defining chronic poverty comparing different approaches in this study we discuss two methods commonly used in the literature to measure chronic poverty the permanent income approach where the chronically poor are those whose mean income over time is below the poverty line and the spells approach where the chronically poor are those households who are below the poverty line half of the time or more we check the differences between these two methods considering also several household characteristics the index we use is that of foster greer and thorbecke fgt with and when each method identifies the chronically poor which could be different individuals by each method and shows the percentage of the chronically poor while when the methods also take into account the depth of poverty our main goal is to show the differences between the two methods so that policymakers would have different perspectives on the problem of chronic poverty and could make decisions on this basis the results show that in the data used the permanent method and the spells

economic mobility and poverty dynamics in developing countries this study provides an introduction to this special issue of the journal of development studies on economic mobility and poverty dynamics in developing countries in addition to providing a conceptual framework it outlines how the contributions fit into the extant literature a series of regularities emerge across these studies the poor consist of those who are always poor poor at all dates and those who move in and out of poverty with the latter group tending to be strikingly large such movements in and out of poverty are apparent when looking at poverty in either absolute or relative terms changes in returns to endowments can be a potent source of increased incomes finally seemingly transitory shocks can have long term consequences the study concludes by drawing out the policy implications of these regularities

status and outlook for thailand s low carbon electricity development thailand is facing an urgency to enhance its energy security and capacity to cope with global warming impacts as demands on fossil fuel consumption keep rising this paper reviewed the latest situation on renewable powers and developmental strategies toward low carbon electricity generation in thailand government recently has spent tremendous financial and legislative supports to promote the uses of indigenous renewable energy resources and fuel diversification while contributing in reduction of global greenhouse gas major policy challenge is on which types of renewable energy should be more pronounced to ensure sustainable future of the country regions in thailand present different potentials for renewable supply on biomass municipal wastes hydropower and wind to maximize renewable energy development in each area location is matter currently energy derived biomass is widely utilized within the country however if droughts happen more often and severe it will not only affect food security but also energy security life cycle of biomass energy production may cause other social issues on land and chemical uses meanwhile deployment of wind and solar energy has been slow and needs to speed up to the large extent in comparison with energy proportion from biomass nuclear power has already been included in the thai power development plan 2010 pdp 2010 however public acceptance is a major issue setting up strategic renewable energy zone to support power producer according to pre determined potential location may assist development direction furthermore government has to strongly subsidize research and development to lower technology cost and promote private investment on renewable energy industry in the future revision of electricity price is needed to allow fair competition between non renewable and renewable energy once subsidy programs are ended environmental tax according to fuel types could help government progressing toward low carbon electricity stimulating renewable energy development and utilization at local community is a key for thai sufficiency economy

intragenerational income mobility in latin america economic mobility has not been widely studied in developing countries until very recently owing to the lack of suitable data studying mobility requires longitudinal data tracking economic units that is individuals households or firms over time collecting this type of data is expensive and historically few latin american countries carried it out now however such data sets are available for a number of latin american and caribbean countries table a 1 in the appendix provides a list of available panel data sets that can be used for income mobility studies for these countries in this paper we discuss how the knowledge gleaned from mobility studies differs from comparable cross sectional analysis the structure of the paper is as follows the next section discusses what mobility is how it can be measured and how it differs from inequality the subsequent section reviews previous mobility studies in latin american countries the paper then summarizes the contributions of our own recent work and the final section discusses what lies ahead in mobility research for latin american economies

from correlates and characteristics to causes thinking about poverty from a chronic poverty perspective summary poverty and poverty reduction are currently the central concerns of development discourse and policy despite recent theoretical advances poverty analysis continues to be dominated by an income consumption conception of poverty we argue for understandings of poverty that go beyond measurement led conceptualizations to more adequately expose the causes of poverty chronic poverty is one such concept its focus on poverty duration and dynamics highlights the forms of social relations that produce poverty and which are often embedded within political institutions and economic structures poverty reduction does not simply require good policy it requires creating the capacity of poorer people to influence and hold accountable those who make policies

residential construction using the urban growth model to estimate housing supply abstract this article presents an empirical model of housing supply derived from urban growth theory this approach describes new housing construction as a function of changes in house prices and costs rather than as a function of the levels of those variables which previous studies have used empirical tests support this specification over the leading alternative models our estimates show that a 10 rise in real prices leads to an 0 8 increase in the housing stock which is accomplished by a temporary 60 increase in the annual number of starts spread over four quarters

persistent expected and innate poverty estimates for semi arid rural south india 1975 1984 this paper uses nine years of panel data on 170 rural households in southern india to calculate intertemporal measures of poverty these include measures of 1 expected poverty that identify households likely to remain poor on average during any year 2 innate poverty that identify households that are poor owning to deep rooted characteristics that cannot easily be changed in the short run and 3 persistent poverty that identify households whose incomes fall below a fixed poverty line over a number of years the poverty rates estimated for the sample with the three measures are 61 percent 48 percent and 22 percent respectively c 1993 academic press inc copyright 1993 by oxford university press

chronic poverty in the united states this paper proposes a method of measuring chronic and transitory poverty using an axiomatically sound additively decomposable index of aggregate poverty our approach is contrasted with alternative methods of measuring poverty persistence we use our method to measure chronic and transitory poverty in the united states during the 1980s and late 1970s and find that chronic poverty is a more serious problem than previously thought between the late 1970s and mid 1980s poverty not only increased it became more chronic and less transitory in nature this is true for the population as a whole and for some but not all of the subpopulations we considered the latter were defined according to race type of social unit and educational qualifications of the head of the social unit all empirical analyses are based on data from the panel study of income dynamics

social capital and household welfare in south africa 1993 98 the aim in this study is to determine the nature of the causal relationship if any between social capital as measured by household membership in formal and informal groups and household welfare in south africa using a recently collected panel data set in south africa s largest province we estimate per capita expenditure functions including measures of social capital after controlling for fixed effects and simultaneity we find social capital has no effect in 1993 but a positive and significant effect in 1998

poverty persistence and transitions in uganda a combined qualitative and quantitative analysis despite uganda s impressive reduction in income poverty during the 1990s recent evidence has shown there to be substantial mobility into and out of poverty this paper represents one of the first attempts to combine qualitative and quantitative information to understand the factors and processes underlying poverty transitions and persistence in some instances similar factors are identified by both qualitative and quantitative approaches including lack of key physical assets high dependency ratios and increased household size in other instances though one approach identifies additional factors not so easily identified by the other for example the impacts of excessive alcohol consumption in many cases the paper argues that there is considerable value added in combining the two approaches allowing us to provide a much richer understanding of many of the processes underlying poverty and poverty transitions

slipping into and out of poverty the dynamics of spells this paper examines the dynamics of poverty previous analyses have examined either fluctuations in the male heads earnings or the frequency of poverty periods over a fixed time frame our approach depends on a definition of spells of poverty using this methodology we find that the majority of poor persons at any time are in the midst of a rather long spell of poverty the methodology also allows us to estimate that less than 40 percent of poverty spells begin because of a drop in the heads earnings while 60 percent of the spells end when the heads earnings increase thus researchers must focus on household formation decisions and on the behavior of secondary family members there has been a dramatic resurgence recently of discussion of the underclass the discussion is reminiscent of debates about poverty during the 1960s when the notions of a culture of poverty particularly as popularized by michael harrington s other america 1962 dominated both intellectual and policy thinking the idea of an underclass seems inconsistent however with much of the research on the dynamics of poverty during the 1970s that research using new longitudinal data seemed to show that the bulk of the poor were poor for only a few years the research also showed that the poor were a very heterogeneous group including a small minority of persistently poor the persistence of poverty is of interest both for understanding the phenomenon and for developing policy claims about dependency and separate life styles among the poor rest on assumptions about the long term nature of poverty questions

how well do static indicators identify the chronically poor abstract we investigate how well the most widely used static welfare indicators perform in identifying the chronically poor we propose a normative measure of performance the cost of a given impact on chronic poverty when transfers are contingent upon a purely static indicator using longitudinal household data from rural india we find that current consumption is not always a better indicator of chronic poverty than current income both however perform much better than other common indicators such as food share and access to land

vulnerability and poverty dynamics in vietnam drawing upon the vietnam household living standards survey vhlss data that cover the whole of vietnam in 2002 and 2004 ex ante measures of vulnerability are constructed these are then compared with static indicators of poverty i e the headcount ratio in a particular year detailed analyses of the panel data show that i in general vulnerability in 2002 translates into poverty in 2004 ii vulnerability of the poor tends to perpetuate their poverty and iii sections of the nonpoor but vulnerable slip into poverty durable reduction in poverty is conditional on i accurate identification of the vulnerable ii their sources of vulnerability and iii design of social safety nets that would enable the vulnerable to reduce risks and cope better with rapid integration of markets with the larger global economy

housing price land supply and revenue from land sales in a recent study peng and wheaton empirically examine the effect of restrictive land supply on hong kong house prices however we argue that the impact of the supply of new land by the hong kong government is not as important as they maintain in accounting for the volatile house prices in hong kong we show that there is no causal relationship between land supply and housing prices our estimations based on the annual data of hong kong s public land sales find that the government acts to maximise land revenue maximisation of revenue from land sales is however consistent with the efficient allocation of resources we also show that the amount of land sales by the government and land in developers land banks tend to decrease when market interest rates increase land banking behaviour is governed by economic conditions long term land holding costs should cover interest costs

poverty time and vagueness integrating the core poverty and chronic poverty frameworks in recent decades there have been considerable steps forward in terms of understanding poverty this paper identifies three meta dimensions of poverty which relate to i depth and severity ii breadth and multidimensionality and iii time and duration the advances that have been made in terms of conceptualising measuring and analysing poverty in each of these areas are briefly considered it is shown that the third and final meta dimension time and duration has been neglected until relatively recently it is argued that time and in particular duration is an important analytical component for understanding the experience of poverty and the processes that create and reduce poverty the final part of the paper suggests a way of integrating time into a unified framework for understanding poverty which can deal with the depth breadth and duration of poverty this involves extending mozaffar qizilbash s poverty and vagueness methodology to include duration

determinants of income mobility and household poverty dynamics in south africa this article analyses household income mobility among africans in south africa s most populous province kwazulu natal between 1993 and 1998 compared to industrialised and most developing countries mobility has been quite high as might have been expected after the transition in south africa this finding is robust when measurement error is controlled for when disaggregating the sources of mobility it is found that demographic changes and employment changes account for most of the mobility observed which is related to rapidly shifting household boundaries and a very volatile labour market in an environment of high unemployment using a multivariate analysis it can be seen that transitory incomes play a large role four types of poverty traps are found associated with large initial household size poor initial education poor initial asset endowment and poor initial employment access that dominate the otherwise observed regression towards the mean

estimation of poverty transition matrices with noisy data summary this paper investigates measurement error biases in estimated poverty transition matrices we compare transition matrices based on survey expenditure data to transition matrices based on measurement error free simulated expenditure the simulation model uses estimates that correct for measurement error in expenditure we find that time varying measurement error in expenditure data magnifies economic mobility roughly 45 of households initially in poverty at time t 1 are found to be out of poverty at time t using data from the korean labor and income panel study when measurement error is removed this drops to between 26 and 31 of households initially in poverty copyright 2016 john wiley sons ltd

drawing inferences about housing supply elasticity from house price responses to income shocks abstract the purpose of this paper is to provide information about the price elasticity of the supply of housing i examine the relationship between the average price of single family housing and the amount of personal income a two equation vector error correction system is estimated using a panel data set consisting of 76 msas from 1980 to 1998 the results suggest an elastic long run supply function but a relatively slow pace of adjustment to long run equilibrium hence a major demand shock can be expected to impact housing prices for several years following the shock differences in the responsiveness among subgroups of msas are examined and found to be generally minor

tax subsidies to owner occupied housing an asset market approach inflation reduces the effective cost of homeownership and raises the tax subsidy to owner occupation this paper presents an asset market model of the housing market and estimates how changes in the expected inflation rate affect the real price of houses and the equilibrium size of the housing capital stock simulation results suggest that the accelerating inflation of the 1970s which substantially reduced homeowners user costs could have accounted for as much as a 30 percent increase in real house prices persistent high inflation rates could lead ultimately to a sizable increase in the stock of owner occupied housing

speculation in the housing market this paper presents and tests a model of house price speculation the mechanisms by which price speculation may occur in the housing market are described and formalised a model of house prices is constructed that allows for speculation aspects of this model are tested using time series data for the uk and the greater london area 1969 95 overall the analysis presents some evidence of the process of speculation as a possible determinant of house prices in the london and uk wide housing markets

household income dynamics a four country story in this article we analyse the dynamics of household per capita incomes using longitudinal data from indonesia south africa spain and venezuela we find that in all four countries reported initial income and job changes of the head are consistently the most important variables in accounting for income changes overall and for initially poor households we also find that changes in income are more important than changes in household size and that changes in labour earnings are more important than changes in other sources of household income

assessing the extent and nature of chronic poverty in low income countries issues and evidence discussions of chronic poverty have mostly considered its monetary dimensions with current evidence suggesting that such poverty is much more transient than chronic but chronic poverty is a real and important phenomenon potentially more important quantitatively than it first appears once account is taken of different methodological approaches and inevitable measurement difficulties the chronic poor have distinctive characteristics such as lack of assets or high dependency rates which may account for their persistent poverty the paper argues that it is also necessary to develop concepts of chronic poverty further covering relevant nonmonetary dimensions and not just relying on panel data

new supply and price dynamics in the singapore housing market in this paper var models are employed to trace the price response of existing houses to the quantity of new units launched by homebuilders in singapore between 1996 and 2009 contrary to the competition hypothesis prediction of a negative reaction it is found that marginal supply granger cause existing house prices in a positive manner the effect is robust to the inclusion of exogenous demand factors as well as price interaction in the primary new houses and secondary existing houses market segments the contagion effect is consistent with the hypothesis that developers due to their ability to predict the market are price leaders in the housing market it is also found that homebuilders exhibit herding behaviour in mimicking each other s timing on when to market their new residential projects

the impact of income components on the distribution of family incomes attempts have recently been made to assign inequality contributions to various components of income this paper discusses the issues involved in such assignments and highlights the problems that follow from having a number of possible decomposition rules u s data on the distribution of family incomes are used to examine the relative influence of these income components and to evaluate empirically the performance of different decomposition rules a wide range of inequality contributions can be obtained even when restricted to only naturally derived decomposition rules some of the results are plainly absurd and serve to warn against the indiscriminate use of decomposition formulae without first investigating their properties

rural poverty dynamics in kenya structural declines and stochastic escapes we use panel survey data and household event histories to explore patterns of rural poverty dynamics in kenya over the period 2000 2009 we find substantial mobility across poverty categories using economic transition matrices drawing on asset based approaches we distinguish stochastic from structural poverty transitions few households successfully escaped poverty through asset accumulation up to 35 of the upwardly mobile while a large proportion of households up to 66 declining into poverty experienced structural transitions using household event histories we find significant differences across structural poverty transition classes in livelihood strategies household level shocks and other factors

privatization of electricity distribution in the northeast of brazil the good the bad the ugly or the naive this paper analyzes the evolution of five electricity distribution companies in the northeast of brazil using technical and financial indicators three privatized and two public firms were analyzed between 1997 and 2008 the financial indicators are used as proxies for the capacity of the business to generate value for shareholders while the technical indicators are used as proxies for service quality provided to consumers we observed that the privatized firms had their financial indicators improved after privatization increasing the value of the firm for the shareholders however there is no evidence that privatization affected the quality of service provided to consumers

combining household income and asset data to identify livelihood strategies and their dynamics abstractcurrent approaches to identifying and describing rural livelihood strategies and household movements between strategies over time in developing countries are imprecise here we i present a new statistical quantitative approach combining income and asset data to identify household activity choice variables characterise livelihood strategy clusters and analyse movements between strategies and ii apply the approach using an environmentally augmented three wave household n 427 level panel dataset from nepal combining income and asset data provides a better understanding of livelihood strategies and household movements between strategies over time than using only income or asset data most households changed livelihood strategy at least once over the two three year periods a common pathway out of poverty included an intermediate step during which households accumulate assets through farming petty trading and migratory work

housing investment in the united states a supply determined model of housing investment is estimated from quarterly data over the 1963 83 period the model is built on dynamic marginal cost pricing considerations and allows short and long run supply elasticities to differ these are estimated as 1 0 and 3 0 respectively but most of the long run response occurs within 1 year rapid adjustment speed and the sizable long run elasticity of supply are important factors in understanding the volatility of housing investment the data also suggest some anomalies in the expected present value theory of asset pricing for housing capital

income dynamics in argentina during the 1990 s mobiles did change over time in this paper we seek to determine the principal observed socioeconomic factors correlated with household income dynamics in argentina during the nineties in other words we want to identify who got ahead who fell behind and who kept up economic position in argentina in order to determine if they were always the same type of individuals households or if on the contrary their characteristics changed during the distressing 1990 s such analysis is relevant since the rises and falls in income or consumption experienced by households are the most direct indicators available of who benefits how much from economic development although there is a vast literature on income distribution analysis from a cross sectional perspective studies offering insights into the dynamics of income or more generally of economic well being and the factors associated with it are still on the research agenda for many countries such work has been particularly delayed in developing countries chiefly because of a lack of panel data surveys which have only recently begun to be carried out in a more systematic way 4 moreover and again due to data restraints even less is known about the possible changes in the dynamics of income over time if mobility analysis requires at least two observations over time from the same household or

the dynamics of the singapore private housing market in this paper a dynamic stock flow model is modified and applied to the singapore private housing market two empirical models are then constructed which offer an explanation for the dynamic patterns of both real private housing prices and new housing construction in the long run movements in the real gdp per capita and the total housing stock are found to have significant impacts on real housing prices while the user cost the public resale housing prices and the autocorrelation of housing prices with one lag explain most of the short run dynamics of real housing prices on the supply side the long run price elasticity of new housing construction is 1 31 it is also found that long run new housing construction drops 6 5 per cent for every 1 per cent increase in the total housing stock

deregulation of esi and privatization of state electric utilities in thailand abstract in thailand electric supply services have all been taken over by the state and operated under state enterprises since 1968 under a law empowering its monopoly state utilities accumulated assets and built up their manpower to expand and operate the power system to serve the whole country during the time of high growth in power demand in early the1990 s the government initiated a move to privatize state electric utilities the pace of which was firmed up after 1997 the year of the financial crash engagement of independent power producers ipps through the use of long term power purchase agreements ppas for supply of electric power into the system operated by state electric utilities was also initiated from the mid 1990s total capacity of ipps and small power producers spps that sell excess power from cogeneration on to the system rose and by the late 1990s started to create a constraint on system economic dispatch in 1999 the national energy policy council nepc approved a recommendation of international consultants to transform the electric supply industry into a structure similar to the system in the united kingdom the transformation was proposed to precede corporatization and privatization of state electric utilities the objectives of deregulation were to revoke the monopoly in esi to improve transparency in electricity pricing to reduce debts of state enterprises and to improve economic efficiency industry participants have voiced strong objection to the industry model proposed with the change of market structure in uk to the new electricity trading arrangement neta the secretariat of nepc also proposed a new structure similar to neta more acceptance from industry participants have been received for the new structure however it has been assumed that the proposed structure would bring improvement in system reliability drawing investment into power generation in a manner that would be efficient tariff has also been expected to become lower because of the competition in power generation and retail trading the authors argue that for developing countries issues of timely investment in new generation and delivery capacity stable and reasonable price of electricity reliability of power supply fuel diversity and security equitable access of supply and promotion of social equity are important maintaining a functioning esi that meet the broad objectives of providing reliable power supply to serve social and economic development needs could be prioritized over introduction of complete competition in wholesale generation and retailing the authors examine the present situation of the industry and propose a transitional model that would serve the broad objectives and introduce gradual competition in the industry the proposed design would unbundle generation from transmission and retailing it would aso eventually promote intra regional interconnection and electricity trading

is transient poverty different evidence for rural china we define transient poverty as the component of time mean consumption poverty at household level that is directly attributable to variability in consumption this can be thought of as a measure of vulnerability to falling consumption the non transient component then depends solely on mean consumption over time and we call this chronic poverty using robust semi parametric methods and household panel data for rural china we test whether transient poverty is determined by a process that is similar to chronic poverty commonly identified causes of poverty in this setting have weak explanatory power for transient poverty and some of the factors determining transient poverty do not matter to chronic poverty or even have the opposite effect successful policy responses to chronic poverty may still leave considerable transient poverty

earnings mobility in times of growth and decline argentina from 1996 to 2003 summary in recent years argentina s economy has experienced both rapid growth and severe decline in this paper we use a series of one year long panels to study who gained the most in pesos when the economy grew and who lost the most in pesos when the economy contracted various considerations led us to expect that mobility would be divergent that is that the individuals who started with the highest initial earnings would enjoy the largest earnings gains in pesos contrary to expectations and for a wide range of specifications mobility is found to be mostly convergent sometimes neutral and never divergent

revisiting forever gained income dynamics in the resettlement areas of zimbabwe 1983 96 this study examines income dynamics for a panel of households resettled on former white owned farms in the aftermath of zimbabwe s independence there are four core findings i over a 13 year period 1983 96 there has been an impressive accumulation of assets and a dramatic increase of crop incomes ii the rise of crop incomes is partly due to asset accumulation but largely to increased asset returns hi differences between households in initial conditions such as previous farming experience have few persistent effects and iv income growth has been widely shared income inequality has fallen sharply and the largest percentage increases in incomes are recorded by households that initially had the lowest incomes

issues in measuring and modeling poverty economists have relied heavily on household incomes or expenditures normalized for differences in household specific prices and demographics in their research and policy advice related to poverty and inequality recognizing the conceptual and empirical problems that confound such measures does not mean that they should be ignored instead it indicates the need for supplementary measures to capture the missing items implementing a genuinely multidimensional approach will often make the welfare rankings of social states more difficult but that fact points to the nonrobustness of low dimensional rankings this may have its own policy ramifications with the possibility of correspondence between policy instruments and welfare objectives the model types used to understand the poverty and inequity determination processes will be affected not only will there be more dependent variables to consider but variables will have potentially complex relationships these relationships will often be hard to empirically disentangle despite richer integrated and longitudinal data sets such data open rich and relevant agenda for research into the dynamics of poverty along multiple dimensions a simultaneous attack on these issues from all three fronts measurement modeling and data offers hope of establishing a credible empirical foundation for public action in fighting poverty

how dependent are the rural poor on the employment guarantee scheme in india an analysis of the icrisat data for two villages in the indian state of maharashtra points to mistargeting of the employment guarantee scheme egs there was a marked deterioration in it over the period 1979 89 reflected in not just a larger concentration of the more affluent among the egs participants but also their much larger gains from participating in this scheme nevertheless a large subset of the chronically poor depended heavily on egs as an additional source of income with significant welfare gains during 1979 84 but a large subset especially of relatively low income participants also withdrew from egs when overall economic conditions improved besides egs earnings varied consistently with economic conditions although the present analysis raises some concerns about the mistargeting of egs and in this context about the design and implementation of this scheme the presumption that such public support makes the poor perpetually dependent on it seems somewhat exaggerated if not mistaken

one kind of freedom poverty dynamics in post apartheid south africa abstract a 1993 south african living standards survey documented the legacy of apartheid in the form high levels of inequality and human insecurity drawing on a 1998 re survey of households in the 1993 study this paper explores whether this legacy has been superseded or whether apartheid s end has been only one kind of freedom that has left households in a poverty trap from which they cannot escape after proposing a theoretically grounded dynamic poverty typology that distinguishes stochastic from structural poverty transitions the paper goes on to estimate that significant numbers of the south african poor are potentially trapped in a structural poverty trap and lack the means to escape poverty over time

the dynamics of welfare gains and losses an african case study this article uses panel survey data for cote d ivoire to investigate the determinants of welfare gains and losses of households over time a first difference model is estimated which takes account of initial conditions for urban areas it was found that human capital is not only a key explanatory factor for levels of welfare but also the most important endowment to explain welfare changes over time in rural areas physical capital especially land and farm equipment mattered most household size and composition and socioeconomic characteristics of the household also affected welfare changes policy implications are discussed

vulnerability seasonality and poverty in ethiopia most studies examining the dynamics of welfare have found large fluctuations in consumption over relatively short periods suggesting substantial short run movements in and out of poverty the consequence is that cross section poverty research may not be able to identify the poor in this study we explore this short run variability further we use a data set on a panel of 1450 households in different communities in rural ethiopia surveyed thrice over 18 months on average year to year poverty is very similar however we find high variability in consumption and poverty over the seasons and year by year econometric analysis suggests that consumption is affected by idiosyncratic and common shocks including rainfall and household specific crop failure while households respond to seasonal incentives related to changing labour demand and prices the results imply that a larger number of households are vulnerable to shocks than implied by the standard poverty statistics while some of the non poor in the

high gas dependence for power generation in thailand the vulnerability analysis abstract thailand uses 74 of its natural gas supply for power generation and 70 of its power comes from gas based technology high dependence on natural gas in power generation raises concerns about security of electricity supply that could affect competitiveness of thai manufacturing and other industries at the global level the effect of fuel dependence on security of electricity supply has received less emphasis in the literature given this gap this research examines the economic impact of high dependence on natural gas for power generation in thailand by analyzing the effect of changes in fuel prices including fuel oil and natural gas on electricity tariff in thailand at the same time the research quantifies the vulnerability of the thai economy due to high gas dependence in power generation our research shows that for every 10 change in natural gas price electricity tariff in thailand would change by 3 5 in addition we found that the gas bill for power generation consumed between 1 94 and 3 05 of gross domestic product gdp between 2000 and 2004 and in terms of gdp share per unit of energy gas dependence in power generation is almost similar to that of crude oil import dependence we also found that the basic metal industry being an electricity intensive industry is the most affected industry additionally we find that volatility of gas price is the main factor behind the vulnerability concern the research accordingly simulates two mitigation options of the problem namely reducing gas dependence and increasing efficiency of gas fired power plants where the results show that these methods can reduce the vulnerability of the country from high gas dependence in power generation

price discovery between private and public housing markets public and private housing markets are usually differentiated in terms of price regulations and policies but they are not necessarily segmented any integration as opposed to segmentation between private and public markets implies that the prices of private housing are interrelated with the prices of public housing determined in the open market if so information revealed in one market will be pertinent for making inferences on prices in the other market this paper addresses the price discovery or relation between public and private housing in view of singapore s substantial public housing programme that has an actively traded secondary market implications for the direction of price causality and upward mobility for households between housing price strata are examined

the price elasticity of the supply of single family detached urban housing abstract past attempts to estimate the price elasticity of the supply of housing have erred by using aggregate data many houses are built in areas where the volume of residential construction is low consequently the influence of observations from higher volume areas where costs may be higher is diminished this problem is eliminated by using cross sectional data from 61 different american urban areas for a total of 223 observations from 1976 to 1981 to estimate a translog cost function for housing the supply elasticity is found to be infinite

pathways out of rural poverty a case study in socio economic mobility in the rural philippines exploiting unique household panel data covering a 30 year period this paper attempts to analyse the patterns of poverty exits by examining socio economic mobility in a philippines village macroeconomic growth was a major factor explaining poverty exit probabilities until the early 1980s after the 1980s poverty exit paths through agricultural ladder narrowed schooling and growth became equally important factors owing to the increased returns to schooling and labour endowments also became important for the lower but not upper social strata providing an economic incentive to have more children for the poor surprisingly we find no evidence of state dependence in poverty spells once observable factors are taken into account copyright 2007 oxford university press

the politics of staying poor exploring the political space for poverty reduction in uganda summary despite claims that uganda s recent success in poverty reduction has been significantly related to getting the politics right there are concerns that the poorest may not have benefited from this form of poverty reduction or the types of politics that have helped shape it employing the analytical framework of political space reveals that although some of the poorest groups are represented within the political system political discourse reveals a strong bias toward the economically active leaving the poorest excluded from poverty programs significantly there is an increasing divergence between the regime s political project of modernization and the international poverty agenda with important implications for the poorest

does unmeasured ability explain the higher wages of new technology workers abstract we study the impact on new technologies nt on wages using a unique data set that matches data on individuals and on their firms in his important article on the same topic krueger 1993 did not give a definitive answer to the following question if workers who use nt are better paid is it because they are abler or because nt increases their productivity we try to provide a precise answer to this question comparing cross section estimates firm effect estimates and person effect estimates we show that computer based new technologies are used by abler workers these workers appear to become more productive when they get more experienced with these nt in terms of wage differentials the introduction of computer based nt contributes to the increase but less than supposed before each year experience with computer based nt adds around 1 to the wage of workers using such techniques