mitigation action increases the lock in in less energy efficient technologies and results in much higher cumulative mitigation costs the models agree that carbon capture and storage ccs and nuclear energy are important mitigation technologies while the shares of biofuels and other renewables vary largely over the models differences between india and china with respect to the timing of emission reductions and the choice of mitigation measures relate to differences in projections of rapid economic change capital stock turnover and technological development furthermore depending on the way it is implemented climate policy could increase indoor air pollution but it is likely to provide synergies for energy security these relations should be taken into account when designing national climate policies

gender bias credit constraints and time allocation in rural india this paper examines the impact of a child s gender on the time allocation of rural indian households for the five year period subsequent to its birth a theoretical model generates predictions for the effect of the birth of a boy relative to a girl i e the gender shock on household behaviour when the household is liquidity constrained and when it is not the results from the empirical analysis are consistent with the case in which poorer households are liquidity constrained and less poor households are not the interpretation of the finding that women in both groups of households work less subsequent to the birth of a boy relative to a girl differs in these two cases

looking for boy girl discrimination in household expenditure data the ability to test for discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls is hampered by a lack of data on intrahousehold distribution the analysis presented here allows inferences about intrahousehold allocation to be made from householdlevel expenditure data for a given level of income families with children will spend less on adult goods in order to purchase children s goods if household purchasing favors boys over girls smaller expenditures on adult goods would be made by families with boys as compared with those with girls a method for determining adult goods is described and the procedure for detecting gender bias is applied to data from c6te d lvoire and thailand the data show no evidence of discriminatio n between boys and girls in c6te d lvoire and a small and statistically insignificant bias in favor of boys in thailand how commodities are allocated among the members of a household has recently occasioned a good deal of interest assessments of poverty and income distribution based on household incomes or expenditures will be misleading if allocation within the household is unequal the position of women and girls has been of particular concern and there is a considerable amount of empirical evidence much of it from the indian subcontinent that documents discrimination against females see in particular bhagwati 1973 sen 1984 sen and sengupta 1983 miller 1981 bardhan 1982 and kynch and sen 1983 as well as survey papers by behrman 1987 and harriss 1987 much of the evidence is concerned with measurements of nutritional outcomes mortality and health status rather than with the direct allocation of goods by gender the difficulty in trying to determine the intrahousehold allocation of goods is that household budget surveys the obvious source of data record consumption not of individuals but of households and while attempts can be made to the author is a professor of public affairs and of economics and international affairs at princeton university and is a consultant to the population and human resources department of the world bank the author thanks dwayne benjamin who provided for excellent research assistance he is grateful to him and to members of the economic growth center at yale university for helpful comments this is a revised and shortened version of living standards measurement study working paper 39 the allocation of goods within the household adults children and gender june 1987 the results from thailand were not included in the working paper 1989 the international bank for reconstruction and development the world bank

linking political ecology with ecological economics in tree plantation conflicts in cameroon and ecuador abstract industrial tree plantations are rapidly expanding worldwide and notably causing a growing number of conflicts between companies and local populations such conflicts the focus of the article have been neglected by ecological economists although there is a proliferation of related reports by environmental non governmental organizations this paper uses empirical evidence to show how elements of political ecology and ecological economics can be combined for understanding the languages of valuation deployed in tree plantation conflicts in southern countries combining qualitative fieldwork on a cameroonian rubber plantation and an ecuadorian eucalypt plantation with a methodological framework taken from the study of social metabolism we find that both conflicts although with different emphasis arise because of land and biomass appropriation ground clearing pollution from agrochemicals and water shortage and are expressed as conflicts on valuation the metabolism of such tree plantations through the exchanges of materials with the local environment explains the bio physical basis of such conflicts in the cameroon case resistance is mainly sporadic and individual while in ecuador a grassroots organization has been able to respond to rural demands in a structured way both patterns of resistance are found in other present day resource extraction conflicts

peasant household behaviour with missing markets some paradoxes explained a model of peasant household behavior under varying degrees of household specific food and labor market failures is constructed to show that these structural features can explain several well known patterns of peasant response which have often been attributed to peculiar motives presumed specific to peasants the model explains sluggish response to cash crops prices and high instability in perceived food and labor scarcities the key role of manufactured consumer goods prices in stimulating peasants effort in cash crops production the effectiveness of taxation as opposed to incentives in stimulating cash crops production and the key role of technological change in food production to enhance cash crop production results are obtained analytically in the case of one market failure and by numerical simulation with more than one

traditional vs modern production systems price and nonmarket considerations of cacao producers in northern ecuador many factors besides profit maximization such as nonmarket ecological and social benefits influence smallholder households to adopt a specific agricultural production system or sell in a particular market thus different analytical techniques are needed that take into consideration more than monetary income to fully capture these additional benefits to better understand the production decisions of smallholder farmers we build on previous work on the household model and shadow wage estimation to develop a shadow wage for ecuadorian cacao producers that includes these nonmarket benefits we found that the shadow wage correctly indicated that on average these households would prefer to use an agroforestry production system instead of the more profitable modern system because of the nonmarket benefits received from the former system

will developing country nutrition improve with income a case study for rural south india aggregate estimates of food expenditure are consistent with such a possibility implying income expenditure elasticities close to one however the high degree of aggregation at which such estimates are made means that the considerable increase in price per nutrient as income increases is ignored and the nutrient elasticities are therefore overstated estimates for a rural south indian sample indicate that this bias is considerable and that the true nutrient elasticities with respect to income may be close to zero

towards an ecological theory of unequal exchange articulating world system theory and ecological economics abstract the focus of this paper is on how an ecological perspective might provide us with an analytically more precise way of defining unequal exchange it is only by looking at the ecological conditions of human economies that we can adequately conceptualize the mechanisms which generate inequalities in distribution considerations of market power aside neoclassical economic ideology has dispelled all possible criteria for assessing a market transaction as unequal or unfair one way to assess the occurrence of unequal exchange may be to look at the direction of net flows of energy and materials concrete productive potential but without falling into the trap of equating productive potential with economic value on the contrary it can be analytically demonstrated that unequal exchange emerges from a kind of inverse relationship between productive potential and economic value the notion of a reasonable market price conceals the fact that what is being exchanged are intact resources for products representing resources already spent if we consider longitudinally along the production process any given set of fuels and raw materials destined to be transformed into a given product plus waste its content of available energy will be inversely related to its utility or price in other words the more of its original energy that has been dissipated the higher its price this means that production i e the dissipation of resources will continuously be rewarded with ever more resources to dissipate generating ecological destruction and global core periphery inequalities as two sides of the same coin

allocation of land tenure rights in tigray how large is the gender bias this study investigates gender differences in land ownership and use in northern ethiopia female headed households have 23 smaller owned landholdings and 54 smaller operational landholdings household endowments of nonland productive inputs are important but decomposition analysis shows that differences in observable characteristics such as labor and oxen explain less than half of these differences whereas the remaining differences can be attributed to differences in returns to these characteristics the latter suggests a gender bias in land allocation the main policy recommendation is to strengthen women s opportunities to cultivate their land and continue the process of securing women s tenure rights

household composition labor markets and labor demand testing for separation in agricultural household models this paper tests the separation of farm labor supply and labor demand decisions using the observation that household composition is an important determinant of farm labor use with nonseparation after assessing the conditions under which the test has power against several alternatives an empirical model is developed to test the proposition that farm employment is independent of family composition the model is estimated on a data set from rural java the null hypothesis that farm labor allocation decisions are independent of household structure is not rejected the results are robust to different specifications of the labor demand function copyright 1992 by the econometric society

gender agricultural production and the theory of the household virtually all models of the household assume that the allocation of resources is pareto efficient within many african households agricultural production occurs on many plots controlled by different members of the household pareto efficiency implies that factors should be allocated efficiently across these plots i find in contrast that plots controlled by women are farmed much less intensively than similar plots within the household controlled by men the estimates imply that about 6 percent of output is lost because of inefficient factor allocation within the household the paper suggests a new approach to modeling intrahousehold allocation consistent with the empirical results

transformation of india s transport sector under global warming of 2 c and 1 5 c scenario abstract the paris agreement stresses on concerted efforts to limit global temperature increase to 2 c and make efforts towards achieving 1 5 c temperature stabilization countries announced actions under the nationally determined contributions outlining domestic mitigation actions to achieve the global target understanding the impact of these actions on achieving these ambitions requires an assessment of long term national level scenarios limited studies currently exist that model long term scenarios at national level addressing the impacts of nationally determined contributions and the additional actions required especially at the sectoral level the paper compares four alternate future scenarios for india spanning till 2050 with a specific focus on the passenger and freight transportation the analysis is performed using the answer markal model and complemented with methodologies to estimate transportation demand under strong decarbonisation pathways the results show that 1 5 c scenario would need immediate actions and deep transformations demand side actions would in addition to infrastructure investments require transforming human behaviour through use of information technology internet and sharing economy clean vehicle technologies need to play a much bigger role and fossil fuel dependence would be moderated with the dominance of electricity hydrogen and biofuels the higher share of electricity in transport is complimented with accelerated decarbonisation of electricity this transformation required for 1 5 c scenario calls for innovations that would be driven through national and sectoral policies and explicit carbon prices

the ecological economics of economic democracy abstract ecological economics is at a sharp crossroads today mostly due to the unprecedented scale of the intertwined social and ecological crises we face we argue that the discipline should engage with the thinking and practices around alternatives to capitalism more substantially as this is essential and invaluable for the discipline s ability to contribute to a just and sustainable future we outline an agenda for future ecological economics research on economic alternatives that are shaped by the concrete ways in which economic democracy deals with issues of uncertainty complexity and value incommensurability and contribute to a kind of political economy that ecological economics would advocate we lay out how this question could be operationalised within the context of allocation and exchange i e alternatives to market production and investment i e alternatives to capitalist firm and economic subjectivities i e alternatives to self interest

sustainable development in a post brundtland world not yet two decades after the publication of our common future the world s political and environmental landscape has changed significantly nonetheless we argue that the concept and practice of sustainable development sd as guiding institutional principle as concrete policy goal and as focus of political struggle remains salient in confronting the multiple challenges of this new global order yet how sd is conceptualized and practiced hinges crucially on the willingness of scholars and practitioners to embrace a plurality of epistemological and normative perspectives on sustainability the multiple interpretations and practices associated with the evolving concept of development and efforts to open up a continuum of local to global public spaces to debate and enact a politics of sustainability embracing pluralism provides a way out of the ideological and epistemological straightjackets that deter more cohesive and politically effective interpretations of sd using pluralism as a starting point for the analysis and normative construction of sustainable development we pay particular attention to how an amalgam of ideas from recent work in ecological economics political ecology and the development as freedom literature might advance the sd debate beyond its post brundtland quagmire enhanced levels of ecological degradation vast inequalities in economic opportunities both within and across societies and a fractured set of institutional arrangements for global environmental governance all represent seemingly insurmountable obstacles to a move towards sustainability while these obstacles are significant we suggest how they might be overcome through a reinvigorated set of notions and practices associated with sustainable development one that explicitly examines the linkages between sustainability policies and sustainability politics

biophysical structure of the ecuadorian economy foreign trade and policy implications abstract at the core of this paper lays the notion that a systematic analysis of material flow accounts enables us to discuss the sustainability of an economic model ecuador is going through a socio ecological transition from an agrarian towards an industrial regime based on the use of nonrenewable sources of materials and energy direct material flow indicators are used in this article to analyze the ecological dimension of the economy of ecuador during 1970 2007 this approach enables the concept of societal metabolism to become operative the paper compares societal metabolic profiles showing that per capita use of materials is still at about one fifth of the average in the high income countries of the world physical flows of trade indicate that there is an ecologically unequal exchange whereas a positive trade balance is desirable from an economic policy its counterpart in physical units has been a persistent net outflow of material resources the extraction of which causes environmental impacts and social conflicts

the intrahousehold demand for nutrients in rural south india individual estimates fixed effects and permanent income good estimates of nutrient intake responses to prices and income are very useful for the evaluation of the numerous efforts to improve nutrition in many developing countries through pricesubsidy and income generation policies we discuss three problems in standard estimates of these responses and then illustrate their implications for nutrient demand relations for a poor sample from rural south india 1 intra household nutrient allocations usually are ignored in this case nutrient intakes for females systematically have algebraically lower price elasticities than do those for males which may leave the females particularly vulnerable at times of food shortages 2 unobserved fixed effects may bias the estimates of responses to observed variables in this case not only the community fixed effects on which the previous literature has focused but also household and individual fixed effects are important failure to control for them results in substantial algebraically upward biases in many estimated price responses 3 most previous studies use current instead of permanent income which a priori may account for the low estimated income elasticities in this case however the use of permanent income does not change the conclusion that the nutrient intakes responses to income are quite small

market opportunities genetic endowments and intrafamily resource distribution child survival in rural india the authors examine how intrafamily resource allocations respond to changes in economic conditions and to genetic differences in children by estimating the determinants of variations in the sex specific survival differentials of rural indian children based on standard census and household survey data they explore in particular the hypothesis that such differences are related to the relative returns to survival with households selectively allocating resources to children in response to variation in sex differences in their expected earnings opportunities as adults data are from the 1961 census and a 1971 household survey excerpt

income distribution in rice growing villages during the post green revolution periods the philippine case 1985 and 1998 this paper aims to examine changes in household income sources and its impact on household income distribution in the post green revolution periods in 1985 and 1998 in the rural philippines we found that there has been a structural shift of household income away from farm in favor of nonfarm labor income sources this finding indicates that rural development is being led by nonfarm sectors such a shift has resulted in an increase in household income inequality as the distribution of nonfarm income has become less equal over time and was markedly more unequal than that of farm income in 1998

how does gender affect the adoption of agricultural innovations the case of improved maize technology in ghana why do men and women adopt agricultural technologies at different rates evidence from ghana suggests that gender linked differences in the adoption of modern maize varieties and chemical fertilizer result from gender linked differences in access to complementary inputs this finding has important policy implications because it suggests that ensuring more widespread and equitable adoption of improved technologies may not require changes in the research system but rather introduction of measures that ensure better access for women to complementary inputs especially land labor and extension services

low carbon scenarios for transport in india co benefits analysis abstract dependence on oil for transport is a concern for india s policymakers on three counts energy security local environment and climate change rapid urbanisation and accompanying motorisation has created some of the most polluting cities in india and rising demand for oil is leading to higher imports besides causing more co 2 emissions the government of india wants to achieve the climate goals through a sustainability approach that simultaneously addresses other environment and developmental challenges this paper analyses a sustainable low carbon transport slct scenario based on sustainable strategies for passenger and freight mobility vehicle technologies and fuel using global co 2 prices that correspond to 2 c global stabilisation target the scenarios span from years 2010 to 2050 and are analysed using the energy system model answer markal the slct scenario has improved energy security cumulative oil demand lower by 3100 mtoe improved air quality pm 2 5 emissions never exceed the existing levels and the cumulative co 2 emissions are lower by 13 billion t co 2 thereby showing that achieving development objectives with co 2 co benefits is feasible

towards a theory of famine relief policy abstract this paper examines how famine mortality is related to the distribution of food consumption a theoretical model is proposed of how individual survival chances are affected by changes in consumption uncertainty in survival prospects arises from the errors made by any observer in assessing health at given current consumption the theory is used to explore two policy issues in famine relief the choice of budgetary rules for allocating emergency aid and the case for price stabilization policies during famines applications to data for two famines in south asia suggest that successful price stabilization would have had substantial benefits in reducing mortality