collective action and group heterogeneity voluntary provision versus selective incentives several studies have concluded that heterogeneity within a group facilitates the initiation of collective action however a recent analysis found that heterogeneity can either facilitate or impede collective action depending on factors like the strength of the temptation to free ride reconciling these conclusions is difficult because the earlier studies assumed that public goods are provided voluntarily whereas the later analysis assumed that selective incentives like norms or laws can mandate cooperation i examine the link between group heterogeneity and collective action in three regimes voluntary systems in which actors make unrestricted decisions to participate in collective action compliance systems in which actors create and enforce norms that compel others to participate in public goods production and balanced systems in which actors can create and enforce compliance norms or oppose such norms the analysis reveals a complex link among group heterogeneity collective action and the type of regime by fostering the organization of previously atomized groups and weakening the cohesion of highsolidarity groups heterogeneity in contribution costs and valuation of the public good can reduce social power differentials

the ambiguous impact of inequality on local resource management abstract the impact of inequality on the ability of human groups to undertake successful collective action is investigated with special reference to overexploitation of common property resources in voluntary provision problems on the one hand inequality has an ambiguous impact on the feasibility of the efficient outcome even though better endowed agents contribute more to collective action in regulated settings on the other hand inequality tends to reduce the acceptability of available regulatory schemes and therefore to make collective action more difficult

an endogenous growth model for the evolution of water rights systems this article presents a model to help explain the transition path from one water management system to another typically a commons framework to one of tradable permit based property rights furthermore drawing from transaction cost literature the model demonstrates how this takes place when externalities the strain on water resources become severe enough to warrant the increased transaction costs inherent with more complex water rights management frameworks

credit market constraints consumption smoothing and the accumulation of durable production assets in low income countries investments in bullocks in india in this paper we formulate and estimate a finite horizon structural dynamic model of agricultural investment behavior that incorporates the major features of low income agricultural environments income uncertainty constraints on borrowing and rental markets and the use of investment assets to generate income and smooth consumption the model is fit to longitudinal indian household data on farm profits bullock stocks and pump sets the estimated structural parameters are used to assess the effects on the life cycle accumulation of bullocks agricultural profits and welfare associated with complete markets and bullock liquidity and with second best policies that provide assured sources of income to farmers and weather insurance

tenure security and land related investment evidence from ethiopia the authors use a large data set from ethiopia that differentiates tenure security and transferability to explore determinants of different types of land related investment and its possible impact on productivity while they find some support for endogeneity of investment in trees this is not the case for terraces transfer rights are unambiguously investment enhancing the large productivity effect of terracing implies that even where households undertake investments to increase their tenure security this may not be socially efficient in ethiopia government action to increase tenure security and transferability of land rights can significantly enhance rural investment and productivity

transition economies performance and challenges i present data and assess the first twelve years of the transition from plan to market transformations have taken place but the income gap between the transition and advanced economies has widened transition countries further east have performed worse than those further west but policies matter all countries carried out quickly type i reforms such as macroeconomic stabilization price liberalization small scale privatization and breakup of state owned enterprises they differed in type ii reforms such as large scale privatization and development of banking and legal systems countries that developed a functioning legal framework and corporate governance have performed better than others

institutions governance and incentives in common property regimes for african rangelands the general distinctions between open access state property common property and private property are now well established in the academic literature when applied to african rangelands however common property admits a wide variety of resource management regimes to formulate effective policies it is necessary to understand the structure and operations of particular regimes in this paper we discuss three examples of common property regimes two from the southern african nation of lesotho and one from the west african nation of senegal to illustrate some of the key characteristics of common property regimes in particular it is important to understand the structure of governance the types of institutions that govern behavior and the compatibility between governance institutions and individual incentives a common property regime can only be effective if its institutions are compatible with the structure of governance the extent of its effectiveness also depends upon the incentives and expectations of individuals expected to enforce the rules of the institutions or comply with their terms at present most african governments lack the organizational capacity and political will necessary to implement state property regimes official regulations on resource use or individual property rights for rangelands resources in many cases it is more appropriate for governments to define and enforce group rights to particular resources then help to establish conditions in which internal group dynamics yield efficient resource management outcomes

does smallholder land titling facilitate agricultural growth an analysis of the determinants and effects of smallholder land titling in zambia summary zambia s land policies privilege agricultural land alienation by wage earners over local smallholder farmers as a result land title holders are not statistically significantly different from non title holders in terms of agricultural productivity despite greater access to investment capital from wage earnings and higher levels of education the effects of land titling on long and medium term land investments are also limited these results are indicative of widespread speculative alienation of agricultural land by wage earners enabling more productive land users to acquire title requires policy change aimed at lowering the transaction costs and bureaucratic complexity of acquiring land title

what explains collective action in the commons theory and evidence from the philippines summary i examine the factors that influence collective action in the commons using econometric analyses on a data set of 1958 irrigation associations in the philippines i find that collective action is associated with water scarcity proximity to markets group size farm size and governance structure water scarcity has a curvilinear effect on collective action and is mediated by the governance structure the results suggest the need for a diagnostic approach in the analysis of institutional arrangements in diverse socio ecological settings these also suggest that collective action in the commons is more complex than is conventionally assumed in the decentralization literature

strategic interdependence in models of property rights the concept of strategic interdependence has opened a wide spectrum of explanation beyond the robinson crusoe economy this essay explores the implications of strategic interdependence for the theory of property rights and the new institutional economics schotter it attempts to clarify some of the linkages from institutional economics to micro and macroeconomic theory by considering how property institutions result from strategic interdependence confer payoffs to individual agents and reflect collective choices based on individual preferences

transaction costs collective action and survival of heterogeneous co management institutions case study of forest management organisations in west bengal india abstract cost effective natural resource management is important for equity and efficiency yet transaction costs of cooperation may pose a challenge to heterogeneous co management institutions we conducted a survey in seven forest protection committees of west bengal india to examine this hypothesis empirically we find that 1 among several factors caste heterogeneity distance to forest political heterogeneity land inequality and trust systematically influence transaction costs and collective action and 2 robust institutions bear less costs of cooperation the implication is that transaction costs related to heterogeneity may exert significant influence on successes or failures of co management

green revolution in sub saharan africa implications of imposed innovation for the wellbeing of rural smallholders green revolution policies are again being pursued to drive agricultural growth and reduce poverty in sub saharan africa however conditions have changed since the well documented successes of the 1960s and 1970s benefitted smallholders in southern asia and beyond we argue that under contemporary constraints the mechanisms for achieving improvements in the lives of smallholder farmers through such policies are unclear and that both policy rationale and means of governing agricultural innovation are crucial for pro poor impacts to critically analyze rwanda s green revolution policies and impacts from a local perspective a mixed methods multidimensional wellbeing approach is applied in rural areas in mountainous western rwanda here malthusian policy framing has been used to justify imposed rather than induced innovation the policies involve a substantial transformation for rural farmers from a traditional polyculture system supporting subsistence and local trade to the adoption of modern seed varieties inputs and credit in order to specialize in marketable crops and achieve increased production and income although policies have been deemed successful in raising yields and conventionally measured poverty rates have fallen over the same period such trends were found to be quite incongruous with local experiences disaggregated results reveal that only a relatively wealthy minority were able to adhere to the enforced modernization and policies appear to be exacerbating landlessness and inequality for poorer rural inhabitants negative impacts were evident for the majority of households as subsistence practices were disrupted poverty exacerbated local systems of knowledge trade and labor were impaired and land tenure security and autonomy were curtailed in order to mitigate the effects we recommend that inventive pro poor forms of tenure and cooperation none of which preclude improvements to input availability market linkages and infrastructure may provide positive outcomes for rural people and importantly in rwanda for those who have become landless in recent years we conclude that policies promoting a green revolution in sub saharan africa should not all be considered to be pro poor or even to be of a similar type but rather should be the subject of rigorous impact assessment such assessment should be based not only on consistent objective indicators but pay attention to localized impacts on land tenure agricultural practices and the wellbeing of socially differentiated people

environmental values and the frame of reference abstract wants may be distinguished by the extent to which they are positional positional wants are determined by one s frame of reference defined by comparison with peer group consumption and by one s own previous consumption the growth in positional wants is not uniquely related to environmental resource depletion but the two do strongly overlap several implications follow first social reductions in positional consumption may yield environmental benefits at little cost to consumers the costs are however spread over time and depend on the rate of adaptation the strength of the social reference effect determines whether individuals are subject to an isolation or an assurance problem and hence the degree to which cuts need to be centrally imposed if they are to succeed it is suggested that the negative consequences of international positioning could be ameliorated by the replacement of conventional income accounts by a welfare index that more fully incorporates environmental costs secondly the neoclassical utility function can be regarded as a special case of the reference based welfare function provided that it is restricted to positive explanations of how momentary choices are made reference based preferences have more in common with the findings of psychologists and hence open a way to consilience between economics and natural science finally the frame of reference also allows a dynamic perspective to the debate on the commensurability of wants

the fate of easter island the limits of resource management institutions abstract malthus malthus thomas 1798 1970 an essay on the principle of population penguin new york believed that population growth will eventually lead to natural resource depletion economic and social collapse and population decline brander and taylor brander james a taylor m scott 1998 the simple economics of easter island a ricardo malthus model of renewable resource use american economic review 88 119 138 use a predator prey model with an assumption of an open access resource they show that the collapse of easter island could be explained by a malthusian trap combined with technical characteristics of the resources they suggest that institutional change such as assignment of property rights could potentially have averted the collapse of easter island in this paper we show that even if the islanders had complete assignment of property rights and implemented optimal resource management with infinite horizon or equivalently had a social planner that implemented such an optimal plan as in neoclassical welfare economics a similar boom bust cycle would have occurred

political commitment institutional capacity and tax policy reform in tanzania abstract the early literature on structural adjustment programs concentrated on the types of economic reforms required and more recent literature addresses the political and institutional dimensions of economic policy reform this paper presents a framework for analyzing the interaction between politics notably the political commitment to reform and institutions especially administrative capacity in implementing reform the framework is applied to tax reform and trade liberalization in tanzania a number of conclusions are drawn regarding the appropriate design and sequence of a reform program to increase the likelihood of effective implementation given the policy environment and political and institutional changes required

the influence of technology and demand factors on firm size and industrial structure in the dram market 1973 1988 abstract the focus of this research is on the impact of the diffusion of innovations in integrated circuit technology on the market structure of that industry and the implications of firm strategy for both further innovation and market structure change the study examines the effects of sustained product innovation over a fifteen year period in the dram segment of the integrated circuit industry assessments are made on first mover advantages shape of the diffusion curve and resource needs in a market characterized by an increasingly complex technology comparisons are made along the dimensions of number of firms in the market continuity of the firms and market concentration

can political entrepreneurs solve the free rider problem abstract a solution of the problem of voluntary collective action employing an improved concept of political entrepreneurship is proposed this solution is consistent with large numbers of actors and pure public goods joint production of private goods and asymmetry are not assumed the importance of information imperfections in producing suboptimality in the provision of public goods is emphasized political entrepreneurship is made to parallel the knightian concept of the entrepreneur emphasizing the role of risk taking and information collecting

risk and insurance in a rural credit market an empirical investigation in northern nigeria credit contracts play a direct role in pooling risk between households in northern nigeria repayments owed by borrowers depend on realizations of random shocks by both borrowers and lenders the paper develops two models of state contingent loans the first is a competitive equilibrium in perfectly enforceable contracts the second permits imperfect information and equilibrium default estimates of both models indicate that quantitatively important state contingent payments are embedded in these loan transactions but that a fully efficient risk pooling equilibrium is not achieved the research is based on a year long survey in zaria nigeria conducted by the author

dimensions and diversity of property rights in rural china dilemmas on the road to further reform abstract this paper contributes to the debate over land tenure in rural china by conceptualizing and measuring multiple dimensions of property rights in a way that elucidates the competing interests that are affected by the property rights regime utilizing a unique village level data set this paper argues that the regional and temporal variation in rural property rights signals a pattern in which decentralized institutional innovation occurs in response to the competing interests of the national state of local authorities and of present and possible future individual land users unlike the earlier debate concerning the household responsibility system the current property rights dilemma is intrinsically more complex because the potential conflicts of interest between individuals local collectives and the state are greater resolution of that debate will ultimately require careful exploration of the reality and substance of the tradeoffs and competing interests that make further reform of rural property rights so difficult

inequality social sanctions and cooperation within south african fishing communities abstract we explore the effect of income inequality and social attitudes on cooperation and sanctioning in nine south african fishing communities where allocation of fishing rights via quota and permits have been unequal and controversial we use a linear public goods experiment design with heterogeneous endowments and peer sanctioning in the punishment treatment aggregate contributions towards the public good are significantly higher amongst unequal groups with low endowment players contributing the greatest endowment share sanctioning is significantly lower in unequal groups but demand for punishment is similar irrespective of differences in relative costs free riding drives punishment but retaliation is another important motivator specifically in unequal groups in equal groups antisocial punishment of cooperators is more common the effect of real wealth and inequality on contributions and punishment is less salient possibly due to real wealth not being discernible in the experimental context interestingly social attitudes are important in explaining sanctioning behavior indicating that distrust in formal institutions and specifically in the top down quota allocation process may have a significant impact on behavioral outcomes and the effectiveness of community sanctioning mechanisms

a theory of the critical mass i interdependence group heterogeneity and the production of collective action collective action usually depends on a critical mass that behaves differently from typical group members sometimes the critical mass provides some level of the good for others who do nothing wh

on the unequal inequality of poor communities important differences exist between communities with respect to their needs capacities and circumstances as central governments are not able to discern these differences fully they seek to achieve their policy objectives by relying on decentralized mechanisms that use local information however household and individual characteristics within communities can also vary substantially a growing theoretical literature suggests that inequality within communities can influence policy outcomes and that this influence could be harmful or helpful depending on the circumstances empirical investigations into the impact of inequality have to date largely been held back by a lack of systematic evidence on community level inequality the authors use household survey and population census data to estimate per capita consumption inequality within communities in three developing countries ecuador madagascar and mozambique communities are found to vary markedly from one another in terms of the degree of inequality they exhibit the authors also show that there should be no presumption that inequality is less severe in poor communities they argue that the kind of community level inequality estimates generated in this paper can be used in designing and evaluating decentralized antipoverty programs

investment and equity effects of land regularisation the case of nicaragua we use data from nicaragua to examine the impact of award of registered and non registered title on land values and changes in land attached investment registration acquisition through purchase and agrarian reform title all are associated with significant increases in the value of plots receipt of registered title is found to increase land values by 30 and at the same time greatly increase the propensity to invest bringing such investment closer to the optimum in line with descriptive statistics indicating great demand for land right regularisation especially from the poor this suggests that titling can have a positive distributional effect at the same time the legal validity and official recognition of the titles issued appears to be of great importance

wealth based trust and the development of collective action interpersonal trust is one possible mechanism by which wealth inequality affects the success of efforts in cooperation specifically the presence of perceived economic differences between members of small agricultural cooperatives in northwest ecuador s agricultural frontier encourages trust in the wealthy thus facilitating co op development during the initial stage of cooperative formation but such inequality and exclusive trust may later negatively affect co op success these generalizations are only possible through refinement of frameworks currently used in the study of heterogeneity and common pool resource management this refinement is made possible by paying closer attention to the operationalization of variables and by synthesizing already existing hypotheses

the new institutional economics and its applicability to development abstract the several remarkable developments in the social sciences which have come to be known as the new institutional economics nie have not yet been fully exploited for analyzing the determinants and effects of institutional change in the context of development this paper identifies two important components of the nie and illustrates both a potential complementarities between them and b their applicability to various problems and policies in the long term development of developing countries

the development of an infrastructure for entrepreneurship abstract this paper takes a macroperspective of entrepreneurship and focuses on the issues and events involved in constructing an industrial infrastructure that facilitates and constrains entrepreneurship this infrastructure includes 1 institutional arrangements to legitimate regulate and standardize a new technology 2 public resource endowments of basic scientific knowledge financing mechanisms and a pool of competent labor as well as 3 proprietary rd numerous entrepreneurial actors in the public and not for profit sectors play crucial roles it motivates one to examine the different roles played by these actors and how their joint contributions interact to develop and commercialize a new technology this in turn makes it possible to understand how the risk time and cost to an individual entrepreneur are significantly influenced by developments in the overall infrastructure for entrepreneurship it also explains why the entrepreneurs who run in packs will be more successful than those that go it alone to develop their innovations

land tenure choice in chinese villages the rational versus the political model the rational and political decision models are developed and tested for the land tenure choice in rural china a novelty of the test is to link the collective decision with general relative factor scarcities competing hypotheses are developed for the two models and tested with panel data collected on 83 chinese villages the results show that neither model is strongly rejected although the political model fares slightly better in more sophisticated econometric testing this suggests that popular political participation is emerging in chinese villages implications of this finding to chinese land policy are discussed

social insurance and transition the authors study the general equilibrium effects of social insurance on transition in a model in which the process of moving workers from matches in the state sector to new matches in the private sector takes time and involves uncertainty as might be expected adding social insurance to an economy without any improves welfare contrary to standard intuition however adding social insurance may slow transition the authors show that this result depends crucially on general equilibrium interactions of interest rates and savings under alternative market structures copyright 1996 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

da agrariedade a ruralidade novos enfoques a economia territorial in the first part the paper presents the evolution of the rural develoment theories from 50s to nowadays consequently in the second part it is addressed the issue of how the transition from subsistance economy to traditional economy to agricultural economy to rural economy could delineate virtuous processes of local development in specific contexts this concept is futher developed in the third part where territorial development is analysed in accordance with international studies and more specifically with european ones and in the forth where the topic is critically focused in the framework of the brazilean literature

using monte carlo analysis to investigate the relationship between overconsumption and uncertain access to one s personal utility function abstract the failure of income and subjective well being to correlate strongly beyond subsistence levels has been well documented this is an important observation from an environmental perspective because it suggests that some excess consumption could be curbed without leading to a decline in subjective well being at the same time there is evidence that access to one s internal utility function is imperfect indicating that choices may approximate utility maximization but that the correspondence is unlikely to be exact here i use a monte carlo model to incorporate findings from hedonic psychology to investigate the question of how imperfect access to one s utility may lead to negatively affective overconsumption through asymmetries in how people are able to budget their time according to the model consumer debt leads to a compounding of this issue although it cannot return well being to the ideal level some hedonic costs of this overconsumption can be partially mitigated through required vacation in excess of what individuals would chose themselves in a fully functioning market perhaps along the line of the european model

cooperation in common property regimes under extreme drought conditions empirical evidence from the use of pooled transferable quotas in spanish irrigation systems the success of a common property regime can be partially judged on the basis of its ability to handle extreme events that stress its capacity for cooperation this paper compares the performance of 38 irrigation associations in a large irrigation area in spain during a severe drought as a test of hypotheses derived from property right theories the case is particularly interesting because it contains a transferable quota institution that can potentially strengthen the effectiveness of common property regimes in scarcity conditions according to the results the use of transferable quotas across associations can contribute to cooperation and drought performance in this context performance is higher when the associations enjoy 1 effective monitoring systems 2 experience and legitimate leaders and 3 facilitative biophysical conditions like soil water holding capacity the analysis also suggests that biophysical properties like soil water holding capacity may compensate for weaker monitoring or leadership and vice versa

economic heterogeneity and the commons effects on collective action and collective goods provisioning summary the question of how economic and socio cultural heterogeneity impacts commons management has been receiving increasing attention but without resolution however the issue is increasingly important in a globalizing world this paper builds upon recent theoretical works to provide a clearer understanding of the conditions under which we might expect economic inequality to have positive or negative effects of critical importance to the argument is the distinction between the problem of collective action and the problem of providing collective goods a synthetic set of predictions is subsequently developed and tested with a comparative analysis of case studies of fisheries and irrigation systems

coping with asymmetries in the commons self governing irrigation systems can work many analysts presume that the appropriators of a common pool resource are trapped in a hobbesian state of nature and cannot themselves create rules to counteract the perverse incentives they face in managing the resource the logical consequence of this view is to recommend that an external authority the government take over the commons but considerable empirical evidence from field and experimental settings holds that appropriators frequently do constitute and enforce their own rules and that these rules work our research agenda is to develop a coherent understanding of the set of conditions that enhance or detract from self organizing capabilities when individuals differ substantially from one another for the sake of concreteness this paper focuses on the asymmetry present in most irrigation systems between those who are physically near the source of water the head enders and those who are physically distant from it the tail enders this paper first explores the interaction between head end and tail end farmers particularly their decisions about whether to devote resources to the upkeep of the irrigation system and how bargaining between the parties can benefit all sides finally we examine empirical evidence from a study of irrigation institutions in nepal and discuss the broader practical significance of our findings

the profits of power land rights and agricultural investment in ghana we examine the impact of ambiguous and contested land rights on investment and productivity in agriculture in akwapim ghana we show that individuals who hold powerful positions in a local political hierarchy have more secure tenure rights and that as a consequence they invest more in land fertility and have substantially higher output the intensity of investments on different plots cultivated by a given individual corresponds to that individual s security of tenure over those specific plots and in turn to the individual s position in the political hierarchy relevant to those specific plots

coping with the tragedy of the commons game structure and design of rules the paper provides an assessment of some recent results of the large amount of new institutional economics analyses investigating a common pool resource setting with a specific focus on game theory models most of the studies have used a non cooperative approach in order to explain how under provision for the resource or its over use the so called tragedy of the commons can be avoided within given management rules they show how the characteristics of the game payoff matrix repetition or of the users group size wealth heterogeneity and moral norms may give incentives for the latter to play in a way that benefits all users by contrast much fewer articles have used a formalized approach to assess the possibility for players to design new rules to overcome the initial tragedy of the commons the article ends with some proposals of directions for future research

wealth weather risk and the composition and profitability of agricultural investments despite the growing evidence that farmers in low income environments are risk averse there has been little empirical evidence on the importance of risk in shaping the actual allocation of production resources among farmers differentiated by wealth the authors use panel data on investments in rural india to examine how the composition of productive and nonproductive asset holdings varies across farmers with different levels of total wealth and across farmers facing different degrees of weather risk income variability is a prominent feature of the experience of rural agents in low income countries the authors report evidence based on measures of rainfall variability that the agricultural investment portfolio behavior of farmers in such settings reflects risk aversion due evidently to limitations on consumption soothing mechanisms such as crop insurance or credit markets the authors results suggest that uninsured weather risk is a significant cause of lower efficiency and lower average incomes a one standard deviation decrease in weather risk measured by the standard deviation of the timing of the rainy season would raise average profits by up to 35 percent among farmers in the lowest wealth quartile moreover rainfall variability induces a more unequal distribution of average incomes for a given distribution of wealth wealthier farmers are willing to absorb significant risk without giving up profits to reduce production risk smaller farmers have to invest their limited wealth in ways that reduce their exposure to risk at the cost of lower profit rates the authors found that at high levels of rainfall variability differences in rates of profit per unit of agricultural assets were similar across classes of wealth but over the sample range of rainfall variability these rates of profit were always higher for the poorer farmers than for the wealthier ones suggesting that the disadvantages of small farmers in risk diffusion are more than offset by their labor cost advantage

structural change power politics and community organizations in africa challenging the patterns puzzles and paradoxes abstract this paper explores two phenomena shaping processes of local institutional and organizational change in rural africa the first is the complexity of institutional layering and dissonance in which local organizations and institutions in rural africa coexist the second is the paradox often found in state local relations in africa central governments encourage local communities to take on responsibilities which the center cannot manage should significant organizational strength emerge at the local level however central powers often move expeditiously to destroy it illustrative material comes primarily from kenya and zimbabwe and selectively from several other countries we ask what new structures are emerging and what old ones are being adapted to new functions we argue that local organizations are critical for addressing ecological decline and restoring the productivity and sustainability of rural africa both localities and national governments have much to gain if the capacities of local organizations can become themselves a valued resource in the resource scarce setting comprising much of rural africa

is land titling in sub saharan africa cost effective evidence from madagascar formalizing land rights has been promoted as a way to encourage agricultural investment and stimulate land markets yet little is known about the benefits of such policies in sub saharan africa where the preconditions for success are less favorable the analysis uses a large sample of plots from an intensively titled rice growing area of madagascar and compares land specific investments land productivity and land values for titled and untitled plots cultivated by the same household having a title has no significant effect on plot specific investment and correspondingly little effect on land productivity and land values these results are broadly consistent with a simulation of a theoretical model of investment under expropriation risk calibrated to the same data a cost benefit analysis suggests that the current system of formal titling should not be extended in rural madagascar and that any new system of land registration will have to be quite inexpensive to be worthwhile

the political economy of transition the overriding importance of political constraints in the transition process has led to developments of the theory of the political economy of reform what are the main insights from that theory how does it reflect the transition reality what have we learned and what do we still need to learn the present article will attempt to answer those questions

heterogeneity and collective management evidence from common forests in himachal pradesh india summary this paper conducts a statistical investigation into the impact of differences in economic benefits wealth and social classes within the community on collective management of forests there are two key results first social parochialism is not a pre requisite for collective management of forests moderate levels of social diversity are associated with low collective management but at high levels of social diversity collective management is high second moderate wealth heterogeneity is beneficial however at high levels and in the presence of benefit heterogeneity it decreases collective management similarly benefit heterogeneity reduces collective management if wealth heterogeneity also exists these results run counter to the dominant understanding of heterogeneity but may be seen as alternate explanations under a specific socioeconomic context

the aggregate effects of sectoral reallocations abstract can a one time permanent change in the fundamentals behind the sectoral composition of the economy prompt an aggregate downturn can this downturn be non negligible even if one uses us data to determine the relative size of gross vs net job flows and the importance of job creation costs can one consider the military build down of the 1990s as a plausible cause for the 1990 1991 recession do sectoral reallocations generate responses that are qualitatively similar to productivity shocks we use a variant of the mortensen pissarides 1994 review of economic studies 61 397 415 job creation destruction model calibrate it to us labor market data and run experiments that suggest one can answer yes to all these questions

conservation versus equity can payments for environmental services achieve both this paper investigates the trade off between conservation and equity considerations in the use of payments for environmental services pes that implicitly incorporate different distributive justice principles using a public good experiment with heterogeneous participants we compare the effects on additional area conserved and distribution of earnings of two pes schemes an equal payment and a payment based on rawls distributional principle which we refer to as maxi min payment scheme the main findings of the framed field experiment conducted in jambi province indonesia indicate that the introduction of a maxi min pes scheme can function as a multi purpose instrument it realigns the income distribution in favor of low endowed participants and does not necessarily need to be compromised by lower environmental additionality at the group level

agricultural labour productivity food prices and sustainable development impacts and indicators in the last few years high and unstable food and agricultural commodity prices and concerns about population growth increasing per capita food demands and environmental constraints have pushed agriculture and food production up national and international political policy and research agendas drawing on both theory and empirical evidence this paper argues that fundamental impacts of links between agricultural productivity sustainability and real food price changes are often overlooked in current policy analysis this is exacerbated by a lack of relevant and accessible indicators for monitoring agricultural productivity sustainability and real food prices two relatively simple and widely applicable sets of indicators are proposed for use in policy development and monitoring historical series of these indices are estimated for selected countries regions and the world their strengths weaknesses and potential value are then discussed in the context of the need for better sustainable agricultural development and food security indicators in any post 2015 successors to the current mdgs

participatory exclusions community forestry and gender an analysis for south asia and a conceptual framework abstract the idea of people s participation has long been part of development thinking but today the management of local natural resources by village communities is widely accepted as an institutional imperative it is therefore essential to examine how these institutions perform especially from the perspective of the more disadvantaged based on extensive fieldwork among community forestry groups in india and nepal and existing case studies this paper demonstrates how seemingly participatory institutions can exclude significant sections such as women it provides a typology of participation spells out the gender equity and efficiency implications of such exclusions and analyzes what underlies them it also outlines a conceptual framework to help analyze the process of gender exclusion and how it might be alleviated

social science knowledge and institutional change over the last several decades agricultural economists have made major contributions to our understanding of the impact of advances in natural science knowledge on technical change and of the impact of technical change on economic growth we have also significantly advanced our understanding of the sources of demand for and supply of technical change work carried out within the framework of the induced technical change paradigm has demonstrated that technical change can be treated as largely endogenous to the development process hayami and ruttan 1971 binswanger and ruttan we have made less progress in our attempts to understand the contributions of advances in social science knowledge to institutional innovation or of the contribution of institutional innovation to economic political or social change and our knowledge of the sources of demand for and supply of institutional change remains rudimentary in this paper i suggest an approach to thinking about the sources of demand and supply for institutional change i then proceed to explore the use of social science knowledge and the role of social scientists in the design and evolution of institutional innovations finally i examine the contribution of agricultural economics research and of agricultural economists to the design and evolution of the direct payment approach to farm price and income policy i follow the lead of commons and knight and define institution to include both the behavioral rules that govern patterns of relationships and action as well as decision making units such as government bureaus firms and families the term institutional change will at times be used to refer to both institutional innovation and to changes in institutional performance i

selecting the state or choosing the chief the political determinants of smallholder land titling summary this article examines the effect of customary institutions on smallholder land titling in sub saharan africa it argues that the individual s status within the customary institution conditions his or her demand for land titles individuals with greater customary privilege gain advantages from maintaining customary property rights including stronger tenure security for households with lower privilege within the customary institution the benefits of adopting state land titles are higher analysis of an original survey of smallholder farmers in senegal and an existing survey in zambia demonstrates that households with greater customary privilege are less likely to adopt state land titles independent of ethnicity wealth and land values i find additional support for the argument in measures of increased tenure security for those with greater customary privilege qualitative interviews with customary authorities and smallholder farmers help establish the mechanism these findings update the dominant wisdom that land values and material transaction costs drive smallholder land titling demonstrating the important effect of status within the customary institution on demand for land titles by examining the political underpinnings of customary property rights this article contributes to our understandings of which farmers benefit most from land titling this has implications for the improved design of land governance programs

adaptation to land constraints is africa different since the seminal works of malthus and boserup scientists have long debated the impact of population growth and land constraints on the wellbeing of rural people today these concerns are particularly relevant to africa with its rapid population growth very small farms and chronic food insecurity in this paper we examine adaptation to falling land labor ratios using a comprehensive theoretical framework in which households faced with binding land constraints can respond in three ways intensifying agricultural production diversifying out of agriculture and reducing fertility rates using cross country data and drawing upon the existing literature we reach three conclusions first population density is associated with reduced fallows and more intensive use of land but not fertilizer use or irrigation indicating major challenges in achieving sustainable intensification or agricultural productivity growth second there is little evidence of successful non farm diversification in response to land pressures in africa from domestic or international income sources third rural africans in land constrained countries desire smaller families but have thus far benefited little from family planning policies these findings underscore the need for a coordinated multi sectoral approach to sustainably reduce poverty in the region

a dynamic option value for institutional change marketable property rights in the sahel in this article we use dynamic programming methods to create an option value measure of the value of the institutional innovation of marketable property rights this measure has two properties that are important to understanding institutional change it is truly dynamic and it allows for agent heterogeneity in the case of west africa we find that the collapse of customary risk management institutions is a vital part of the demand for marketability rights as agents struggle to smooth income and consumption in its wake we find that the social efficiency implications of this demand for institutional innovation are ambiguous

institutions and the r d of gm crops abstract this paper analyzes how different institutional structures shape the research and development r d of genetically modified crops gm crops whether this r d is conducted within companies cooperatives or public research organizations both publicly and privately funded r d is expected to influence the type of crops and traits that are developed and therefore the effects on society and ecosystems that potentially could follow from the use of gm crops this issue is analyzed empirically by statistical analysis of 1323 notifications for field trials with gm crops that have been submitted under two eu directives in seven european countries the results show that the type of r d organization influences the traits and crops that are developed companies are more likely to submit notifications that concern gm crops that secure the potential for profit than are other types of r d organizations while r d organizations that are purely publicly funded are more likely to submit notifications that only concern biosafety research than are cooperatives and companies consideration of the environment food safety and food security might justify institutional reforms of r d of gm crops this might include increased public funding combined with changes in intellectual property rights

high value forests hidden economies and elite capture evidence from forest user groups in nepal s terai abstract this paper argues that the policy on decentralised forest management in nepal informed by experiences from the middle hills overlooks the complexity and conflictual potential of establishing effective and equitable user groups in the terai our case study evidence from west central terai suggests that the combination of high forest value and weak institutional control mechanisms create opportunities for local elites to siphon off substantial shares of the benefits generated by valuable local forests the rents created by autonomous fug policies give rise to stark distributional biases a scramble for control and institutional instability we estimate the extent of elite capture and argue that institutional reform needs are intimately linked to controlling what we call the hidden economy of forest user groups

the paradox of group size in collective action a theory of the critical mass ii many sociologists incorrectly believe that larger groups are less likely to support collective action than smaller ones the effect of group size infact depends on costs if the costs of collective goods rise with the number who share in them larger groups act less frequently than smaller ones if the costs vary little with group size larger groups should exhibit more collective action than smaller ones because larger groups have more resources and are more likely to have a critical mass of highly interested and resourceful actors the positive effects of group size increase with group heterogeneity and nonrandom social ties paradoxically when groups are hetero geneous fewer contributors may be needed to provide a good to larger groups making collective action less complex and less expensive

making sense of institutions as a factor shaping economic performance abstract there has recently been a resurgence of interest in how institutions affect economic performance a review of this literature reveals that the concept of an institution means different things to different scholars both within economics and across the social sciences we discuss what factors unify the different definitions of institutions and develop a concept of institutions useful for the analysis of economic performance and economic growth in particular specifically we develop the notion of institutions as standard social technologies economic growth results from the co evolution of physical and social technologies

job reallocation in two cases of massive adjustment in eastern europe summary this paper uses worker level data to characterize economy wide job creation and job destruction during periods of massive structural adjustment we contrast the gradualist czech and the rapid estonian approach to the destruction of the communist economy and assess their experience in light of selected theories of reallocation with frictions we find that gradual job destruction combined with job creation support allows extensive reallocation to concur with low unemployment drastic job destruction on the other hand need not slow down job creation as long as unemployment benefits are kept very low

collective action for local commons management in rural yunnan china empirical evidence and hypotheses using evolutionary game theory this paper presents hypotheses regarding collective actions for irrigation management with the help of evolutionary game theory data for the analysis were collected by the author from the irrigation system of rural yunnan china an econometric analysis reveals that collective action will be forthcoming in rural communities where few nonfarm job opportunities are provided the degree of income disparity is quite small and resource restrictions are moderately problematic the finding that communities without local government intervention outperform those with intervention supports the proverbial view that external agencies should delegate significant parts of the control rights of common pool resources to immediate stakeholders

toward a theory of induced institutional innovation in this paper we elaborate a theory of institutional innovation in which changes in the demand for institutional innovation are induced by changes in relative resource endowments and by technical change we illustrate from agricultural history how changes in resource endowments and technical change have induced changes in private property rights and in the development of non market institutions we also consider the impact of advances in social science knowledge and of cultural endowments on the supply of institutional change in a final section we present the elements of a model of institutional innovation that maps the relationships among resource endowments cultural endowments technology and institutions

the optimal speed of transition a general equilibrium analysis we present a benchmark model for the optimal speed of transition from a state owned to a private market economy based on the consumption savings decision in a closed economy we abstract from frictions to focus on the macroeconomic conditions for accumulation of private capital and closure or restructuring of state owned enterprises it is shown that hard budget constraints compensate for too slow speed of enterprise closure but that an excess speed of closure may slow down transition because of output contraction effects this will especially be the case if such a deviation occurs at early stages of transition

land tenure security and investment incentives puzzling evidence from burkina faso abstract the commonsense logic associating higher land security and higher incentives to invest has been recently called into question in the case of african agriculture to be meaningful empirical tests have to be carefully designed so as to take account of the possible endogeneity of the land rights variable this is done in this paper by applying suitable econometric methods to the original data collected in burkina faso the results obtained cast doubt on the existence of a systematic influence of land tenure security on investment by reviewing the justifications for scepticism in the recent literature we are able to conclude that the traditional village order where it exists provides the basic land rights required to stimulate small scale investment

opportunism and ngos entrepreneurship and green north south transfers abstract through the lens of entrepreneurship this paper applies the new institutional economics to examine two case studies of environmental nongovernmental organizations ngos in latin america to clarify their political economic roles southern ngos that rely on northern donors are viewed as entrepreneurial economic entities producing international public goods these nonprofit ngos take their place alongside for profit firms as contributors to economic production employment institutional innovation and technology transfer the theoretical framework proposed assumes that self interested behavior coexists with loyalty commitment and altruism as well as opportunism

scarcity amidst abundance reassessing the potential for cropland expansion in africa abstract sub saharan africa is typically regarded as land abundant and previous efforts to estimate the true extent of potentially available cropland pac have largely affirmed this perception such efforts however have largely focused on production potential and have underemphasized economic profitability and other constraints to expansion this paper re estimates pac for africa in a more explicit economic framework that emphasizes the returns to agricultural production under a variety of assumptions using recent geospatial data existing pac estimates for africa are shown to be highly sensitive to assumptions about land productivity and market access and are moderately influenced by the use of alternative data sources the region s underutilized land resources are concentrated in relatively few countries many of which are fragile states between one half and two thirds of the region s surplus land is currently under forest cover conversion of forests to cropland would entail major environmental costs most of the continent s unexploited land resources are located far from input and output markets limiting their economic attractiveness in the long run improvements in infrastructure and agricultural productivity and the growth of hinterland towns will enhance the economic returns to cropland expansion in the short to medium term however the potential for profitable smallholder based cropland expansion in most african countries is likely to be much more limited than it is typically perceived to be

institutional innovation and agricultural development abstract this paper elaborates a theory of institutional innovation in which shifts in the demand for institutional change are induced by changes in relative resource endowments and by technical change the supply of institutional innovations responds to advances in social science knowledge and changes in cultural endowments case studies drawing on 1 innovations in land tenure and labor relations in the philippines 2 export promotion and import substitution of agricultural commodities in east asia and 3 farm commodity policy in the united states are presented elements of a general institutional innovation model are outlined

income and the environment in rural india is there a poverty trap we study the relationships between rural income distributions and changes in environmental conditions in southern western and central india between 1994 95 and 2000 01 other than the relatively rich we find that all income strata benefit from an improved environment and intermediate expenditure households benefit more than the very poor in absolute terms higher median consumption expenditures and richness are estimated to increase environmental decline but we do not find a significant impact of income poverty on local environmental health the results do not support the poverty trap conjecture with environmental degradation driving expenditure reductions that promote offsetting aforestation which benefits the poor

what has luck got to do with it a regional analysis of poverty and agricultural growth in rural india this article explores the role of agro ecological factors associated with agricultural growth and poverty outcomes in india using a new operationalisation of agro ecological factors and incorporating within state variations in poverty and other variables we show that agricultural growth and poverty reduction appear to depend on underlying agro ecological conditions which are favourable to the spread of irrigation and hence agricultural development which in turn in associated with poverty reduction promotion of agriculture in less favoured areas in unlikely to have similar effects on agriculture in less favoured areas is unlikely to have similar effects on agricultural growth even if the effects of agricultural growth on poverty remain similar unless conditions for irrigation are favourable or rainfall is sufficiently abundant and reliable this suggests that considerable caution may be needed in drawing policy conclusions from empirical analysis by state alone and without regard to their underlying f

collective action within the household insights from natural resource management summary households face many collective action situations with members working together to produce livelihoods and allocate goods but neither unitary nor bargaining models of the household provide frameworks to analyze the conditions under which households work collectively and when they fail to do so drawing on the institutional analysis and development framework based in the natural resource management literature this paper explores the factors that encourage and inhibit collective action and provides insights into how to understand collective action problems within the household as dynamic multi actor situations with outcomes that can be evaluated by multiple criteria not just efficiency

the failure of competition in the credit card market the bank credit card market containing 4 000 firms and lacking regulatory barriers casually appears to be a hospitable environment for the model of perfect competition nevertheless this article reports that credit card interest rates have been exceptionally sticky relative to the cost of funds moreover major credit card issuers have persistently earned from three to five times the ordinary rate of return in banking during the periods 1983 88 the failure of the competitive model appears to be partly attributable to consumers making credit card choices without taking account of the very high probability that they will pay interest on their outstanding balances copyright 1991 by american economic association

business groups and the natural state abstract recent revisionist accounts of corporate governance in both business history and finance are challenging the tradition narrative associated with berle and means 1932 and chandler 1977 in which the american model of diffuse ownership and coherent diversification is both an inevitable outcome of economic development and perhaps a normative standard for the world to follow this essay is an attempt to rethink that narrative in light of the continued significance of the pyramidal business group as a governance structure around the world i argue that business groups arise in response both to inadequacies in arm s length markets and to the needs of what north et al 2009 call the natural state in this view the quality of markets and the demands of the state are tightly interconnected phenomena such a perspective explains the emergence of business groups in developing countries as well as their persistence even in wealthy and sophisticated polities apart from the u s and the u k in the end moreover i endorse the view that the much discussed and oft misunderstood exceptionalism of the u s in corporate governance arises not only from the sophistication of american markets but also importantly from government policies toward corporate taxation and securities regulation policies that arose from the unique public choice problem posed by the differential effect on the u s of the collapse of globalization during the middle years of the twentieth century

the political economy of productivity thai agricultural development 1880 1975 the economic history of thailand between 1880 and 1975 contrasts sharply with the development experiences of other third world countries between the opening of trade in 1850 and 1941 when war halted economic activity thailand became a major exporter of rice in the world market although conditions for further growth seemed highly favourable thailand s rapid integration into the world economy failed to improve living standards and rice yields actually declined in examining the causes of the underdevelopment of thai agriculture over the last 100 years feeny introduces supply and demand models of technical and institutional change to analyse why the rice export boom did not result in more development this book much of which is based on primary research in the thai national archives is one of the few quantitative economic histories of a less developed country

contracting problems and regulation the case of the fishery the inefficiencies of common property fisheries are of continuing concern to economists the early work by scott gordon 1954 and anthony scott 1955 outlined the problem and later studies by james crutchfield and giulio pontecorvo 1969 and frederick bell 1972 provided empirical estimates of the losses that result those studies were followed by the dynamic models of colin clark 1976 and james quirk and vernon smith 1970 of optimal harvest rates and the use of corrective taxes or quotas to achieve them but in spite of a large and growing literature and the persuasiveness of the outlined efficiency criteria most fisheries retain common property aspects with overcapitalization and excessive labor input why those conditions persist and the failure of the regulatory response to them are the issues addressed in this paper we examine a number of fisheries but focus on the texas shrimp industry which is one of the nation s most valuable fisheries for a single species and which shares the common property characteristics observed elsewhere it is considered overcapitalized and catch per unit of effort is falling 2 examination of the fishery reveals the many margins along which rent dissipation occurs and the nature of the regulations necessary for controlling fishing effort to avoid those losses the regulatory environment in texas is complicated by conflict within the fishery between inshore and offshore fishermen the latter assert that bay shrimping reduces the number of shrimp that successfully migrate to the gulf the inshore fishery is highlighted by another issue the recent resettlement of some 30 45 000 vietnamese refugees including many fishermen along the texas coast marine advisory service paul starr their entry has been met by hostility and violence from existing shrimpers who recognize that they are in an environment characterized by the absence of property rights bay shrimpers have lobbied the texas legislature for broad limits on new entrants yet ironically the sale of additional boats by individual shrimpers to the vietnamese has facilitated entry of the refugees into the fishery regulations in the texas shrimp and other fisheries are incomplete leaving many options for rent dissipation uncontrolled because of high contracting costs among fishermen and political factors that mold government actions contracting costs are high among heterogeneous fishermen who vary principally with regard to fishing skill 3 montana state university and texas a m university respectively we benefitted from comments by terry anderson raymond c battalio gardner brown oscar burt micha gisser wade griffin john r moroney anthony d scott peter temin and participants in workshops at texas a m university and the university of washington research assistance was provided by scott barnhart and phil mizzi funding was provided by sea grant texas a m university throughout this paper we use the terms common property and open access interchangeably here the terms describe a situation where no property rights group or individual exist s for the resource 2catch per unit of effort in the inshore texas gulf and federal gulf waters is presented for 1963 77 by w l griffin c g tydlacka and w e grant they show catch per unit of effort generally falling in inshore and offshore waters while catch per unit of effort fluctuates from year to year it falls from approximately 360 kg shrimp per unit of effort to 220 kg from 1963 to 1977 the common property nature of the fishery is reflected in the following statistics since 1975 the number of vessels has grown by 23 percent nelson swartz for fish houses the record of entry is similar between 1970 a d 1977 the number of firms grew from 259 to 287 though during that period many left the industry as others entered the number of fish houses was calculated from license data supplied by the texas parks and wildlife department the record of entry by fish houses suggests that monopsony as discussed by colin clark and gordon munro is absent in the fishery 3there may be minor differences in labor leisure choices and capital but our statistical evidence and discussions with fishermen indicate that catch variations are largely due to skill government regulations in the texas bays restrict capital and our empirical evidence shows boats to be relatively homogeneous

returns to human capital under uncertain reform good guys finish last abstract this paper models the career decisions of agents heterogeneous in their ability facing the possibility of future drastic changes e g reforms affecting the demand for different professions supposing that the uncertainty arises after educational choices have been made by the cohort of agents we analyze their response to it depending on ability and educational attainment we show that the more able individuals tend to stay in their original profession while their less able counterparts are more likely to switch to an alternative occupation if reform does take place the more able agents will be forced to change careers since they switch late they miss the benefits of learning by doing this adverse selection has important implications for the analysis of labor allocation during transition from central planning to markets in particular it lowers productivity in the emerging market occupations reducing the benefits of reforms

an assessment of the agricultural economics profession i u i r t department of agricultural and resource econol 1ics division of agriculture and natural resources le niversity of california d 8cvlceltvc j working paper no 509 an assessment of tiie agricultural economics profession by richard e just and gordon c rausser california agricultural experiment station giannini foundation of agricultural economics august 1989

the development of a land market insights from cote d ivoire this paper contributes to the debate on rural land sales in africa first it shows that the emergence of sales in the forested area of cote d ivoire corresponds to an imperfect land commoditization due to the social embedding of land transfers in the autochthon migrant relationship then it analyzes land sales in a former no man s land outside this relationship where the transactions correspond to complete sales however a diachronic analysis reveals an involution in the market related to the transformation of the pioneer s individual private right into a family right once the land is inherited highlighting therefore another social dimension of land markets 2006 by the board of regents of the university of wisconsin system

the vanishing hand the changing dynamics of industrial capitalism alfred chandler s portrayal of the managerial revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries does not extend well into the late twentieth century when widespread vertical disintegration began replacing the classical multi unit managerial enterprise this paper attempts to explain the new economy in a manner consistent with chandler by providing an enlarged theoretical account of industrial evolution in this account clusters of chandlerian firms appeared as a temporary episode within a larger smithian process of the division of labor

public goods provision and redistributive taxation abstract this paper studies the relationship between redistributive taxation and tax deductible charitable contributions redistribution has two opposite effects on voluntary giving the price of charitable giving decreases with the degree of redistribution and this has a positive effect on the total amount of giving substitution effect however redistribution leads to lower consumption for the contributors and therefore has a negative effect on contributions to the charity income effect the theoretical model developed in this paper demonstrates that under a general class of utility functions the substitution effect dominates the income effect hence charitable giving increases with the tax rate in purely egalitarian societies the public good is provided efficiently and the total welfare is maximized independent of the ex ante income inequality however the positive impact of taxation on charitable giving and welfare may disappear if individuals generate their income levels in anticipation of taxation and redistribution does not take into account the cost of effort

borrow and adjust fiscal policy and sectoral adjustment in an open economy should the government run fiscal deficits in response to an adverse external shock that warrants transfer of resources from production of nontraded to traded goodsq this article considers normative fiscal policy implications of sectoral adjustment costs in a two sector model with overlapping generations fiscal deficits benefit present generations by depleting foreign assets and slowing down the adjustment process we show that despite no nominal rigidities temporary fiscal deficits increase social welfare if adjustment costs prevent immediate sectoral reallocation of inputs if there are no adjustment costs the case for fiscal deficits vanishes copyright 2003 by the economics department of the university of pennsylvania and osaka university institute of social and economic research association

socioeconomic impacts of public forest policies on heterogeneous agricultural households nepal has a long history of returning public forests to local people as part of its community forestry programme in principle the community forestry programme is designed to address both environmental quality and poverty alleviation however concern has been expressed that forest policies emphasise environmental conservation and that this has a detrimental impact on the use of community forests in rural nepal where households require access to public forest products to sustain livelihoods to study the effect of government policies on forest use an economic model of a typical small community of economically heterogeneous households in nepal was developed the model incorporates a link between private agriculture and public forest resources and uses this link to assess the socioeconomic impacts of forest policies on the use of public forests socioeconomic impacts were measured in terms of household income employment and income inequality the results show that some forest policies have a negative economic impact and the impacts are more serious than those reported by other studies this study shows that existing forest policies reduce household income and employment and widen income inequalities within communities compared to alternative policies certain forest policies even constrain the poorest households ability to meet survival needs the findings indicate that the socioeconomic impacts of public forest policies may be underestimated in developing countries unless household economic heterogeneity and forestry s contribution to production are accounted for the study also demonstrates that alternative policies for managing common property resources would reduce income inequalities in rural nepalese communities and lift incomes and employment to a level where even the poorest households could meet their basic needs