imperfect competition and the keynesian cross abstract this paper presents a simple general equilibrium model in which the only non walrasian feature is imperfect competition in the goods market the model is shown to exhibit various keynesian characteristics in particular as competition in the goods market becomes less perfect the fiscal policy multipliers approach the values implied by the textbook keynesian cross

union growth in the netherlands 1961 1989 an empirical analysis is presented of union growth in the netherlands over the past decades the analysis shows that the effect of changes in the industrial structure is very small it appears that union growth is influenced by wage growth and by unemployment if real wages increase more than labour productivity or if unemployment declines union membership increases

on the existence of conjectural equilibria with a priori chosen rationing patterns hahn s model of conjectural equilibrium hahn 1978 is investigated a proof of existence of non walrasian conjectural equilibrium for a regular economy is given the method used enables one to choose a priori and within a large class the rationing pattern to emerge in equilibrium for instance an equilibrium with a rationing pattern of general supply rationing is thereby shown to exist also it is possible to select a priori one commodity money which is never rationed these results are valid for the fix price model as well the method of our proof is basically a generalization of gale s method gale 1978

dutch trade union membership 1979 1995 determinants of dutch trade union membership are analysed for the years 1979 1987 and 1995 by means of a decomposition method it is established that changing characteristics of the working population primarily caused the union decline between 1979 and 1987 whereas the recovery afterwards can be entirely attributed to changing unionization behaviour a further application of the decomposition method shows that the contribution of the separate explanatory variables to shifts in the density rate is less straightforward than the results of the first analyses suggest

estimating the probability of trade union membership a study of men and women in britain the paper examines the determinants of the individual decision to unionize for british employees and uses micro data from the 1975 national training survey the unionization probability is estimated separately for manual and non manual men and full time and part time women an interesting finding is that personal characteristics of both men and women generally do not affect the unionization probability this result run counter to the common perception that family responsibilities explain low female trade union density

involuntary unemplyment in imperfectly competitive general equilibrium models this paper is about involuntary unemployment in general equilibrium models with imperfect competition it surveys papers written after the seminal work of d aspremont dos santos ferreira and gerard varet 1984 this unemployment is called involuntary because it exists at any wage it results from imperfect competition in the product markets more specifically from firms excessive market power these papers have focussed their attention on the conditions required for involuntary unemployment in our presentation we characterise this form of unemployment through three elements consumers preferences price expectations and ford effects each element is important because it influences the demand for the good and hence its price elasticity the latter being central in the definition of firms market power jel classification d43 e24

agricultural development with rainforest conservation methods for seeking best bet alternatives to slash and burn with applications to brazil and indonesia abstract forests continue to fall for agricultural purposes throughout the humid tropics with immediate and potentially large consequences for climate change and biodiversity loss issues of key interest to the international community some of the actors directly responsible for forest conversion fell trees to meet food security needs and alleviate poverty issues of urgent interest to them and also to national policymakers this multiplicity of groups with differing often conflicting interests in the multifarious goods and services produced by tropical forests complicates the search for alternative agricultural activities for forest margins since these alternatives must satisfy such divergent objectives this paper sets out a conceptual framework for comparing the impacts of different land use systems and agricultural practices at the margins of tropical rainforests in terms of the concerns and objectives of two key interest groups small scale farmers seeking livelihoods at the forest margins and the international interests in the global public goods and services supplied by tropical rainforests this framework should be useful to a third key group the national and regional policymakers who must consider these and other policy objectives and then decide on courses of action the paper identifies data needs and analytical methods capable of supplying an empirical base for this conceptual framework based on quantifiable indicators it then presents preliminary results of the application of this conceptual framework in indonesia and brazil in association with a global collaborative multidisciplinary research program even using preliminary order of magnitude estimates to be replaced by more precise measurements as they become available this conceptual framework presents results in ways that allow researchers and policymakers to select clear best bets for development when they exist and to assess tradeoffs and options for complementary policy action and research efforts when they do not

stabilisation policy targets and unemployment in imperfectly competitive economies this paper argues that the rate of equilibrium unemployment depends on the objectives of the central bank in a model where the central bank uses monetary policy to stabilise the economy we show that unemployment and inflation will be lower with an inflation target than with targets for output money or nominal gdp the intuition for this is that the elasticities of demand in both the product and the labour markets are greater when there is an inflation target we show that this leads to a lower mark up of price over marginal cost and makes wages more sensitive to unemployment

links between rural poverty and the environment in developing countries asset categories and investment poverty abstract this paper presents a framework for analyzing the links between poverty and the environment in rural areas of developing countries it introduces the concept of investment poverty and relates it to other measures of poverty in analysis of these links the notion of poverty is examined in the context of categories of assets and categories of environment change with particular focus on farm household income generation and investment strategies as determinants of the links the strength and direction of the poverty environment links are shown to differ even invert depending on the composition of the assets held by the rural poor and the types of environmental problems they face policy strategies need to focus on conditioning variables that affect market development community wealth infrastructure household asset distribution and the affordability and appropriateness of natural resource conservation technologies

rights to forest products deforestation and smallholder income evidence from the western brazilian amazon abstract the causes of tropical deforestation are many and complex but relative financial returns at the household level play a large role in determining which activities and investments are pursued a farm level bioeconomic model indicates that the best course for smallholders in the western brazilian amazon who seek to boost consumption levels over time is to convert forest to agriculture results of a simulated experiment show that permitting sustainable off take of timber products on farms would improve incomes and slow smallholder deforestation but use of cleared land would be little changed because such strong financial incentives exist to harvest timber unsustainably mechanisms for monitoring timber off take will be required the costs of establishing and maintaining them should be shared among all beneficiaries of the environmental services provided by forests

land use intensification potential in slash and burn farming through improvements in technical efficiency abstract much attention is being paid to find alternative land use options in slash and burn sab farming or forest fallow based shifting cultivation systems the conservation objective is often twofold that is to discourage farmers from expanding into the forest frontier and to reduce the ecological damage from burning plots options include the total abandonment of forest plots the adoption of productivity increasing green revolution type technologies and the application of modern evergreen agroforestry knowledge this paper evaluates another alternative the intensification of land use by improving technical efficiency in farming this involves the reduction of land clearing while at the same time maintaining crop output levels and the local and traditional low input technology the potential for such land use intensification is empirically assessed with ecological and socioeconomic household data from yucatan mexico the methodology is based on both parametric and nonparametric output and input distance functions in addition the sources of inefficiency are addressed the results of the analysis suggest that on and off farm labour diversification can play a key role to help shifting cultivating households to improve their technical efficiency in farming and thus to help to intensify land use furthermore while the empirical results point towards the positive effect of soil fertility mainly determined by the length of forest fallows on crop output levels farmers appear to overcome the ecological constraint of farming in less fertile soils by being more technically efficient

poverty and famines an essay on entitlement and deprivation this book focuses on the causes of starvation in general and famines in particular the traditional analysis of famines is shown to be fundamentally defective and the author develops an alternative analysis

equilibrium selection in imperfectly competitive economies with multiple equilibria this paper investigates the selection of an equilibrium in an economy with multiple pareto ranked nash equilibria a history dependent selection criterion is proposed which induces correlated behavior in equilibrium even though agents are playing one shot games and disturbances are not correlated over time the model economy may experience prolonged periods in which a low productivity technology is in use and then as a consequence of a large real disturbance may switch to an alternative equilibrium in which a high productivity technology is utilized thus the model qualitatively matches observations of serially correlated movements in output and employment and generates procyclical productivity though there are no exogenous technology shocks copyright 1994 by royal economic society

microeconomic uncertainty and macroeconomic indeterminacy we propose a stylized intertemporal macroeconomic model wherein the combination of decentralized trading and microeconomic uncertainty taking the form of privately observed and uninsured idiosyncratic shocks creates an information problem between agents and generates indeterminacy of the macroeconomic equilibrium for a given value of the economic fundamentals the economy admits a continuum of equilibria that can be indexed by the sales expectations of firms at the time of investment the walrasian equilibrium is one of these possible equilibria but it is reached only if firms are optimistic enough with a weaker degree of optimism equilibrium output employment and real wages will be lower than in the walrasian equilibrium moreover the range of possible equilibria will depend positively on the wage elasticity of the labour supply and on the magnitude of the information problem between buyers and sellers in our case the variance of the idiosyncratic shocks stochastic simulations performed on a calibrated version of the model show that pure demand expectation shocks may generate business cycle statistics that are not inconsistent with the observed ones 2006 elsevier b v all rights reserved

a model of imperfect competition with keynesian features the recent literature on the reappraisal of keynes has viewed keynesian equilibria as arising when prices are fixed and effective demands and supplies are equilibrated through the adjustment of quantities one problem with this approach is that it lacks a theory of price determination in particular of why prices are fixed in the present paper we show that a number of keynesian features arise in a model in which prices are fully flexible but where agents have some monopoly power one advantage of this approach is that it provides a theory of the determination of both prices and quantities

deprived land use intensification in shifting cultivation the population pressure hypothesis revisited this article provides a theoretical framework based on optimal control theory to analyze farm households land use intensification decisions in forest based shifting cultivation slash and burn agroecosystems the main results from the analysis generally coincide with the population pressure hypothesis pph as an important driver of soil degradation due to the so called fallow crisis or deprived land use intensification in shifting cultivation however the model also shows from a supply perspective that such a vicious circle of lower yields and greater forest land clearing may be avoided when the production elasticity of on farm labor outweighs the elasticity of substitution between farm labor and soil fertility furthermore using data from shifting cultivating households from yucatan mexico we calibrate the effect of changes in population density the numerical analysis suggests that by contrast to better off households when population density increases poorer shifting cultivating households optimal labor allocation strategy is to further extensify land use by clearing more forest in the village common property land or ejido land

imperfect competition and fixprice equilibria when goods are gross substitutes it is possible in principle that the price quantity pair generated by a model of imperfect competition may satisfy the conditions voluntary trading and absence of frictions for a fixprice equilibrium it is shown that imperfect competitors will typically satisfy voluntary trading provided that appropriate gross substitute assumptions are satisfied hence such assumptions are seen to ensure that the solutions of some well known imperfectly competitive general equilibrium models are indeed fixprice equilibria thus bringing together two important traditions in theoretical microeconomics copyright 1991 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

the employment of married women in the united kingdom 1970 83 the proportion of married women in employment in the united kingdom grew rapidly during the 1970s rising from around 50 to 60 per cent the paper investigates this change using a time series of cross sections from the family expenditure survey an attempt is made to assess how much of the change was due to trends in the observable characteristics of the population and what part was played by changes in behavioural and other factors reflected in the coefficients of the model a technique of growth accounting is proposed and used to this purpose excerpt

monopolistic equilibrium and involuntary unemployment abstract this note provides a simple example of an economy in which involuntary unemployment may be the consequence of monopolistic behavior on the product market

a model of shifting cultivation can soil conservation reduce deforestation shifting cultivators manage soil not only by adjusting soil use on already cleared lands as in continuous cultivation but also by clearing forests to obtain new fertile soils this study examines the crucial link between on farm soil conservation and deforestation in shifting cultivation by modeling forest clearing as an investment in soil for a private farmer more generally by doing so the study attempts to integrate deforestation and soil conservation models which have been separately developed in the literature our policy goal is to arrest tropical deforestation as destruction of global commons caused by land degradation in shifting cultivation while improving the well being of poor shifting cultivators our integrated approach enables joint policy analyses of deforestation and land degradation three welfare enhancing policies are considered the first is agricultural and nonagricultural subsidies affecting farm and nonfarm income opportunities the second is fiscal and tenure policies affecting discount rates our question is whether the link between forest clearing and soil fertility alters the outcomes of these two standard macroeconomic policies commonly found in the literature the third policy or program is various soil conservation measures affecting soil regeneration and erosivity on already cleared lands this article examines a very important question which has received little attention in previous theoretical works can soil conservation reduce deforestation this study confirms anti deforestation effects of the promotion of nonfarming activities a common and often emphasized finding in previous works among shifting cultivators more importantly it also demonstrates that improving various soil conservation measures not only discourages forest clearing among shifting cultivators but also tends to have greater effects on forest protection than promoting nonfarming activities contrarily agricultural price subsidy or technological progress gives rise to the opposite outcome and lowering the farmer s discount rate or improving tenure security encourages him her to clear more forests just to accumulate soil

the elementary economics of social dilemmas a social dilemma is in essence a prisoners dilemma in a continuous strategy space i discuss a number of social dilemmas that have caught my attention offer an elementary diagrammatic synthesis of them and discuss some of the economic insights that the diagrams capture including incentives for pre commitment finally i model pre commitment via delegation and link results to the literature on the evolution of preferences l economie elementaire des dilemmes sociaux un dilemme social est essentiellement un dilemme du prisonnier dans un espace continu de strategie l auteur discute d un certain nombre de dilemmes sociaux qui ont retenu son attention il en propose une synthese graphique elementaire et discute certaines des suggestions economiques qui decoulent de ces diagrammes comme par exemple les incitations a se pre engager finalement l auteur construit un modele de pre engagement par delegation et relie ses resultats a la litterature sur l evolution des references