commodity prices trade and poverty in uruguay abstract the 2006 2008 food price spike raised concerns about the impact of high commodity prices on poverty in developing countries this paper addresses these concerns in relation to uruguay a small country that exports agricultural commodities and imports fuels applying a general equilibrium model we find that as a whole an increase in commodity prices has a positive effect on the economy of uruguay benefits obtained through a growth in export activities are partially outweighed by an increase in crude oil prices in this context extreme poverty increases as in other countries the increase in food prices affects the already poor population who become even poorer this fact highlights the need for policies that mitigate the negative effects of price shocks

quality quantity and nutritional impacts of rice price changes in vietnam summary asian governments intervene in the world rice market to protect domestic consumers whether consumers are nutritionally vulnerable depends on the elasticity of calories with respect to rice prices common demand models applied to household survey and market price data ignore quality substitution and force all adjustment onto the quantity calorie margin this paper uses data from vietnam on market prices food quantity and quality a 10 increase in the relative price of rice reduces household calorie consumption by less than 2 but this elasticity would be wrongly estimated to be more than twice as large if quality substitution is ignored

market power in emission permit markets theory and evidence from the eu ets a well known result about market power in emission permit markets is that efficiency can be achieved by full free allocation to the dominant firm i show that this result breaks down when taking the interaction between input and output markets into account even if the dominant firm perceives market power in the permit market alone i then examine the empirical evidence for price manipulation by the ten largest electricity firms during phase i of the eu ets i find that some firms excess allowance holdings are consistent with strategic price manipulation and that they cannot be explained by price speculation or by precautionary purchases to insure against uncertain future emissions my results suggest that market power is likely to be an empirically relevant concern during the early years of emission permit markets

the impact of the global food crisis on self assessed food security the paper provides the first large scale survey based evidence on the impact of the global food crisis of 2007 08 using an indicator of self assessed food security from the gallup world poll for the sampled countries as a whole this subjective indicator of food security remained the same or even improved seemingly owing to a combination of strong economic growth and limited food inflation in some of the most populous countries particularly india however these favorable global trends mask divergent trends at the national and regional levels with a number of countries reporting substantial deterioration in food security the impacts of the global crisis therefore appear to be highly context specific

market power permit allocation and efficiency in emission permit markets market power in permit markets has been examined in some detail following the seminal work of hahn q j econ 99 4 753 765 1984 but the effect of free allocation on price manipulation with market power in both product and permit market has not been fully addressed i show that in this case the threshold of free allocation above which a dominant firm will set the permit price above its marginal abatement costs is below its optimal emissions in a competitive market and that overall efficiency cannot be achieved by means of permit allocation alone in addition to being of general economic interest this issue is relevant in the context of the eu ets i find that the largest german uk and nordpool power generators received free allowances in excess of the derived threshold conditional on having price setting power in both the electricity and permit markets these firms would have found it profitable to manipulate the permit price upwards despite being net permit buyers

gendered impacts of the 2007 2008 food price crisis evidence using panel data from rural ethiopia abstract this paper provides empirical evidence on the gendered impact of the 2007 2008 food price crisis using panel data on 1400 households from rural ethiopia that were initially surveyed before the onset of the crisis in 1994 1995 1997 and 2004 and after food prices spiked in 2009 it investigates whether female headed households are more likely to report experiencing a food price shock and whether female headed households experiencing a shock are more or less likely to adopt certain coping strategies controlling for individual household and community characteristics our findings suggest that female headed households are more vulnerable to food price changes and are more likely to have experienced a food price shock in 2007 2008 because female headed households are also resource poor and have a larger food gap compared with male headed households they cope by cutting back on the number of meals they provide their households during good months and eating less preferred foods in general a combination of short term measures to protect diet diversity and micronutrient consumption of vulnerable groups and longer term measures to promote investment in sustainable agriculture such as strengthening women s property rights may increase the ability of poor and vulnerable households to cope better with food price increases

dividend yield and expected returns abstract previous research examining the relation between dividend yield and equity returns documents a u shaped pattern arising from the positive capm adjusted average excess return of zero dividend firms in contrast this paper reports that zero dividend firms earn negative average excess returns relative to firms of similar size despite the apparent conformity of these results to the predictions of after tax asset pricing models the negative size adjusted excess returns cannot be drive solely by tax effects these excess returns which are concentrated in the initial zero dividend years and approach 1 per month are attributed to possible dividend expectation effects rather than taxes

capital gains tax and equity values empirical test of stock price reaction to the introduction and reduction of capital gains tax exemption abstract this paper evaluates the differential effect on stock prices of the introduction in canada of 500 000 capital gains tax exemption and the reduction of this limit to 100 000 two years later using the seemingly unrelated regression methodology and controlling for thin trading and heteroscedasticity the empirical evidence indicates that the changes in capital gains tax laws had a differential effect on low dividend yield and high dividend yield stocks on both occasions while the evidence indicates that the stock market anticipated the 1985 capital gains tax law changes the significant market reaction to the 1987 reduction of the exemption occurred a day before and after the reading of the tax reform proposals in parliament thus it can be inferred from the results that despite the presence of tax sheltering opportunities in canada changes in capital gains tax laws affect equity values

the global food crisis and guatemala what crisis and for whom summary international food prices rose sharply during 2006 08 precipitating the global food crisis we analyze the welfare effects of changes in prices over categories of households in guatemala and find three surprising results the first is that the transmission of international into domestic prices was quite modest the second is that most farm households are net buyers of food implying that they lost from rising prices the third is that farm households represent two thirds of all poor households losing from rising food prices stressing the importance of production for home consumption in sheltering the poor from the crisis

new evidence that taxes affect the valuation of dividends this paper uses british data to examine the effects of dividend taxes on investors relative valuation of dividends and capital gains british data offer great potential to illuminate the dividends and taxes question since there have been two radical changes and several minor reforms in british dividend tax policy during the last 30 years studying the relationship between dividends and stock price movements during different tax regimes offers an ideal controlled experiment for assessing the effects of taxes on investors valuation of dividends using daily data on a small sample of firms and monthly data on a much broader sample we find clear evidence that taxes affect the equilibrium relationship between dividend yields and market returns these findings suggest that taxes are important determinants of security market equilibrium and deepen the puzzle of why firms pay dividends financial economists have long been puzzled by corporate dividend behavior many individual investors should value a dollar of corporate dividends less than a dollar of corporate retentions because the former gives rise to greater tax liabilities corporations however face equal costs of paying out dividends and retaining earnings miller and modigliani 31 demonstrated that in the absence of taxes dividend policy should have no effect on share valuation if dividends are tax penalized however a value maximizing firm should pay no dividends widespread dividend payments to taxable investors are therefore surprising in 1981 dividend tax revenues in the united states were estimated to exceed 20 billion dollars indeed some have interpreted the large volume of dividends paid as evidence against the rational behavior postulates typically used by economists the dividend question has stimulated a large theoretical and empirical literature concerned with the qluestion of investors valuation of dividends in particular the question of how taxes affect the market valuation of dividends has generated considerable controversy numerous studies including auerbach 2 litzenberger and ramaswamy 24 26 morgan 34 and rosenberg and marathe

monetary policy shocks and the dynamics of agricultural commodity prices evidence from structural and factor augmented var analyses fluctuation in commodity prices is a significant and timely issue to be studied this study is to examine the impact of monetary policy and other macroeconomic shocks on the dynamics of agricultural commodity prices the major contributions of this study are twofold first unlike other studies that use indexes this study analyzes the commodities individually affording the inclusion of commodity specific fundamentals such as the level of inventory an important determinant of commodity price in a structural var framework second it exploits a rich data set of agricultural commodity prices which includes commodities that are usually overlooked in the literature and extracts a common factor using the dynamic factor model to understand the extent of comovement of the prices and to gauge the extent to which macroeconomic shocks drive the comovement in a factor augmented var favar framework the findings show that monetary policy global economic conditions and the u s dollar exchange rates play an important role in the dynamics of agricultural commodity prices

the price impact of extreme weather in developing countries we examine the impact of extreme weather on consumer prices in developing countries by constructing a monthly data set of potential hurricane and flood destruction indices and linking these with consumer price data for 15 caribbean islands our econometric model shows that the price impact of extreme weather events can be large to illustrate potential welfare losses due to these price effects we combine our estimates with price elasticities obtained from a demand system and with event probabilities for jamaica our results show that while expected monthly losses are small rare events can cause large falls in monthly welfare due to price increases

test for tax effects in the pricing of financial assets this paper tests four competing hypotheses regarding taxation and the pricing of financial assets no differential tax effects in the pricing of stocks or bonds the equilibrium condition described by miller 1977 the two parameter after tax pricing equations of brennan 1970 and litzenberger and ramaswamy 1979 and dividend related clientele effects described by elton and gruber 1970 and litzenberger and ramaswamy 1980 these hypotheses make substantially different predictions about the impact of taxes on financial decisions however when stated in terms of returns the hypotheses imply parameter restrictions with the same functional form the commonality of the parameter restrictions allows simultaneous testing of all four models by testing the form of the parameter restrictions this approach differs from that of previous researchers who have by and large implicitly assumed that the parameter restrictions implied by the respective models hold see elton and gruber 1970 black and scholes 1973 1974 litzenberger and ramaswamy 1979 1980 miller and scholes 1982 conditional on this assumption parameter estimates have been made and this paper tests four models describing the impact of taxes on financial asset returns no tax effects miller s equilibrium the twoparameter pricing models of brennan and litzenberger and ramaswamy and taxinduced dividend clientele effects these tests are carried out by casting the hypotheses in terms of systems of equations and identifying the parameter restrictions implied by each of the hypotheses the systems approach is particularly useful for testing for clientele effects because we are able to identify withinand between equation restrictions without specifying the marginal tax rate of the clientele which holds a particular security my results suggest that none of tax motivated hypotheses is descriptive of the data this paper is a distillation of several research projects i have undertaken in the last two years special thanks are in order to g constantinides e fama j ingersoll a madansky and m scholes i owe a particularly important debt to merton miller for help and encouragement finally i would like to thank steve buser and e han kim

the developing world is poorer than we thought but no less successful in the fight against poverty a new data set on national poverty lines is combined with new price data and almost 700 household surveys to estimate absolute poverty measures for the developing world we find that 25 of the population lived in poverty in 2005 as judged by what poverty typically means in the world s poorest countries this is higher than past estimates substantial overall progress is still indicated the corresponding poverty rate was 52 in 1981 but progress was very uneven across regions the trends over time and regional profile are robust to various changes in methodology though precise counts are more sensitive

the economics of pollution permit banking in the context of title iv of the 1990 clean air act amendments abstract this paper presents a model of the collective emission permit banking behavior of electricity generating units affected by title iv of the clean air act amendments of 1990 a rigorous treatment of the constraint that pollution permits cannot be borrowed from future allocations is introduced this approach enables an analysis of the impact of future changes in electricity demand regulations and technologies on the present permit price and emissions level the effect of uncertainty on the banking behavior is also explored

dividends and capital asset prices tax based dividend models of capital asset pricing assume that dividends are known at the time prices are set dividends which are announced and paid in the same month and dividends which were expected but cancelled in the month constitute surprises which interfere with many empirical tests of the effects of expected dividend yield on returns this paper avoids these problems by relating returns to forecasts of dividend yield obtained from past data three distinct views of the importance of dividends to investors have received support at one time or another according to the two most important views dividends have a neutral and a negative effect on security prices respectively miller and modigliani 1 and miller and scholes 12 13 favor complete substitutability of dividends and capital gain brennan 6 and litzenberger and ramaswamy 9 have developed models which incorporate differential taxation of income and capital gain in these models the tax disadvantage of income changes the investor s portfolio problem from one of optimization of mean and variance of portfolio before tax return to optimization in after tax terms stocks with relatively large dividend yields should provide high expected returns and so sell for low prices to compensate the investor for the tax much of the empirical evidence seems to favor the view that tax disadvantages of dividend income do not escape investors attention and that returns are higher when they include dividend income to compensate the investor for the tax liability however interpretation of the available evidence is difficult and it is significant that most of these researchers remain unconvinced that their own findings can be satisfactorily explained by tax effects ball brown finn and officer 1 interpret their estimates as being far too strong to be explained in terms of differential taxation blume 3 reaches a similar conclusion but litzenberger and ramaswamy attribute their results to the tax disadvantage of

the distributional impacts of indonesia s financial crisis on household welfare a rapid response methodology analyzing the distributional impacts of economic crises is an ever more pressing need if policymakers are to intervene to help those most adversely affected they need to identify those who have been hurt most and estimate the magnitude of the harm they have suffered they must also respond in a timely manner this article develops a simple methodology for measuring these effects and applies it to analyze the impact of the indonesian economic crisis on household welfare using only pre crisis household information it estimates the compensating variation for indonesian households following the 1997 asian currency crisis and then explores the results with flexible nonparametric methods it finds that virtually every household was severely affected although the urban poor fared the worst the ability of poor rural households to produce food mitigated the worst consequences of the high inflation the distributional consequences are the same whether or not households are permitted to substitute toward relatively cheaper goods households with young children may have suffered disproportionately large adverse effects

a model of intertemporal emission trading banking and borrowing abstract this paper provides a general treatment of emission trading banking and borrowing in an intertemporal continuous time model using optimal control theory the decentralized behavior of firms is shown to lead to the least cost solution attainable under joint cost minimization explicit solutions for the time paths of emissions and permit prices are derived when firms are allowed to both bank and borrow and when firms are only allowed to bank emission permits the policy implications of emission banking and borrowing are discussed

a note on market power in an emission permits market with banking in this paper we investigate the effect of market power on equilibrium path of an emission permits market in which firms can bank current permits for use in later periods in particular we study the market equilibrium for a large potentially dominant firm and competitive fringe with rational expectations we characterize the equilibrium solution for different permits allocations and discuss the large firm s stock holding constraints needed for credible market manipulation

the canadian tax reform and its effect on stock prices a note the effect of personal taxation on stock prices remains controversial while some researchers have found evidence of a tax effect in the stock market others have found evidence to the contrary this paper provides additional empirical evidence on the effect of the differential taxation of dividends and capital gains on stock prices by analyzing stock price changes around the 1971 canadian tax reform and its subsequent amendments in 1977 the results show that changes in the taxation of cash dividends and capital gains affected high yield and lowyield stocks listed on the toronto stock exchange tse differently section i of the paper describes the tax changes the method used to analyze the tax effect is described in section ii section iii reports the results and conclusions are presented in section iv

the effect of personal taxes on common stock prices the case of a belgian tax reform abstract this paper analyses how a belgian tax reform affected the relative pricing of securities with differential tax treatment of dividends the results show that stock prices reflect their relative personal tax advantage and the price differentials are significantly related to dividend yield

extent and possible causes of intrayear agricultural commodity price volatility wheat corn rice soybeans and cotton experienced higher volatility in the second half of the 2000s for the sample at hand the unit root tests only validate a new period of high volatility for wheat and cotton if in the next couple of years however corn rice and soybeans maintain their higher volatility a new period of high volatility may also be validated statistically regarding the factors driving the intrayear volatility gmm estimates show that commodity market fundamentals i e the stock to use ratio and to a lesser extent the degree of internationalization are the most systematically statistically significant coefficients among commodities over time consecutive low stock to use ratios and a thin international market provoke typically high volatility speculative activity and liquidity in the agricultural derivative market have a stabilizing effect on the spot price if any finally common macro factors significantly impact volatility especially the volatility of petrol and of exchange rates their dispersion importance over the sample is quite sizeable however it is difficult to establish a link between on the one hand loose monetary policy business cycle and inflation and on the other hand commodity price volatility as the sign of the estimated coefficient changes depending on the commodity and the estimated elasticities are quite low

permit banking in emission trading competition arbitrage and linkage abstract several existing or proposed climate policies have considered bankable permits in a cap and trade c t program that covers beyond a single sector e g electric power or allows the program to link to external c t programs in other regions this paper develops a model of permit banking under imperfect competition and imperfect inter temporal arbitrage in which the firms in one dominant sector can exert market power in both product and permit markets while those in other sectors or linked programs are perfectly competitive a simple analytical model is developed to generate contestable hypothesis we further extend the model to account for the physical power system institutional rules and market conditions and then apply it to the pennsylvania jersey maryland pjm market we show that if the dominant firm has market power then the permit price rises at a higher rate than the discount rate contrary to perfectly competitive permit market where the permit price rises at the discount rate following the classic hotelling s rule furthermore under a declining emissions cap system with the permits front loaded in early time periods the dominant firm has an incentive to suppress the permit prices monopsony when buying the permits in early periods and then inflate the permit prices monopoly when selling them in later periods numerical results of the pjm case are consistent with the analytical conclusion

business cycles and emission trading with banking abstract we propose an emission cap adjustment policy for an emission trading system ets that allows banking of allowances for later use and faces business cycle uncertainty the forward looking banking decisions cause a commitment problem with respect to regulator s next period allowance supply decision we tackle the commitment problem by focusing on the markov equilibrium of the policy the equilibrium policy has a surprisingly simple structure combining features from both price and quantity instruments the regulator s ability to choose a new cap for each period does not render banking obsolete but on the contrary makes banking an integral part of the equilibrium policy using data from the eu ets to calibrate the model we solve the markov equilibrium policy for the case of carbon emissions regulation and compare markov policies with and without the possibility to bank allowances a counterfactual analysis of the eu ets during the period of 2009 2013 shows that the optimal markov policy would have led to a steadier allowance price level and a stricter emission regulation than what was actually observed in the eu ets

emission permit banking pollution abatement and production inventory control of the firm abstract in this paper we present a dynamic model modified with emission permit banking and pollution abatement and investigate the effect of emission permit banking and pollution abatement on the production inventory strategy of the firm after introducing emission permit banking and pollution abatement the cost function consists of the inventory holding and production costs the cost of investment in abatement capital goods and the emission procurement selling cost furthermore the inventory holding costs are linear production costs are non decreasing and convex functions of the production level and the costs of investment in abatement capital goods are increasing and convex functions of the investment level we compare the optimal production inventory strategy before emission permit banking and pollution abatement and thereafter the mathematical investigation is based on the arrow karlin model

self reported food insecurity in africa during the food price crisis this article analyzes data on self reported food insecurity of more than 50 000 individuals in 18 sub saharan african countries over the period 2005 2008 when global food prices increased dramatically the average level of self reported food insecurity was high but remarkably stable over time at about 54 however this average hides large heterogeneity both within countries and across countries in eight of the sample countries self reported food security improved while it worsened in the ten other countries our results suggest that heterogeneous effects in self reported food security are consistent with economic predictions as they are correlated with economic growth and net food consumption both at the household and country level specifically in the face of rising food prices self reported food security improved on average in rural households while it worsened in urban households a finding that holds when using global prices or domestic food prices improvements in food security over time were also positively correlated with net food exports and gdp per capita growth while the self reported indicator used in this paper requires further study and one should carefully interpret the results our findings suggest the need for a critical evaluation of the currently used data and numbers in the public debate on food prices and food insecurity

market power and transferable property rights the appeal of using markets as a means of allocating scarce resources stems in large part from the assumption that a market will approximate the competitive ideal when competition is not a foregone conclusion the question naturally arises as to how a firm might manipulate the market to its own advantage this paper analyzes the issue of market power in the context of markets for transferable property rights first a model is developed that explains how a single firm with market power might exercise its influence this is followed by an examination of the model in the context of a particular policy problem the control of particulate sulfates in the los angeles region

intertemporal emission trading with a dominant agent how does a restriction on borrowing affect efficiency in this paper we analyze how restricting intertemporal trading by prohibiting borrowing of emissions permits affects the ability of a dominant agent to exploit its market power we show that the monopolist could take advantage of the constraint on borrowing by not distributing the sale of permits cost effectively across periods furthermore we show that a constant present value price over time does not imply a cost effective distribution of abatement permit sales across periods

forecasting food inflation in developing countries with inflation targeting regimes developing countries that employ inflation targeting monetary policy regimes require accurate short run food inflation forecasts we develop a systematic approach to improve food inflation forecasts apply it to colombian monthly data from december 1989 to april 2006 and show its relevance for inflation targeting regimes forecast accuracy can be improved by disaggregating food products into away from home processed and fresh foods employing econometric methods to combine forecasts from individual models and using flexible least squares methods in the presence of structural changes we also show the importance of accurate food inflation forecasts in models simulating monetary policy transmission ams subject classification copyright 2012 oxford university press

urban agriculture poverty and food security empirical evidence from a sample of developing countries urban agriculture may have a role to play in addressing urban food insecurity problems which are bound to become increasingly important with the secular trend towards the urbanization of poverty and of pop ulation in developing regions our understanding of the importance nature and food security implica tions of urban agriculture is however plagued by a lack of good quality reliable data while studies based on survey data do exist for several major cities much of the evidence is still qualitative if not anec dotal using a recently created dataset bringing together comparable nationally representative house hold survey data for 15 developing or transition countries this paper analyzes in a comparative international perspective the importance of urban agriculture for the urban poor and food insecure some clear hints do come from our analysis on the one hand the potential for urban agriculture to play a sub stantial role in urban poverty and food insecurity reduction should not be overemphasised as its share in income and overall agricultural production is often quite limited on the other hand though its role should also not be too easily dismissed particularly in much of africa and in all those countries in which agriculture provides a substantial share of income for the urban poor and for those groups of households to which it constitutes an important source of livelihoods we also find fairly consistent evidence of a positive statistical association between engagement in urban agriculture and dietary adequacy indicators

the effect of emission permit trading with banking on firm s production inventory strategies abstract we investigate the effect of tradable emission permits with banking on the production inventory strategy of a firm in this paper the basis of the work is the well known arrow karlin dynamic production inventory model in which the inventory holding costs are linear and production costs are non decreasing and convex functions of the production level the cost of environmental protection is taken into account in the model we assume there is an emission trading program with which firms are able to purchase their emission rights or sell them and the rights are allowed to be deposited in intertemporal trading we compare the optimal production inventory strategies of this paper with those without emission permits

the impact of food inflation on urban poverty and its monetary cost some back of the envelope calculations this paper uses a sample of 73 developing countries to estimate the change in the cost of alleviating urban poverty brought about by the recent increase in food prices this cost is approximated by the change in the poverty deficit that is the variation in financial resources required to eliminate poverty under perfect targeting the results show that for most countries the cost represents less than 0 1 percent of gross domestic product however in the most severely affected it may exceed 3 percent in all countries the change in the poverty deficit is mostly due to the negative real income effect of those households that were poor before the price shock while the cost attributable to new households falling into poverty is negligible thus in countries where transfer mechanisms with effective targeting already exist the most cost effective strategy would be to scale up such programs rather than designing tools to identify the new poor

local food prices and international price transmission world food prices spiked in the periods 2007 8 and 2010 11 the impact of these spikes in world food prices on local food prices and thus on local consumers is determined by the food price pass through pass through is defined as the extent to which changes in world food prices lead to changes in local food prices we examine the determinants of variation in food price pass through from global to local consumer prices in a global sample of 147 countries using fao data on world food prices and ilo data on food prices for consumers while market integration matters our study finds that income per capita is the dominant factor explaining cross country variation in pass through of food prices we estimate an elasticity of about 0 3 of pass through with respect to income per capita this means far greater price transmission of food price shocks at the commodity level to final consumers in low income countries than in high income countries the implication is that future swings in world food prices will in particular jeopardize food security in poor countries trade policy measures of market integration also affect the pass through significantly whereas infrastructure and geography measures play no significant role

food price surges and poverty in urban colombia new evidence from household survey data abstract the present study simulates the impacts of price surges in 2006 2008 on poverty in the main colombian cities drawing upon household survey data it is found that the price surges increased both extreme and moderate poverty in urban areas but the magnitude of poverty rise was not homogeneous across geographical locations or in terms of household characteristics such as education or gender of the household head as a policy option we suggest geographical targeting or demographic targeting that will select and support poor households by locations or socio demographic characteristics guided by the degree of household vulnerability to food price shocks

on the measurement of poverty official statistics in the united states and the united kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970 s and the 1980 s but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings in particular the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism this paper re examines three basic issues in measuring poverty the choice of the poverty line the index of poverty and the relation between poverty and inequality one general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted there is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line affecting both its level and its structure in this situation we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering the first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons illustrating their application by reference to data for the united states the choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed in the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class which includes many of those proposed give the same ranking those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded the third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare

implications of higher global food prices for poverty in low income countries in many poor countries the recent increases in prices of staple foods raise the real incomes of those selling food many of whom are relatively poor while hurting net food consumers many of whom are also relatively poor the impacts on poverty will certainly be very diverse but the average impact on poverty depends upon the balance between these two effects and can only be determined by looking at real world data results using household data for ten observations on nine low income countries show that the short run impacts of higher staple food prices on poverty differ considerably by commodity and by country but that poverty increases are much more frequent and larger than poverty reductions the recent large increases in food prices appear likely to raise overall poverty in low income countries substantially

banking and back loading emission permits in this article we focus on the so called back loading policy adopted by the european commission to increase the carbon market price this environmental measure consists of removing a share of the allowances allocated for a given period in order to reallocate some or all of them later on to analyze the impact of the permits back loading we determine the co2 price equilibrium with and without the policy measure considering not only the market for permits but also the output market of regulated sectors we propose a two period model where the market for permits is perfectly competitive and the output market can be either competitive or oligopolistic first we define the condition under which banking from one period to another is optimal this condition that is the absence of arbitrage opportunities aoa depends not only from the period initial allocation but also on production market fundamentals when this condition is satisfied the market for emission is shown intertemporally efficient second we point out that the back loading measure may create inefficiencies or leave unaffected the permits price if it alters the aoa