the effects of expenditure growth and urbanisation on food consumption in east asia a note on animal products abstract consumption functions for total animal derived food products were estimated for six east asian countries incorporation of urbanisation was found to make a significant contribution to the functions the urbanisation elasticities were always positive indicating that the process of urbanisation had a positive effect on the demand for animal food products the expenditure elasticities were also positive but often less than they would be if estimated from consumption functions that excluded the effects of urbanisation thus projections of consumption that ignore the influence of urbanisation may be biased

productivity gains from rice genetic enhancements in west africa countries and ecologies abstract many critics claim that public research in west africa has failed to develop technological innovations to improve productivity and stimulate economic development in the agricultural sector using griliches method of estimating the impact of a research induced supply shift this study finds that rice varietal improvement generated a producer surplus gain of approximately us 360 million in 1998 in the seven most important rice producing countries of west africa eighty one percent of this gain has occurred in the irrigated and rainfed lowland ecologies which occupy just 12 and 35 of total regional rice area respectively by contrast approximately us 5 6 million is invested annually in regional varietal improvement research

do elites benefit from democracy and foreign aid in developing countries abstract a popular argument for the absence of any beneficial effects of foreign aid is that it is skimmed by political elites in recipient countries however studies also suggest that aid may be more effective in relatively democratic developing countries by exploring data on income quintiles derived from the world income inequality database for 88 developing countries a set of results indicate that foreign aid and democracy in conjunction are associated with a higher share of income held by the upper quintile it thus appears that foreign aid contrary to popular beliefs leads to a more skewed income distribution in democratic developing countries while the effects are negligible in autocratic countries the paper closes with a discussion of potential mechanisms generating this perverse effect

how the new international goal for child mortality is unfair to sub saharan africa again summary the sustainable development goals sdgs include level end goals for both under five and neonatal mortality to be obtained by 2030 no more than 25 and 12 deaths per 1 000 births respectively recent accelerations in the rate of reduction in under five mortality have been cited as a cause for optimism in this paper we show that changes in mortality rates are subject to mean reversion hence high rates observed recently for sub saharan africa make for an overly optimistic estimate of future reductions taking this into account in projecting mortality rates until 2030 we find that only very few countries in sub saharan africa are likely to attain the new targets while a majority of countries elsewhere are likely to attain the target or have done so already we also show that while mdg4 has been rightly criticized as unfair to sub saharan africa in the past a relative target may have been more appropriate today and would be relevant for all countries we also offer a discussion of likely challenges the region faces in making further inroads against preventable deaths

on the endogenous allocation of decision powers in federal structures abstract this paper provides a political economy explanation of the degree of centralization in economic policy making to determine which policies are to be centralized regions select representatives who then negotiate the degree of centralization and the regional cost shares of centrally decided policies we show that the resulting degree of centralization is suboptimally low voters strategically delegate to representatives who are averse to public spending and hence prefer decentralized decisions in order to reduce their region s cost share when spillovers are asymmetric strategic delegation is stronger at the periphery than at the center

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

estimating consumption deprivation in india using survey data a state level rural urban analysis before and during reform period this paper assesses deprivation in india employing a measure proposed by sitaramam and using consumption data at the household level as cereals constitute a staple food and form a major portion of expenditure on food the deprivation measure considered here is deprivation in cereal consumption the total expenditure at which the engel curve for cereals turns from concave to convex is taken as the cut off to determine the deprived households it is shown that cereal deprivation at the all india level exhibits a declining trend over the period 1987 88 and 1999 2000 in the rural sector while there is little change in the urban sector further this decline in cereal deprivation seems to have been slowing down during the reform period the estimates of deprivation are poorly correlated with the hci and pgi at state level both in rural and urban sectors they however have better temporal correlations with those poverty measures we offer some explanation for these observed differences in alternate deprivation indices the trends in cereal deprivation are accompanied in some cases by a decline in real terms in maximum cereal consumption of each group of consumers whether this is an improvement or otherwise of the living standards of the poor must await further analysis of per capita food consumption in general with an analysis of prices and quantities of various food items it is hoped that this kind of study on deprivation of essential commodities may increase our understanding of poverty and even suggest direct intervention strategies

a household hedonic model of rice traits economic values from farmers in west africa abstract new crop varieties often have been promoted in developing countries based upon superior yield vis a vis locally available varieties this research presents a hedonic price model for upland rice by drawing upon the input characteristics and consumer good characteristics model literature model specification tests determine that a combination of production and consumption characteristics best explains the willingness to pay for new upland rice varieties the household model specification determined that five traits explain the willingness to pay for new rice varieties plant cycle length plant height grain colour elongation swelling and tenderness yield was not a significant explanatory variable of the willingness to pay for seed the implications of this model are two fold first varietal development and promotion must include post harvest characteristics in addition to production traits when determining which varieties to promote for official release secondly non yield production characteristics such as plant height and cycle length are significant factors in producer s assessments of the value of a new variety overall this paper provides an alternative explanation for limited adoption of modern upland rice varieties in west africa varietal evaluation programs have focused too narrowly on yield evaluation and have not promoted varieties with superior non yield characteristics than locally available varieties

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 scope of imf conditionality international organizations are governed by two parallel sets of rules formal rules which embody consensual procedures and informal rules which allow exceptional access for powerful countries a new data set drawn from the imf s records of conditionality provides an opportunity to study the bargaining process within an important international organization and answer questions about the institution s autonomy i find evidence of u s influence which operates to constrain condition ality but only in important countries that are vulnerable enough to be willing to draw on their influence with the united states in ordinary countries under ordinary circumstances broad authority is delegated to the imf which adjusts conditionality to accommodate local circumstances and domestic political opposition the imf has refrained from exploiting the vulnerability of particular countries to maximize the scope of conditionality international organizations have become increasingly important actors in inter national politics they have proliferated have expanded in membership have acquired new legal enforcement powers and have extended their reach into the details of domestic political economy in their member states af ew including the international monetary fund imf or simply the fund command significant resources and wield considerable authority some critics have argued that these international organizations are sufficiently autonomous to create a democratic def icit at the international level as they pursue a vision of undemocratic liberal ism 1 other critics have argued that international organizations are nothing more than instruments in the hands of powerful states 2 these critiques of course cannot simultaneously be true and both run into difficulties the puzzle that the rogue agency view cannot explain is why the principals have chosen to delegate so much authority in principal agent terms this view posits that both screening and monitoring have failed the principals are unable to select agents with preferences similar to their own and are unable

foreign aid and market liberalizing reform market oriented economic policies reflected in limited economic activity by government protection of private property rights sound monetary policy outward orientation regarding trade and efficient tax and regulatory policy have been strongly linked to faster rates of economic growth foreign aid is often provided in the belief that it encourages liberalizing reforms in these areas this paper analyzes the impact of aid on market liberalizing policy reform correcting for the possible endogeneity of aid results indicate that higher aid slowed reform over the 1980 2000 period as measured by a broad index of policies disaggregating policy into five areas aid is significantly linked to slower reform in some policy areas but not in others disaggregating by decade aid s adverse impact on policy reform is much more pronounced for the 1980s than for the 1990s

corrupt governments do not receive more state to state aid governance and the delivery of foreign aid through non state actors abstract a core result of the aid allocation literature is that the quality of governance in recipient countries does not affect the amounts of foreign aid received donor countries may still give aid to poorly governed countries because of a dilemma they face those countries most in need typically also lack proper institutions this paper argues that donors try to resolve this dilemma by delivering aid through non state actors using aid shares as well as absolute amounts of aid allocated through state and non state channels and considering different dimensions of governance we provide evidence that bypassing governments via ngos and multilateral organizations is indeed a response to weak recipient state institutions the effect is stronger in aid sectors where donors can more easily switch between channels and weaker for higher levels of economic self interest among donors

the persistence of risk adjusted mutual fund performance the authors examine predictability for stock mutual funds using risk adjusted returns they find that past performance is predictive of future risk adjusted performance applying modern portfolio theory techniques to past data improves selection and allows the authors to construct a portfolio of funds that significantly outperforms a rule based on past rank alone in addition they can form a combination of actively managed portfolios with the same risk as a portfolio of index funds but with higher mean return the portfolios selected have small but statistically significant positive risk adjusted returns during a period where mutual funds in general had negative risk adjusted returns copyright 1996 by university of chicago press

counterpart funding requirements and the foreign aid procyclicality puzzle official development assistance is a key source of external finance in many developing countries a striking feature of these aid flows is their positive correlation with business cycles in recipient countries this pattern is puzzling in that it reinforces recipients already strong and costly macroeconomic fluctuations we propose a simple model of investment financing and aid provision under asymmetric information that rationalizes such a pattern we assume that donor agencies and recipient governments value projects differently and that donors know less than recipients do about project characteristics we show that donors can make a recipient government identify high return projects by requiring that the latter contribute some of its own funds to projects providing these matching grants or counterpart funds is less affordable for recipients during economic downturns which leads to aid procyclicality our model produces aid contracts consistent with those used by aid agencies rationalizes observed aid patterns and yields a rich set of testable empirical predictions

a policy analysis of china s wheat economy this paper examines the impacts of china s historical and anticipated future reforms on its domestic wheat economy and how it affects the import demand for wheat using a stochastic coefficient regression method the results strongly support the hypothesis that producers and consumers in the post reform era were responsive to a less controlled economy furthermore the higher import forecasts indicate that china will interact more with the world wheat market

why conditional aid does not work and what can be done about it abstract this paper studies a simple reform that introduces ex post incentives for the donor to reward good policies contrary to existing practices instead of committing aid to each recipient ex ante and making aid conditional on reform the donor centralizes the disbursement decision by committing aid to a group of countries the actual amount disbursed to each individual country would depend on its relative performance this explicit linkage of the allocation and disbursement decisions has two important advantages as compared to present practices first it raises the opportunity cost of disbursing aid ex post thereby giving the donor stronger incentives to reward good policies second competition among recipients allows the donor to make inferences about common shocks which otherwise conceal the recipient s choice of action this enables the donor to give aid more efficiently

development paradigm failures over time the international development community has advocated various development paradigms but countries following these paradigms have often performed poorly we provide an explanation for this poor performance in our model the political leader of a developing country chooses a policy and whether to implement it in an honest or corrupt manner these choices affect domestic production and aid inflows production is high when productive capacity is high and when the policy is appropriate in the country specific circumstances and implemented honestly aid inflows are high when the policy is close to the paradigm in equilibrium countries with low productive capacity and high corruption resulting from weak political institutions follow the paradigm more closely hence our model suggests that development paradigms have a tendency to fail because they are primarily followed by countries that would fail anyway we provide empirical evidence in support of the main assumptions and results

rice in asia is it becoming an inferior good empirical results using time series and cross sectional data indicate that rice in asia is becoming an inferior good income elasticities declined and in some cases became negative between 1961 and 1985 in most of the fourteen asian countries studied accordingly domestic demand for rice in these countries is not likely to grow as rapidly as it has in the past as a consequence there is a potential for excess supplies of rice to develop in asia putting downward pressure on rice prices while governments in asian countries may need to adjust their rice policies in the future world rice suppliers may need to develop new markets for rice

the political economy of imf lending in africa why has imf lending achieved such poor results in africa is it because the fund imposes the wrong conditions or because it fails to enforce them analysis of monthly data on 53 african countries from 1990 to 2000 shows that the imf s loans for reform contract lacks credibility because donor countries intervene to prevent rigorous enforcement countries that have influence with developed country patrons as measured by u s foreign aid membership in postcolonial international institutions and voting profiles in the un are subject to less rigorous enforcement shorter program suspensions they have more frequent program suspensions because they violate their conditions more often the imf will have to become more independent in order to become an effective champion of reform

efficiency with costly information a study of mutual fund performance 1965 1984 if information is costly to collect and implement then it is efficient for trades by informed investors to occur at prices sufficiently different from full information prices to compensate them for the cost of becoming informed this notion is tested by evaluating investment performance in the mutual fund industry over a 20 year period the study finds evidence that is consistent with optimal trading in efficient markets risk adjusted returns in the mutual fund industry net of fees and expenses are comparable to returns available in index funds and portfolio turnover and management fees are unrelated to fund performance

of tournaments and temptations an analysis of managerial incentives in the mutual fund industry we test the hypothesis that when their compensation is linked to relative performance managers of investment portfolios likely to end up as losers will manipulate fund risk differently than those managing portfolios likely to be winners an empirical investigation of the performance of 334 growth oriented mutual funds during 1976 to 1991 demonstrates that mid year losers tend to increase fund volatility in the latter part of an annual assessment period to a greater extent than mid year winners furthermore we show that this effect became stronger as industry growth and investor awareness of fund performance increased over time

investor behavior and the persistence of poorly performing mutual funds abstract recent studies tentatively suggest some mutual funds have near term persistent positive performance but reinforce earlier findings that other funds have long term persistent negative performance in this paper we ask how consistently underperforming mutual funds are able to persist nevertheless we compare two models one model incorporates the assumption that investors choose funds on the basis of past risk adjusted returns the other model motivated by the representativeness heuristic assumes investors react to recent returns without considering the predictive validity of returns our analysis of a sample of no load growth funds supports a model of investor behavior combining two extremes when choosing among funds investors respond to returns ignoring differences in systematic risk and expenses but upon choosing a fund they stick fast forsaking the sensitivity to returns displayed in evaluating funds

when cheaper is better fee determination in the market for equity mutual funds abstract in this paper we develop a model of the market for equity mutual funds that captures three key characteristics of this market first there is competition among funds second fund managers ability is not observed by investors before making their investment decisions third some investors do not make optimal use of all available information the main results of the paper are that 1 price competition is compatible with positive mark ups in equilibrium and 2 worse performing funds set fees that are greater or equal to those set by better performing funds these predictions are supported by available empirical evidence

aid poverty reduction and the new conditionality the paper examines the effect of aid on poverty rather than on economic growth we devise a pro poor public expenditure index and present evidence that together with inequality and corruption this is a key determinant of the aid s poverty leverage after presenting empirical evidence which suggests a positive leverage of aid donors on pro poor expenditure we argue for the development of conditionality in a new form which gives greater flexibility to donors in punishing slippage on previous commitments and keys aid disbursements to performance in respect of policy variables which governments can influence in a pro poor direction

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

expected utility violations implications for agricultural and natural resource economics nomic toolkit they compare the dogged defense of eu by economists to that of a monty python character playing the role of a petstore owner disputing the state of an obviously dead parrot the shop owner goes through incredible machinations to avoid replacing the bird let us consider another analogy the behavior of a caged parrot can likely tell us very little about the behavior of parrots in the wild a biologist may want to incorporate the behavior of caged parrots into the study of wild birds but would undoubtedly need to be extremely careful about understanding the underlying differences in the opportunities and constraints faced by caged versus wild birds before inferring much about wild parrot behavior to some extent experimental violations of eu present us with the same problem as the hypothetical parrot biologist subjects in these risk experiments are in a setting and are completing tasks very different from the setting and tasks they face in their everyday economic and social context what is missing relates to the power of the rationality assumption discussed in friedman that relies not only on the person s skill but also on the feedback they receive from the market friedman s expert billiards players are selected by a market because of their skill in billiards and th se are the players who fit friedman s as if description 1 risk researchers should not ignore experimental data however before we eliminate eu we should more fully understand the underlying reasons for the experimental behavior that violates eu agricultural and natural resource economists are well suited to assess

an analysis of production efficiency differentials in the philippines in the late seventies and early eighties policy makers in many developing encouraged extensive research to develop appropriate rice technology for unfavourable rainfed environments the question addressed in this paper is whether the farmers producing under the non irrigated rainfed environments are achieving the potential of the technology fully at the farm level the empirical analysis which concerns the farm level production behaviour of rainfed rice farmers in the philippines indicates a wide variation in production efficiencies extension advice and credit availability appear to be the two major factors influencing the gap between farmers actual and potential production levels

rice in asia is it becoming an inferior good reply huang david and duff raise a number of issues concerning data and method in particular they argue for the following procedures a use of private consumption expenditures expressed in a common currency rather than per capita gross domestic product gdp expressed in national currencies b use of domestic price data instead of world price data and c the use of prior information in specifying the ridge regression using these procedures they reestimate our model and obtain results that differ from

demand for cereal grains in asia the effect of urbanization abstract this paper analyzes the effects of urbanization on demand for cereal grains rice wheat and coarse grains in nine asian countries a complete demand system almost ideal demand system in linear form is estimated in two stages based on aggregate time series data from 1960 to 1988 in the high income countries i e japan and south korea urbanization was observed to significantly reduce demand for cereal grains in the lower income countries demand for cereal grains either increased or remained the same with urbanization among cereal grains urbanization has had negative effects on demand for rice and coarse grains but consistently positive effects on demand for wheat only japan and thailand among the countries studied have negative income elasticities of demand for total cereal grains and for rice in particular hence rice remains a necessity and a normal good in most asian countries previous estimates of income elasticities of rice based on time series aggregate data tend to be lower than those based on cross section household level data when urbanization is explicitly specified in the demand model the estimates of income elasticities from time series data turn out to be consistent with those from cross section data

when more poor means less poverty on income inequality and purchasing power we show theoretically that the poor can benefit from price changes induced by higher income inequality as the number of poor increases the market for products aimed toward the poor grows and such products become more profitable as a result there are circumstances where an increase in income inequality associates with higher purchasing power of the poor using cross country data on the price of one kilogram of rice and the price of a big mac hamburger we confirm a negative association between income inequality and the price of inferior goods robust to the inclusion of a large set of control variables results are also robust to a first difference specification and to a two stage instrumental variables approach examining economic well being it is thus important to analyze not only the incomes of households but also the prices of the products and services that they buy

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

efficiency with costly information a reinterpretation of evidence from managed portfolios we investigate the informational efficiency of mutual fund performance for the period 1965 84 results are shown to be sensitive to the measurement of performance chosen we find that returns on s p stocks returns on non s p stocks and returns on bonds are significant factors in performance assessment once we correct for the impact of non s p assets on mutual fund returns we find that mutual funds do not earn returns that justify their information acquisition costs this is consistent with results for prior periods coauthors are martin j gruber sanjiv das and matthew hlavka article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

read my lips the role of information transmission in multilateral reform design abstract context specific knowledge is crucial to crafting multilateral reform programs nonetheless local knowledge often consists of unverifiable information thus the quality of countries reports depends on the conflict of interests faced by the recipient and the multilateral we compare the performance of a delegation scheme against a centralization scheme we find that recipients discretion in the choice of reforms delegation should only be increased when the countries local knowledge is strictly more important than the multilateral s information conversely a reduction in the conflict of interests may lead the multilateral in to allowing the recipient less freedom in designing reforms centralization our empirical results support these theoretical predictions

farm mechanization scale economies and polarization the japanese experience abstract whether economies of scale are the major factor underlying concentration of agricultural land in large farms has long been under debate the case study of japanese agriculture for the past three decades confirmed the tendency observed from international comparison that increasing returns in agricultural production emerge when economic development reaches a stage at which real wage rates begin to rise sharply it was found that the effect of scale economies was highly significant even though the intersectoral labor market effect was greater on land concentration the results imply that developing countries need not worry about mechanization to cause more unequal land distribution if factor markets are not unduly distorted

imf programs and reforms inhibition or encouragement abstract we analyze the impact of international monetary fund imf programs on market oriented reforms employing panel data for 116 countries over the period 1970 2000 we find that the net effect of imf programs on reforms is negative

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

redesigning the aid contract donors use of performance indicators in uganda abstract the perceived failure of traditional ex ante conditionality has led to proposals for using performance indicators as a basis for aid allocations ex post conditionality in this article we assess the role of performance indicators and their impact on the aid contract between donors and the government of uganda in uganda the use of performance indicators has radically changed donor recipient relations by improving both program monitoring and donor coordination it has however not yet fundamentally changed the incentive structure in the aid contract to improve the incentive structure we propose a distinction between indicators used for monitoring and those designed to guide aid allocations

an econometric analysis of rice consumption in the people s republic of china abstract rice is the most important staple food in the people s republic of china prc in many asian countries rice appears to have become an inferior good with income increases leading to declines in per capita consumption as other food products are substituted for rice in this study human rice consumption is analyzed with a model that allows income elasticities to vary with income levels an additional equation accounting for rice disappearance as seed livestock feed industrial uses and exports is also estimated the results of the analysis indicate that rice has become an inferior good in china and per capita consumption is likely to decline in the future population growth and the growing use of rice for other purposes means that total rice disappearance will continue to increase although at a rate that is lower than has historically been the case the predicted changes in rice consumption will create pressures to adjust production and trade patterns for rice as well as other agricultural products

reforming imf conditionality as it has for many years international monetary fund conditionality is currently receiving much attention in the context of the global financial crisis at the beginning of the 2000s the fund introduced a policy of streamlining intended to reduce the amount of conditionality and refocus it with a view to increasing country ownership and improving programme implementation this article uses the results of a report by the imf s independent evaluation office into structural conditionality to assess the extent to which the initiative delivered on its promises more significant seem to be the recent changes associated with the global crisis the article discusses the evolution of conditionality and assesses the current situation and the prospects for the future

technological progress for sustaining food population balance achievement and challenges the growth in land productivity in rice cultivation has slowed down substantially since the early 1990s due to technological progress reaching its limit in the irrigated ecosystem and nonavailability of suitable technologies for the unfavorable rainfed environments this development raises concern regarding the world s ability to meet the food population balance in the coming decades rice research must deal with a number of difficult problems to meet the challenge raising the yield ceilings of the current available rice varieties protecting the past yield gains in the irrigated ecosystem and using biotechnology tools to develop high yielding varieties for the rainfed systems that are tolerant to drought submergence and problem soils the speed and extent of meeting these challenges depends on the level of resources that can be mobilized to support crop improvement research in the public sector

hot hands in mutual funds short run persistence of relative performance 1974 1988 the relative performance of no load growth oriented mutual funds persists in the near term with the strongest evidence for a one year evaluation horizon portfolios of recent poor performers do significantly worse than standard benchmarks those of recent top performers do better though not significantly so the difference in risk adjusted performance between the top and bottom octile portfolios is six to eight percent per year these results are not attributable to known anomalies or survivorship bias investigations with a different previously used data set and with some post 1988 data confirm the finding of persistence

market analysis technical change and income distribution in semi subsistence agriculture the case of bangladesh for the first time the model developed by hayami and herdt is applied to determine gains from modern varieties of rice in bangladesh and the distribution of these gains between consumers and producers the results suggest that consumers surplus is much greater than it would have been had the high yielding crop varieties hyvs not been introduced by keeping the real price lower than it would have been otherwise the modern varieties have tended to be income equalizing for urban consumers the hayami herdt partial model even suggests that given the relatively inelastic demand for rice in bangladesh the real cash income of producers has risen slightly as a result of these new technologies in reality however the impact of these changes on incomes of farmers and the distribution of income between those involved in production is more complex it is suggested that if a less partial view is taken and if account is taken of lower cost of obtaining home consumed produce the increase in income may be greater in any event there are dangers in using such a partial model to predict the developmental consequences of technological changes affecting a staple crop and attention needs also to be given to the possibility that the supply curve may not have the simple form and pivot in the way supposed by hayami and herdt while the hayami herdt model is simple to apply it is best used as a first approximation or starting point rather than a final solution it ignores a number of criteria that could be important in assessing new agricultural technologies such as their impact on the variability of benefits to producers and consumers and their consequences for sustainability of production furthermore the hayami herdt model does not deal specifically with changes in factor shares in farm production nor does it consider the impact on income distribution of the ownership and control of critical input like irrigation and imperfection in the rural credit market it is pointed out in our paper that the adoption of hyvs has been associated with important variations in factor shares in bangladeshi rice production analysis of available farm level data indicates that the relative share of labour has fallen suggesting an uneven distribution of gains from technological changes between the owners of non labour resources and those of labour resources however the absolute share of labour has increased and it seems that rural employment has risen as result of the new technologies

the political economy of conditionality an empirical analysis of world bank loan disbursements abstract traditional aid conditionality has been attacked as ineffective in part because aid agencies notably the world bank often fail to enforce conditions this pattern undermines the credibility of conditionality weakening incentives to implement policy reforms the standard critique attributes this time inconsistency to bureaucratic factors within the aid agency such as pressure to lend defensive lending or short sighted altruism pressure from powerful donors provides another potential explanation for lax enforcement this paper presents an empirical analysis of the political economy of conditionality in international organizations using the case of the world bank and the united states the analysis examines panel data on world bank disbursements to 97 countries receiving structural adjustment loans between 1984 and 2005 using un voting as an indicator of alignment with the u s the paper presents evidence that world bank structural adjustment loan disbursements are less dependent on macroeconomic performance in countries aligned with the united states

credit and risk in rural developing economies abstract this paper examines the theory of credit as a means of raising the productivity and living standards of producer households who face significant uncertainty a dynamic model with uncertainty is developed in which households choose how much to invest in a yield enhancing technology how much to consume and how much to save i find that while credit has important short and medium run benefits for productivity consumption and lifetime utility these benefits are not sustained in the long run indeed under reasonable parameter settings mean consumption will fall in contrast the paper shows that risk mitigation has sustained benefits for productivity lifetime utility and equality

aid policies and growth comment in an extraordinarily influential paper craig burnside and david dollar 2000 p 847 find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies but has little effect in the presence of poor policies this finding has enormous policy implications the burnside and dollar 2000 henceforth bd result provides a role and strategy for foreign aid if aid stimulates growth only in countries with good policies this suggests that 1 aid can promote economic growth and 2 it is crucial that foreign aid be distributed selectively to countries that have adopted sound policies international aid agencies public policy makers and the press quickly recognized the importance of the bd findings this paper reassesses the links between aid policy and growth using more data the bd data end in 1993 we reconstruct the bd database from original sources and thus 1 add additional countries and observations to the bd data set because new information has become available since they conducted their analyses and 2 extend the data through 1997 thus using the bd methodology we reexamine whether aid influences growth in the presence of good policies given our focus on retesting bd we do not summarize the vast pre bd literature on aid and growth we just note that there was a long and inconclusive literature that was hampered by limited data availability debates about the mechanisms through which aid would affect growth and disagreements over econometric specification see gustav f papanek 1972 robert cassen 1986 paul mosley et al 1987 peter boone 1994 1996 and henrik hansen and finn tarp s 2000 review since bd found that aid boosts growth in good policy environments there have been a number of other papers reacting to their results including paul collier and jan dehn 2001 carljohan dalgaard and hansen 2001 patrick guillaumont and lisa chauvet 2001 hansen and tarp 2001 robert lensink and howard white 2001 and collier and dollar 2002 these papers conduct useful variations and extensions some of which had already figured in the pre bd literature such as introducing additional control variables using nonlinear specifications etc some of these papers confirm the message that aid only works in a good policy environment while others drive out the aid policy interaction term with other variables this literature has the usual limitations of choosing a specification without clear guidance from theory which often means there are more plausible specifications than there are data points in the sample we differentiate our paper from these others by not deviating from the bd specification thus we do not test the robustness of the results to an unlimited number of variations but instead maintain the bd methodology this paper conducts a very simple robustness check by adding new data that were unavailable to bd thus we expand the sample used over their time period and extend the data from 1993 to 1997 easterly department of economics new york university 269 mercer street new york ny 10003 center for global development and national bureau of economic research e mail william easterly nyu edu levine department of finance carlson school of management university of minnesota 321 19th avenue south minneapolis mn 55455 and national bureau of economic research e mail rlevine csom umn edu roodman center for global development 1776 massachusetts avenue nw washington dc 20036 e mail droodman cgdev org we are grateful to craig burnside for supplying data and assisting in the reconstruction of previous results without holding him responsible in any way for the work in this paper thanks also to francis ng and prarthna dayal for generous assistance with updating the sachs warner openness variable and to three anonymous referees craig burnside and henrik hansen for helpful comments 1 see for instance the world bank 1994 2001 2002 the u k department for international development 2000 president george w bush s speech march 16 2002 the announcement by the white house on creating the millennium challenge corporation white house 2002 as well as a washington post editorial february 9 2002 a financial times column by alan beattie march 11 2002 and the economist march 16 2002

global horse trading imf loans for votes in the united nations security council we investigate whether temporary members of the united nations security council receive favorable treatment from the international monetary fund imf using panel data for 197 countries over the period from 1951 to 2004 our results indicate a robust positive relationship between temporary security council membership and participation in imf programs even after accounting for economic political and country specific factors there is also evidence that security council membership reduces the number of conditions included in imf programs imf loans seem to be a mechanism by which the major shareholders of the fund can win favor with voting members of the security council

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