the balance of power in rural marketing networks a case study of snake trading in cambodia abstract producers in small scale rural markets often receive unfavourable prices for their goods as a result of more powerful market participants this study uses a combination of price analysis and interview data to assess the position of snake hunters in the aquatic snake market from tonle sap lake in cambodia despite the hunters dependence on intermediary traders for market access and credit the evidence implies that they are not powerless participants intermediary traders operate under high competition as a result of the increasing scarcity of snakes and therefore despite interlocked credit and snake markets offer relatively high prices to hunters

location and housing demand abstract william alonso s model of the demand for housing and location in the monocentric city is one of two pre eminent models of its type the purpose of this article is to provide the detailed analysis and the comparative statics of the alonso model the complexity of the analysis is seen to derive from the nature of the constraint which is nonlinear and has slopes which vary with income a new result is that housing and closeness can be inferior even when they are taste normal the empirical direct variation of income with distance is explained consistent with the finding that income increase has indeterminate effects on location and housing demand the alonso specification is shown to be superior to others

facilitating the provision of farm credit the role of interlocking transactions between traders and zamindars in crop marketing systems in sindh abstract formal credit institutions in pakistan have largely failed to provide access to farm credit to small and medium scale landowners or zamindars this paper examines interlocked transactions between traders and landowners in the cotton and wheat markets in sindh that facilitate the provision of credit by traders it is concluded that the case examined provides an example where traders lend to landowners in a segment of the credit market that approximates competitive behavior without surplus extraction by traders key conditions resulting in this favorable outcome are the existence of both competition for market share and information sharing on borrowers between traders whether this outcome is also beneficial for other rural groups who may borrow from landowners in particular sharecropping tenants is independent of market relations between landowners and traders and is not determined here

household behavior in a monocentric urban area with a public sector abstract this paper has examined how a public sector alters the model of urban household behavior and its predictions the qualitative housing price and demand location characteristics remain unchanged by the introduction of either an exogenous or endogenous public sector in addition the household s response to tax rate and public service changes depend solely upon the nonlocational demand relationships the major impact of location per se on the household s demand vector is through an additional hicksian price term whether locational effects reinforce or vitiate nonlocational demand changes depends upon the compensated relationship between the good in question and housing this paper also investigated the design of neutral public budgets government budgets using property income or comprehensive sales taxes to finance public services cannot be neutral with respect to housing demand and location of the four types of taxes considered only a narrow based sales tax can finance public services neutrally

driving to opportunity local rents wages commuting costs and sub metropolitan quality of life we examine variation in local rents wage levels commuting costs household characteristics and amenities within metropolitan areas for 2071 areas covering the united states by density and central city status we demonstrate the sensibility of estimating wage levels by workplace not residence and recover decentralized rent gradients that fall with commuting costs we construct and map a willingness to pay index which indicates the quality of life typical households receive from local amenities when households are similar mobile and informed this index varies considerably within metros and is typically high in areas that are dense suburban sunny mild safe entertaining and have elevated school funding

the rise fall and rise again of industrial location theory m ccann p and sheppard s 2003 the rise fall and rise again of industrial location theory reg studies 37 649 663 in this paper we will argue that new academic fashions new international institutional arrangements new communications technology and new developments in data availability have all renewed the need for a redevelopment of analytical industrial location theory our paper will argue that the microeconomic foundations of industrial location theory must now be reconsidered in particular the methodological basis of traditional industrial location models needs to be reconciled with recent models of clustering the new economic geography literature and also more aggregate systemic levels of analysis we will argue that in order to do this it is necessary first to specify the transactions cost assumptions underlying these various approaches second to adopt broader definitions of spatial transactions costs and third to incorporate environmental characteristics within an orthodox loca

assessing the welfare impacts of public spending an important objective of public spending is to raise household living standards particularly for the poor but how can final impacts on this objective best be assessed evaluating a policy s impact requires assessing how different things would have been in its absence but the counterfactual of no intervention is tricky to quantify the author surveys the methods most often used to assess the welfare effects of public spending limitations of current practices are studied and implications for future best practices are drawn the methods used to assess welfare impacts broadly fall into two groups benefit incidence studies and behavioral approaches benefit incidence studies ignore behavioral responses and second round effects using the provision cost as a proxy for benefits received behavioral approaches present quite different drawbacks in attempting to represent individual benefits correctly a number of recent studies usefully combine both approaches it is still uncertain whether behaviorally consistent methods actually point to fundamentally different policy recommendations what can be concluded is that we need to diversify and compare results from our evaluation methods and broaden our definition of well being to see how various facets of living standard are affected by public spending

bargaining with incomplete information an infinite horizon model with two sided uncertainty the resolution of any bargaining conflict depends crucially on the relative urgency of the agents to reach agreement and the information each agent has about the others preferences this paper explores within the context of an infinite horizon bargaining model with two sided uncertainty how timing and information affect the rational behaviour of agents when commitment is not possible since the bargainers are uncertain about whether trade is desirable they must communicate some of their private information before an agreement can be reached this need for learning due to incomplete information about preferences results in bargaining inefficiencies trade often occurs after costly delay thus the model provides an explanation for the inefficient bargaining behaviour that appears to occur often in practice

building on poor people s capacities the case of common property resources in india and west africa revised version of a paper commissioned by the international development research centre idrc of canada for a world bank conference on poverty environment growth linkages held in washington dc march 1999

farm gate tomato price negotiations under asymmetric information this article provides an empirical analysis of farm gate tomato price negotiations under asymmetric information regression models are estimated to analyze when and by how much sellers stick to their initial ask prices and what explains the variation in the initial ask offer price spread detailed information on 66 farm gate tomato transactions and daily tomato wholesale price data from the central vegetable market in addis ababa are used for the analysis estimation results show that farmers are less committed to their initial ask price when the buyer speaks out the transaction price first when their quality perceptions of the tomatoes being transacted differ from those of the buyers and when their tomato farm is at a large distance from the main road sellers stick more to their initial ask price when they know that the central market price is high the initial ask offer price spread decreases when the buyer speaks out the initial negotiation price first but increases in the difference in quality perception between buyer and seller and in the quantity of tomatoes being transacted

benefits on the margin observations on marginal benefit incidence benefit incidence analysis has become a popular tool over the past decade especially for researchers at the world bank despite or perhaps because of the popularity of this method recent research has pointed out many of its limitations one of the most common criticisms of benefit incidence analysis is that its description of average participation rates is not necessarily useful in guiding marginal changes in public spending policies this article considers a variety of methods for analyzing the marginal benefit incidence of policy changes a key conceptual point is that despite the fact that the various methods measure marginal incidence they do not measure the same thing nor are they intended to do so there are many possible policy changes and thus many margins of interest each method captures one of these and so is of interest for some analyses and inappropriate for others empirically the precision of the methods differs substantially with those relying on differenced data or aggregations of households yielding standard errors that are quite large relative to the estimated shares

decentralized targeting of an antipoverty program abstract developing country governments often delegate authority over the targeting of antipoverty programs to community organizations while retaining control over how much goes to each community we offer a theoretical characterization of the information structure in such programs and the interconnected behavior of the various players our model motivates an econometric specification for explaining distributional outcomes results for bangladesh s food for education ffe program indicate that within village targeting improved with program size lower land inequality less remoteness fewer shocks and less private redistribution there is no sign that the center took account of village attributes conducive to reaching the poor

imperfect information screening and the costs of informal lending a study of a rural credit market in pakistan many governments have perceived the rural moneylender as usurious this article takes a first step toward directly testing the validity of this view in a study of services costs and charges of fourteen informal market moneylenders and their clients in chambar pakistan the article examines whether the high implicit interest rates charged reflect the actual costs of operating in that market estimates of the resource costs incurred by informal lenders for screening pursuing delinquent loans overhead and cost of capital including unrecoverable loans suggest that lenders charges are equal to their average cost of lending but exceed their marginal cost this finding is consistent with the view that the informal credit market is characterized by excess capacity and monopolistic competition in the presence of imperfect information

rural urban welfare program and labor force participation nonmetro poor in the midwest participate more in the labor force and less in welfare programs than metro poor we formalize how household composition capital labor market conditions and state specific regulations define opportunity sets then estimate a bivariate binomial probit model of work and program participation choices an oaxaca decomposition analysis is conducted to compare differences in characteristics to differences in behavior in explaining the two groups choices we find no behavioral basis for the difference in labor market participation and while most of the lower midwestern nonmetro welfare program participation is due to demographics some is due to different life cycle behavior

flexible discrete choice demand models consistent with utility maximization an application to health care demand policies a considerable literature has developed to estimate the economic determinants of health care provider choice one important goal of this literature has been the estimation of price elasticities of health care demand particularly in rural areas of developing countries where debates continue regarding appropriate levels of user fees in government health facilities world bank accurate estimation of price elasticities is crucial to evaluating the trade offs between health promotion and revenue generation in rural areas where poorly funded government clinics are often consumers only accessible health care choices however the exact empirical implementation of demand estimation with discrete data has be

revealed preference and location choice abstract the assumption that population and structural densities are defined over parcels of land with zero area is problematic when interpreting the standard residential land use model as approximating a large finite economy this paper extends revealed preference theory to depict a spatial economy with land parcels of finite area the model generalizes the standard utility function approach allowing for many consumer types with different tastes and incomes and labor leisure choice to show that the most important predictions of the standard theory hold in the general finite framework studied here

when fishery rhymes with poverty a first step beyond the old paradigm on poverty in small scale fisheries abstract in this paper we first look retrospectively at the perceptions embraced by academics international agencies and practitioners of the relation between fisheries and poverty in developing countries and we try to identify the underlying paradigms which have structured these perceptions the review reveals how the debate has focused on the economic low income and biological overexploitation aspects of the problem we then revisit these perceptions in the light of the recent conclusions drawn from other sectors and in particular from the new consensus on poverty proposed by the international community incorporation of the recent research on poverty helps to show how socio institutional mechanisms governing people s access to fisheries resources rather than the resources themselves play such a critical role in vulnerability to poverty finally a typology identifying four different categories of intrasectoral exclusion mechanisms is developed and illustrated through empirical studies derived from african and asian fisheries

overcoming supply chain failure in the agri food sector a case study from moldova abstract successor states of the soviet union have witnessed substantial falls in agri food production since the break up of the ussr supply chain disruption has been a major factor in this decline this paper identifies how asymmetric information between farmers and processors led to market failure in moldova and how one dairy company has attempted to overcome such a crisis the case study company has invested in better monitoring of milk quality to effectively supervise transactions milk production is a major source of income for rural households who sell to dairies via village collecting stations the costs of monitoring milk quality to avoid market failure from adverse selection are significant preventing small scale producers being marginalised from dairy supply chains is an important factor in safeguarding and improving rural livelihoods

location housing and leisure demand muth s model of cbd employed household behavior has been successfully extended to include labor leisure choice in order to deal with the original version s deficient treatment of commuting time the extension demonstrates how all the basic results of the simpler formulation remain valid this paper provides a similar extension for the locally employed household variant of muth s model the analysis demonstrates a surprising difference between the demand gradient and comparative static results for the locally employed household without leisure choice and the locally employed household with leisure choice not observed for the cbd employed household model