how do migrants from latin america and the caribbean fare in the us labour market this paper discusses the causes of mass migration from latin america and the caribbean lac to the united states in recent decades and how these migrants have fared in us labour markets the evidence shows that lac migrants have higher unemployment rates and substantially lower wages than other immigrants and natives furthermore the relative wages of lac migrants have been declining sharply over the last 25 years the most significant factor explaining the latter is the lower and declining educational attainment of lac migrants relative to other immigrants and natives compounded by the rising rates of return to education in the us

government spending the balance of trade and the terms of trade in british history abstract this paper investigates the relationship between government spending the balance of trade and the terms of trade using early british data a large open economy intertemporal framework in which ricardian equivalence holds predicts a larger effect of temporary government spending changes on the trade deficit than permanent ones further a pure switch between debt and taxes should have no effect on trade flows the results provide some support for these hypotheses although they are sensitive to sample period and the method of decomposition of government spending a negative relationship between government spending and the terms of trade is also found

migrants in a guest worker system a utility maximizing approach this paper examines the behavior of utility maximizing migrants in a system of guest worker migration their pattern of leisure and commodity consumption at home and abroad is analysed and related

foreign ownership and the theory of trade and welfare some standard topics in the theory of international trade are reconsidered in this paper by distinguishing between national and aggregate income when fixed supplies of foreign inputs are present within the home country under conditions that would ensure a national welfare gain if foreign ownership were absent international transfer economic growth or tariff policy might cause a national welfare loss in the presence of foreign ownership the techniques developed could be applied to other domestic distinctions such as those based on race sex age or ethnicity and to the theory of customs unions in a three country world

the effects of immigration in a distorted two sector economy this paper examines the income employment and distributional impact of immigration on a recipient economy facing an administered wage distortion it is found that immigration increases the unemployment rate of the native population and shifts income distribution against labor and in favor of the nonlabor input its effect on the total income of the non immigrants is however ambiguous and depends on the relative importance of the increase in unemployment versus the net increase in the rent received by the owners of the non labor input

international migration and real wages is there any neo classical ambiguity abstract recent research has shown that while labor emigration increases the nominal wage rate the impact on the real wage rate remains quite ambiguous the present paper reexamines the issue under the standard two factor two commodity international trade model normally employed for this purpose the principal finding of this paper is that once the problem is correctly formulated and analyzed introducing utility maximizing consumers no such ambiguity exists indeed labor emigration always leads to an increase in the welfare real wage of labor in the source country

note on international differences in service prices and some related empirical phenomena abstract this paper provides an alternative explanation of some important stylized facts of development including the phenomenon of international differences in service prices in terms of differences in factor endowments between countries in so doing this paper advances a general equilibrium model of a small open economy which features non traded goods as well as demand factors thereby incorporating important economic aspects which were neglected by many others an interesting finding which emerges from this exercise is that many puzzles in development can be explained simply in terms of differences in factor endowments between countries

specialization the terms of trade and the international transmission of monetary policies the ricardian model with a continuum of goods is extended to a cash in advance environment with variable labor supply which allows domestic monetary policy to influence real activity through an inflation tax channel and to be internationally transmitted to real activity abroad the continuum of goods feature of the model allows for the international transmission of monetary policies to occur at both intensive and extensive margins at the intensive margin monetary policy is internationally transmitted via its impact on relative employment levels at home and abroad this in turn alters the terms of trade thereby affecting the range of commodities in which the home country has a comparative advantage monetary policies are thus transmitted at the extensive margin by influencing international patterns of trade and specialization

international migration non traded goods and economic welfare in the source country abstract this paper examines the economic effects of emigration in a source country producing both traded and non traded commodities it is shown that even if the economy faces fixed terms of trade emigration can still affect the welfare of the non migrants and the direction of the effect in this context will always be negative

an exploration in the theory of exchange rate regimes three exchange rate regimes a float a one sided peg and a cooperative peg are evaluated and compared in terms of efficiency and welfare levels the framework of analysis embodies country specific monies with the money of each country being used to transact in its commodity markets and its currency denominated bonds welfare levels depend only on consumption levels in the presence of perfect foresight all equilibrium allocations are pareto efficient in a floating exchange rate regime the perfect foresight equilibrium allocation coincides with an equilibrium of a costless barter economy the same result holds in a one sided peg if the pegging country s exchange rate stabilizing authority breaks even over time in a cooperative peg regime there is a different equilibrium allocation for each combination of exchange rate levels and monetary policies problems of policy coordination and conflicts in desired monetary policies are discussed

a note on international migration non traded goods and economic welfare in the source country abstract this note extends the work of rivera batiz to the case where capital is collectively owned and the decision to emigrate entails both a withdrawal of labor services from the source country and the surrender of the ownership of capital in this framework which seems to have wide real world relevance for socialist labor managed and peasant economies it is found that emigration helps increase the welfare of the non migrant this result which seems quite robust to its specifications is exactly the opposite of that of rivera batiz and points to the need for great caution in drawing policy conclusions with regard to issues pertaining to emigration

international financial intermediation and aggregate fluctuations under alternative exchange rate regimes this paper presents a two country overlapping generations model in which financial intermediation arises endogenously as an incentive compatible means of economizing on monitoring costs because of the existence of transactions costs money markets in the two countries are segmented and investors have differential access to international credit markets the model is used to generate predictions about the role of international intermediation in determining the nature of business cycle phenomena across alternative exchange rate regimes disturbances are propagated by a credit allocation mechanism which also lends a novel flavor to the model s long run properties

international factor movements in the presence of a fixed factor abstract to the basic model of international factor mobility is added a third immobile factor unlike the basic model the factor flows that result from a policy of free mobility are now uniquely determined additionally a large variety of privately optimal national policies is predicted each dependent upon the country s endowment pattern and the fiscal instruments available to it several of the predicted policies e g subsidies paid to migrant factors and simultaneous restrictions on the export of both factors are incompatible with the basic model

international transmission of anticipated inflation under alternative exchange rate regimes this paper studies the international transmission of anticipated inflation a two country two good two currency cash in advance model is used to examine analytically and numerically the consequences of changes in a country s inflation rate domestic monetary policy influences real activity at home through an inflation tax channel these real effects are transmitted to the foreign country via fluctuations in the real exchange rate under a flexible nominal exchange rate inflation is a beggar thy neighbor policy under a fixed nominal exchange rate each country suffers a welfare loss when one country inflates the quantitative results are fairly insensitive to variations in the cash credit mix used to finance investment expenditures 2001 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

the dynamics of migration in the presence of chains abstract the experience of several host countries shows that small initial inflows of migrants have a perpetuating effect on further migration from the same country of origin this paper studies the interplay of factors that determine the transitional dynamics of migration flows in the presence of social relationships between migrants we fully specify and formally solve a stochastic two country model of chain migration with one sending and one receiving country in which initial immigration patterns matter for future immigration patterns numerical calculations illustrate the crucial role of the wage elasticity of labor demand in counteracting the potential explosiveness of chain migration

a model of real national price levels this paper is concerned with the price level in the sense used in a recent paper by kravis and lipsey entitled toward an explanation of national price levels 15 the price level of a particular country relative to the base country is defined as the ratio of the purchasingpower parity ppp to the exchange rate it has become generally recognized that the ppp need not equal the exchange rate even in long run free trade equilibrium and the explanation of the discrepancy is a natural subject of scientific interest there is a voluminous literature on temporary deviations of ppp from the exchange rate that are explained in terms of monetary disturbances and random shocks there is a much smaller literature on long run or structural factors that explain why ppp does not coincide with the exchange rate the present paper falls in the second category we shall assume the economy is in monetary and balance of payments equilibrium the term price level as used in kravis and lipsey 15 may be confusing because that term usually refers to the price of goods in terms of money the term real price level seems more appropriate in that the concept refers to a ratio of two prices the real price level is what the tourist has in mind when he goes to a poor country and remarks my but prices are low here a major feature of the existing literature on long run or structural explanations of the real price level is the emphasis on the distinction between tradables and nontradables it is typically assumed that the law of one price holds for tradables but not for nontradables which are dominated by services the productivity differential model as stated by balassa 2 for example assumes that international differences in labor productivity are greater in commodities tradables than in services it follows that services will be relatively cheap in poor low productivity countries and that consequently the real price level relative to a base country will rise with per capita income recently bhagwati 5 has shown that the low relative price of services in poor countries can be explained by a capital labor model without recourse to the assumption that production functions differ internationally in bhagwati s model rich countries export capital intensive commodities and poor countries export labor intensive commodities but even though commodity prices are equalized through trade complete specialization prevents factor prices from being equalized since services are assumed to be labor intensive relative to any commodity they are cheaper in poor countries than in rich countries

income inequality and international migration the purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of international factor movements on the personal distribution of income in order to get clearcut results we use a simple model of trade and migration in which there are two traded goods and three factors for any given country one of the traded goods corresponds to exports and the other to imports the three factors include capital and two types of labour skilled and unskilled we focus mainly on the alternative results of international migration of the two types of labour the geographical focus is worldwide excerpt

do asset transfers build household resilience abstract we estimate the impact of an asset transfer program on household resilience we measure resilience as the probability that a household will sustain at least the threshold asset level required to support consumption above the poverty line using six rounds of data collected over 42 months in rural zambia we construct a measure of resilience based on households conditional welfare distributions to estimate program impacts we find that the program increased household resilience beneficiaries likelihood of being non poor in future periods increased by 44 the program both increased mean assets and decreased variance signaling an upward shift in households conditional asset distributions our method demonstrates the added value of the resilience estimation compared with a conventional impact assessment numerous households classified as non poor are unlikely to remain non poor over time and the relationship between wealth and resilience is driven by changes in both the conditional mean and the conditional variance

a theoretical explanation of some stylized facts of economic growth this paper presents a three good two country general equilibrium model that is consistent with several stylized facts of economic growth the three goods are manufactures agriculture and services manufactures are subject to economies of scale the model predicts that services a nontraded good must be more expensive in the country with higher per capita income it also shows that as per capita income increases we should expect the productivity in commodities relative to services to rise the model is able to generate many other stylized facts of economic growth

does 25 cents more per day make a difference the impact of livestock transfer and development in rural zambia abstract analyses of the impacts of asset transfer programs often find statistically significant effects on consumption expenditures that are large in percentage terms but small in absolute value this study explores the practical significance of such impacts using the case of a livestock transfer program among impoverished households in zambia as in other studies results show that the asset transfers increased household consumption expenditure and dietary diversity extending previous work this paper examines whether the increase in expenditures has been large enough to trigger changes in consumption patterns or in subjective assessment of poverty status changes in composition of expenditures composition of diet and subjective self assessment of poverty all suggest a growing sense of security and a practically significant change in welfare for treated households as transfers included three different types of animals dairy cows meat goats and draft cattle we are able to discern that the specific nature of the asset transferred influences food security impacts examination of change in the composition of consumption shows substantial effects on poverty and food security starting within six months of livestock transfers persistence of the impact through the next 18 months of our study period indicates that livestock transfers can have a sustained effect on poverty and food security

emigration and welfare in an economy with foreign capital abstract this paper examines the effects of emigration on welfare of the remaining residents r in an economy producing traded t and non traded n goods with the aid of foreign and domestic capital while the existing literature has established that emigration reduces the welfare of those left behind when foreign capital is not present in the economy the analysis below suggests that with foreign capital the effect on welfare may well be reversed the paper also compares the welfare implications of remittance flows back to the source country when they are used to finance consumption and when they are used to finance capital accumulation

temporary and permanent migration with and without an immobile factor abstract this paper develops two two country overlapping generations models one with and one without an immobile factor to study temporary and permanent migration temporary migration is shown to be equivalent to international lending and borrowing one strong result found in the literature that if natives of each country are homogeneous permanent migration leads to the migration of the entire population of the impatient country in the long run is overturned welfare effects of migration are analyzed

trade theory distribution of income and immigration this paper examines the impact of mass immigration utilizing the analytical framework of so called trade theory as such its emphasis is on general equilibrium effects and on the constraints imposed by the openness of the economy on such effects the analysis will center on the distributional impact of unskilled labor immigration excerpt

temporary emigration and welfare the case of low skilled labor this article studies the implications of temporary emigration for the welfare of a source country the framework is one of general equilibrium where the economy s stocks of both capital and labor are endogenously determined by the saving and migration decisions of optimizing agents simulations of the model suggest that for realistic values of the parameters welfare of nonmigrants of the source country is maximized when the migrants are employed abroad for a period in the range of roughly 8 12 years the ideal duration is found to be an increasing function of the international wage differential migration costs and the degree to which the rights of migrants are protected in the host country

why are services cheaper in the poor countries in their important work on international comparisons of national incomes and of comparative price structure kravis heston and summers i982 p 8 have noted that services are much cheaper in the relative price structure of a typical poor country than in that of a rich country this phenonomen has been documented now fairly systematically by the data gathered under their guiding hand of the united nations international comparison icp which covers 34 countries table i reproduced from their work i982 and fig i based on rows 3 and ii 13 indeed show this tendencyfor the relationship between relative service prices and real per capita gdp in this kravis heston summers 34 country 6 group sample the tendency is strongly evident except for the intermediate groups iii and iv

the theoretical structure of producer willingness to pay estimates this article analyzes the theoretical underpinnings of producer willingness to pay wtp for new inputs in addition to conceptualizing the producer wtp function we derive its comparative statics and show how these properties can be used to estimate quantities demanded or supplied and price elasticities we also discuss implications of the comparative statics

trade and tax reforms in a cash in advance economy we examine the effects of both tariff only and coordinated trade tax reforms on market access government revenue and welfare for a small monetary economy under the assumption that a certain fraction of purchases of each good must be financed with cash held in advance we show that if the cash requirement ratio in the exportable sector is greater than that in the importable then contrary to previous results i a uniform radial reduction of tariffs has ambiguous effects on both welfare and market access ii tariff and consumption tax reforms that leave consumer prices unchanged may be more efficient in improving market access and welfare than a reform that involves only tariffs and iii export and production tax reforms that keep producer prices unchanged may be welfare deteriorating

the impact of international migration on real wages another look abstract this paper examines the issue of how emigration alters real wages in the source country the analysis is carried out first using the two class framework developed by rivera batiz 1984 and then by means of a simple model of scale economies and imperfect competition our results indicate that within these contexts real wages are likely to decline in response to emigration if 1 the migrants possess a large fraction of physical or human capital that they take with them when migration occurs or 2 emigration reduces the scale of operation of domestic firms our conclusions are compared to those of quibria 1989

international migration income taxes and transfers a welfare analysis abstract an important issue in public policy debates is the effect of international migration on welfare in source and host countries we address this issue by constructing a general equilibrium model of a two class source or host country each country produces many traded and non traded goods uses income taxes and distributes the tax receipts equally to all individuals the analysis examines the effects of permanent migration on class and national welfare we show among other things that marginal immigration hurts people already in the country regardless of whether or not non traded goods exist the presence of international capital mobility however may reverse the above result

assessing the impact of environmental charges a partial general equilibrium model of the forest sector this paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of how environmental charges affect a particular sector of the economy our approach allows a simple comparison of how partial and general equilibrium results may differ

effects of inflation on the pattern of international trade this paper integrates a transactions based model of money with a real trade model and examines how steady state inflation affects the direction and size of international trade the effects of inflation work through changes in supplies of labour and capital which are chosen jointly with production and consumption by utility maximizing households if production exhibits constant returns to scale in domestically mobile factors then it is unlikely that the economy will produce both of the two traded goods for certain rates of inflation small changes can have dramatic effects on the direction of trade for other rates of inflation the volume of trade is affected when money is held for transactions purposes and factor supplies are endogenous changes in inflation can cause changes in the pattern of trade that do not reflect real underlying changes in comparative advantage

skills and the pattern of migration the role of qualitative and quantitative restrictions on international labor mobility this paper develops a two country model of international migration in an attempt to study the role of both qualitative and quantitative restrictions on international labor mobility individuals are distinguished in terms of their ability and age enabling the model to examine factors which influence the age and skill profile of those who migrate as well as the equilibrium flow of migrants and the pattern of factor rewards in the two economies effects of changes in certain parameters of the model are related to the nature of the immigration policy enforced by the host country the role of emigration restrictions is also considered excerpt

do different types of assets have differential effects on child education evidence from tanzania to assess the conventional view that assets uniformly improve childhood development through wealth effects this paper tests whether different types of assets have different effects on child education the analysis indicates that household durables and housing quality have the expected positive effects but agricultural assets have adverse effects on highest grade completed and no effects on exam performance extending the standard agricultural household model by explicitly including child labor the study uses three waves of panel data from tanzania to estimate the effects of household assets on child education the analysis corrects for the endogeneity of assets and uses a hausman taylor instrumental variable panel data estimator to identify the effects of time invariant observables and more efficiently control for time invariant unobservables the negative effect of agricultural assets is more pronounced among rural children and children from farming households presumably due to the higher opportunity cost of their schooling

factor intensities and factor substitution in general equilibrium abstract this article examines how factor intensity rankings between industries and the economy wide asymmetry in the degree of factor substitution combine to influence the manner in which changes in relative commodity prices affect the factoral distribution of income the reciprocal influence of factor endowment changes on the composition of outputs is also discussed the analysis is undertaken in a general three factor two commodity framework the minimal sized model that allows both influences to affect factor prices and admits of the possibility of complementarity between factors factors which are good substitutes find their returns behave somewhat similarly when commodity prices change while factors which are complements experience strongly asymmetrical fortunes a crucial role is played by a comparison of the share of the middle factor in each sector

international migration increasing returns and real wages the present paper makes an exploratory attempt to investigate the impact of emigration on real wages in the presence of increasing returns to scale in production the problem has been posed in the context of a 2 x 2 model of international trade where one of the commodities is a non traded good and is subject to a type of increasing returns to scale that are external to the firm but internal to the industry analysis indicates that in this instance international emigration unambiguously increases real wages in the source country this result which seems to be at odds with the general presumption in this area is quite robust to variations in the underlying assumptions behind the analysis summary in fre excerpt

tariffs transfers and the real exchange rate the deviation of exchange rates from purchasing power parities ppp s has recently become the subject of theoretical and empirical attention the massive body of data collected and presented by the international comparisons project icp under the direction of kravis heston and summers khs 9 11 has permitted new empirical investigation of an old topic and has stimulated the construction of theoretical models to account for observed patterns in the icp project and the related literature the focus is on the ratio of the exchange rate to the ppp the concept of this ratio is closely related to the concept of the real exchange rate which is defined as the actual exchange rate multiplied by the ratio of an index of foreign prices to an index of domestic prices the term real exchange rate a term widely employed in both economics journals and in the financial press is frequently used to describe changes over time in a particular country and its calculation requires only time totime changes in exchange rates and price indexes the ratio of the exchange rate to the ppp on the other hand refers to a comparison of the levels of the exchange rate and the ppp at a moment in time and its calculation requires the availability of a ppp survey of the kind performed by the icp the purpose of the present paper is to analyze the effects of tariffs and transfers on the real exchange rate of a small country in this theoretical endeavor we shall hold constant the prices in foreign countries in this context it can easily be seen that the real exchange rate and the ratio of the exchange rate to the ppp are identical concepts provided that the expenditure weights used in the index of domestic prices are the same as those used in the calculation of the ppp

international migration and real wages a resolution note the authors examine the impact of international labor migration on wages in country of origin two types of emigration are distinguished bundled emigration which can result in a reduction of real wages and pure labor emigration which results in an increase in real wages annotation

estimating farm level input demand and wheat supply in the indian punjab using a translog profit function application of the translog profit function to farm level data from punjab india allowed a more disaggregated analysis of the farm production structure compared to the case of cobb douglas formulation the flexibility afforded by translog formulation permitted measurement of the different impacts that exogenous variables have within and across input demand and output supply functions policy relevant elasticity estimates with respect to variable inputs and output prices fixed inputs a few soil related state of nature variables measured by soil analysis and education which are usually considered constraints to farm production were obtained and two examples of policy applications were developed

a general equilibrium model of guest worker migration the source country perspective abstract this paper examines the problem of guest worker migration from an economy populated by identical utility maximizing individuals with finite working lives the decision to migrate the rate of saving while abroad as well as the length of a migrant s stay in the foreign country are all viewed as part of a solution to an intertemporal optimization problem in addition to studying the microeconomic aspects of temporary migration the paper analyses the determinants of the equilibrium flow of migrants the corresponding domestic wage and the level of welfare enjoyed by a typical worker effects of an emigration tax are also investigated

a formalisation and test of the factor productivity explanation of international differences in service prices this paper extends and integrates previous models of the determinants of international differences in the prices of services relative to tradable commodities the authors provide a model capable of identifying the effects of differences in total factor productivity on service price differences separately from the effects of factor endowment differences they propose a method for measuring these factor productivity difference effects and apply this to a sample of sixty countries in 1980 the authors results provide support both for the endowment difference and productivity difference explanations suggesting that in this context at least the two hypotheses are complements rather than competitors copyright 1996 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

anticipated monetary policy in a cash in advance economy this paper analyses the effects of perfectly foreseen monetary policy within the framework of a standard cash in advance economy anticipated monetary policy is shown to have real effects by influencing inflationary expectations in a cash in advance economy an increase in the anticipated rate of inflation reduces the return to labour supply and induces a substitution away from time spent in the labour market the paper analyses the implication of this substitution for the time paths of output prices interest rates real and nominal and stock market prices

international migration remittances and welfare in a dependent economy abstract this note extends the work of rivera batiz 1982 in an attempt to examine the role of remittances in determining the effects of migration on the welfare of the remaining residents in a small open economy producing both traded and non traded goods it is shown that if the flow of remittances exceeds a certain critical amount the remaining residents benefit from migration even if they do not receive any of the remittances themselves this is in sharp contrast with the results of the rivera batiz model in which the possibility of a gain for the non migrants is ruled out

livestock s contribution to poverty alleviation how to measure it summary the difficulty of valuation of livestock outputs has strong political and economic implications for farmers because policies require metrics based on a case study in mali this paper gives different estimations of the contribution of livestock to reducing poverty using different methods from the most common measure based approaches that is a financial approach to an asset based approach the results show that the asset based approach reflects the roles of livestock in terms of security money cash and vulnerability but only a dynamic approach to indicators can account for the complex role of livestock in reducing poverty

sources of growth abstract distributive shares are commonly identified with sector or marginal factor productivity in value terms and after deflating these values by prices with physical productivity as well in this paper it is argued that this approach yields incorrect or misleading views on the true sources of or contributions to growth even more serious the identification may lead to mistaken policies designed to foster or accelerate growth in reality distributive shares in the national accounts have little to do with physical productivity or the sources of growth

milk in the data food security impacts from a livestock field experiment in zambia summary smallholder livestock ownership has potential to enhance food security by raising incomes of the poor and by increasing the availability of nutrient dense foods this paper exploits the staggered rollout of livestock distribution by heifer international in zambia to identify the effects of livestock using statistically similar treatment and control groups in a balanced panel of households results indicate that livestock ownership improves dietary diversity through both direct consumption of animal products produced on farm and through increased consumption expenditures further results indicate that expanded livestock ownership alters the local food economy to influence food consumption by households lacking farm animals

the economics of the to and fro migrant some welfare theoretical considerations the effects of international to and fro migration on the economic welfare of the migrants and the nonmigrants in the host and home countries are examined a to and fro migrant is defined as a worker who changes residence from origin to destination without any systematic tendency to remain in any of the two permanently the study is based on the theoretical framework developed by krauss the results indicate that to and fro emigration from a source country to a recipient country increases the economic welfare of the migrants and the nonmigrants residing in the host country but it tends to decrease the welfare of the nonmigrants residing in the source country in general the migration also tends to be pareto optimal from a world point of view excerpt

how much can asset transfers help the poorest evaluating the results of brac s ultra poor programme 2002 2008 abstract the impacts of an innovative programme in rural bangladesh which has assisted extremely poor households literally the poorest of the poor were assessed over a six year period 2002 2008 the provision of a substantial dose of assets has helped produce very positive results by and large vulnerability to downturns on account of negative events such as illnesses and house damage has resulted in asset losses for several assisted households additional measures that reduce vulnerability and risk will help complete the good work commenced by the asset transfer plan

estimating substitution and expansion effects using a profit function framework this study reports a first attempt to derive all the relevant information with respect to the structure of production of an industry using knowledge of only a profit function using estimates of a profit function for canadian agriculture a procedure to separate substitution and expansion effects for both inputs and outputs was implemented information concerning net input and output substitution and complementarity possibilities were obtained the most important empirical results suggest that the hypothesis of nonjoint production of crop and animal outputs in canadian agriculture cannot be rejected and that hired and operator labor are complements rather than substitutes

in defense of the finance constraint simple models of monetary trade commonly impose a finance constraint on expenditure it is often suggested that this finance constraint is artificial a result of money s being the only asset of the absence of credit and of the special time structure of such models this paper shows that the finance constraint on aggregate expenditure remains in force when other assets and credit are introduced and when the time structure is generalized to allow overlapping income periods of differing lengths most of the objections to the finance constraint are shown to involve fallacies of composition there are economists to whom a constraint of the form pc m in units t must appear unthinkable r e lucas jr 1980

exchange rate based stabilizations under real frictions the role of endogenous labor supply abstract this paper studies exchange rate based stabilization programs in the context of a model of a small open economy where labor supply is endogenous agents derive utility from both consumption and leisure in environments where consumption is subject to a cash in advance constraint a cut in the rate of devaluation lowers the nominal interest rate and hence alters the optimal mix of consumption and leisure the paper shows that in the presence of adjustment costs of investment a perfectly credible cut in the devaluation rate causes simultaneously a consumption and output boom a cumulative current deficit a sustained real appreciation of the domestic currency and an increase in labor supply over time it is also shown that an imperfectly credible stabilization program in this environment would have effects similar to the perfectly credible program but generate richer dynamics such as an initial boom in output followed by a recession which begins prior to the end of the program the model has clear welfare implications in that permanent reductions in inflation are unambiguously welfare enhancing

on generalizing the economic analysis of international migration a note the author critically examines an article by kar yui wong concerning two important well known propositions on international factor movements namely first finite international factor movements are beneficial to the nationals of the destination country but detrimental to those who are left behind in the source country and second marginal movements do not have such welfare implications the present paper by utilizing the indirect trade utility function derives results in a manner that is both direct and at once intuitively transparent

agricultural supply response in the argentinean economy este trabajo tiene como objetivo estimar la forma reducida de una funcion de oferta agropecuaria de la economia argentina en el marco de un modelo de equilibrio general los resultados de la estimacion de la oferta agropecuaria con datos que cubren los anos 1939 1984 muestran que hay una elasticidad precio de oferta de largo plazo de aproximadamente 1 3 que es estadisticamente significativa y que la convergencia al estado estacionario se logra en aproximadamente nueve anos esta estimacion de la elasticidad de oferta agropecuaria es aproximadamente tres veces mas grande que estimaciones previas con modelos de equilibrio parcial

financial repression and the relative price of non traded goods abstract the financial structure of ldcs affects differences in relative prices among nations we show empirically that financial repression depresses the relative price of non traded goods

international migration remittances and real incomes effects on the source country this article deals with the impact of remittances from emigrants on real incomes for different groups in their country of origin in a two by two model with one traded and one nontraded good it is shown that emigration does not necessarily raise the real income of the emigrants themselves if the traded good is capital intensive nonmigrant workers gain and capitalists lose whereas if it is labor intensive the outcome depends on what happens to the price of the nontraded good the result of a rise is that capitalists gain and workers lose while a fall has the opposite effect excerpt

to specialize or diversify agricultural diversity and poverty dynamics in ethiopia recent agricultural development policies have begun to shift focus from the promotion of a few staple crops toward encouraging crop diversity the belief is that crop diversification is an effective strategy for dealing with a variety of issues including poverty alleviation however there is a lack of empirical evidence to justify these positions we contribute to filling this research gap by providing quantitative evidence on the impact of diversity in crop cultivation on household poverty using household panel data from ethiopia we develop a diversity index to measure the effect of crop diversity on poverty status to control for endogeneity and selection bias resulting from unobserved heterogeneity we utilize a recently developed parametric method for estimating dynamic binary response models with endogenous contemporaneous regressors our results provide evidence that households which grow a diverse set of crops are less likely to be poor than households that specialize in their crop production additionally crop diversity reduces the probability that a non poor household will fall into poverty and the probability that a poor household will remain in poverty we conclude that crop diversification is a viable way to deal with the exigencies of being poor

optimal monetary policies and policy interdependence in the world economy the literature on strategic policy interactions has focused on the implications of alternative strategic policy interactions cooperative versus noncooperative for equilibrium macroeconomic policies given the state of the world economy this paper asks how changes in world economic conditions alter equilibrium policies given the nature of policy interdependence among nations the paper considers a world economy comprised of two countries operating under a system of flexible exchange rates both governments act noncooperatively and choose the rate of growth of their money supply so as to maximize the utility of their country s residents given the rate of growth of the other country s money supply the resulting nash equilibrium rates of growth of the home and foreign money supplies are determined and the dependence of international differences in money growth and inflation rates on international differences in technology jel e52 e60 f41 f42 the international transmission of monetary and fiscal policies has been studied a great deal by economists however policy interdependence how one country s policies depend on the policies enacted by other countries has only recently begun to be explored hamada s 1976 paper was one of the first major contributions in this regard hamada considered a world economy comprised of n countries operating under a fixed exchange rate system in which policymakers set domestic credit growth so as to maximize an objective function depending on inflation and the rate of accumulation of international reserves using this framework hamada demonstrated that in equilibrium optimal domestic credit policies are generally not pareto efficient when they are chosen noncooperatively but are pareto efficient when they are set cooperatively in subsequent work hamada 1979 1985 has elaborated on this and various other aspects of cooperative and noncooperative monetary policies under both fixed and flexible exchange rates many others have followed hamada s lead by comparing the properties of cooperative and noncooperative monetary policies eichengreen 1985 for instance considers discount rates as the instrument of monetary policy and examines issues of leadership and cooperation during the interwar years under the gold standard oudiz and sachs 1985 have used simulation methods to

international migration non traded goods and economic welfare in the source country a comment abstract labor emigration redistributes income in a two factor two good economy where one good is internationally non traded labor s nominal wage rises as nominal capital payments fall recent research has shown that the prices of non traded goods rise causing society s welfare to decline here the induced change in the real income of each factor is considered separately there is an ambiguity with regard to the real income of non emigrating labor if labor spends a relatively small fraction of income on the non traded good its real income may rise even though society suffers the loss of welfare

a note on the application of the restricted generalised leontief profit function abstract the conditions for a restricted generalised leontief profit function to fulfil the requirements of profit functions are explored a specification is proposed in which homogeneity of degree 1 in the fixed inputs is nested in the non homogeneous case

assessing food value chain pathways linkages and impacts for better nutrition of vulnerable groups abstract this article offers insights into assessing the effectiveness of post farm gate agri food value chains at improving the nutrition intake of vulnerable groups it develops a conceptual framework integrating the value chain concepts with agriculture and nutrition and identifies key outcomes and requirements for value chains to be successful at delivering substantive and sustained consumption of nutrient dense foods by poor households other frameworks linking value chains with nutrition have been published but this article provides the analytical lens to assess post farm gate value chains to achieve improvements in the intake of nutritious foods by the target populations food must be safe to eat on a sustained basis nutrient dense at the point of consumption and consumed in adequate amounts on a sustained basis this shifts the focus to the role of public actions and policy in terms of shaping the functioning of food value chains by assessing the limits of what business can and cannot contribute in a given market context policy makers and other relevant stakeholders will be more capable of creating an appropriate institutional environment that shapes how value chains operate for the benefit of vulnerable target groups designing and implementing effective policies and strategies with respect to the role and use of market based interventions

inflation and welfare in the steady state this is a paper on expected inflation and welfare in steady state equilibrium the demand for money is an inventory demand with an endogenous payment period the clower constraint is not imposed higher inflation reduces welfare by reducing consumption as people devote more of their real income to maintaining lower average money holdings high inflation does not necessarily promote an increase in the capital stock the mundell tobin effect is absent the policy conclusion is standard deflate at the rate of time preference because capital is held socially optimal consumption falls short of its golden rule level if inside money is allowed it drives out fiat money and welfare is again at a maximum

the service sector monopolistic competition and the impact of emigration abstract a framework is developed in which the service sector is characterized by the production of slightly differentiated commodities under conditions of monopolistic competition the impact of labor emigration is then examined and found to be welfare worsening for the non migrants

welfare effects of migration in societies with indirect taxes income transfers and public good provision abstract we construct a general equilibrium trade model of a two class small open host or source country when consumption tax revenue finances the provision of a public good marginal migration reduces social welfare in the source country and raises it in the host when consumption tax revenue is equally distributed among domestic households in each country then migration has an ambiguous impact on social welfare in either country when tariff revenue in either country is either equally distributed among domestic households or it is used to finance the provision of a public good then migration has an ambiguous effect on social welfare in the host country and is expected to reduce social welfare in the source

dynamics of a floating exchange rate regime we study the full equilibrium dynamics of a two country world economy with a floating exchange rate traded and nontraded goods and explicit modeling of the use of money the resulting exchange rate equation depends on several details of the economic structure such as the supply structure and propensities to spend on various goods although real exchange rate movements have the usual association with the current account the ordinary exchange rate may appreciate or depreciate when there are deficits on current account even when the quantities of money do not change deviations from purchasing power parity and the fisher equation are shown to be the rule rather than the exception

macroeconomic policy exchange rate dynamics and optimal asset accumulation the paper develops a model of exchange rate and current account determination for a small economy peopled by infinitely lived utility maximizing households in this setting a central bank purchase of foreign exchange has no real effects when central bank foreign reserves earn interest at the world rate and proceeds are returned to the public in contrast an increase in the monetary growth rate does have real effects even in the long run the model developed here implies that an increase in government spending may lead to a surplus on current account the external adjustment process predicted by the model is one in which consumption real balances and external assets all rise or fall simultaneously

international migration non traded goods and economic welfare in a two class economy a reply abstract this paper sketches a formal model of an economy producing traded and non traded goods in which two classes of individuals are differentiated each owning different endowments of capital and labor and allocating different proportions of their income to the consumption of each commudity the effects of emigration on prices income distribution and the real income of each class is then examined