distributed energy infrastructure paradigm community microgrids in a new institutional economics context abstract this paper provides a theoretical framework based on new institutional economics nie concepts to guide the development of community microgrids given limited application thus far of such energy systems this paper also draws on empirical studies and experiences from the planning and development of other public community infrastructure and utility services in the development of this framework it links an efficient ownership and governance structure with transactional characteristics such as asset idiosyncrasy frequency and uncertainty defined in section 3 1 the key role of the customers and the microgrid service provider and more specifically their bilateral monopoly relationship and its effects on the choice of institutional structure is highlighted the paper examines the optimum conditions for public private or hybrid financial ownership and for unified or network governance through long term contracting this allows ex ante investment uncertainty and ex post appropriation risks to be efficiently managed the analysis suggests that long term contract completeness future demand for electricity and level of uncertainty are the determining factors in the selection of institutional structure this has significant real world implications for the communities seeking to achieve electricity self sufficiency and environmental benefits through community microgrids service providers and other private or public actors

comparing the incomes of nations a critique of the international comparison project this article s main purpose is to discuss certain key problems that arise in calculating purchasing power parities ppps when making international comparisons of real product while reviewing partially the work of irving kravis alan heston and robert summers 1982 before beginning the discussion the author wishes to record his opinion that this work of kravis heston and summers carried out and successively published over the past 15 years represents one of the great contributions to applied economics in the article that precedes this one kravis provides a survey of the applications of this type of data but it must be emphasized that any such listing can do only partial justice to the scope of new applications which seem to arise almost every day apart from applications to various aspects of international economic policy there is so much greater international variation in basic economic variables such as real income and relative prices than is usually found in typical intranational intertemporal comparisons that the new data inevitably represent an enormous increment in our science s general capacity for statistical experiment thus the debt owed to this team of research workers by the economics profession at large is immeasurable a ppp is essentially a form of international or interregional price index complicated but not essentially changed by the existence of national currencies for example suppose we found by some kind of index number calculation that the general price level in region a was 10 percent higher than in region b of the same country given a common currency the exchange rate between the money circulating in the two regions is clearly 1 0 but the ppp for region a in comparison with region b is 0 91 this being the number by which it is necessary to multiply a given nominal income in a to give it the same purchasing power as a corresponding income in b it follows that the ppp must be some average of the ratios among individual commodity prices in the two regions in the case of two countries with different currencies one can speak of a commodity ppp as being the rate of exchange between the two currencies which would equalize the price of a given commodity then the general ppp for the two countries is some average of the commodity ppps in international as in intertemporal comparisons there is a duality between the problem of measuring price levels and

on the estimation of an implicitly additive demand system motivated by a lack of engel flexibility in commonly used demand systems rimmer and powell developed a new demand system this system referred to aidads is implicitly directly additive possesses marginal budget shares and thus engel elasticities that vary nonlinearly with expenditure such that predicted budget shares are restricted to the 0 1 interval due to these attractive engel properties aidads represents a significant contribution to the literature on demand analysis this paper presents an alternative estimation procedure to the one used by rimmer and powell and examines its properties via a case study the proposed approach avoids a linear approximation employed in rimmer and powell s estimation framework based on a small monte carlo study it appears that the approach produces more accurate estimates of the parameters and engel elasticities

assessing the equalizing force of mobility using short panels france 1990 2000 in this paper we document whether and how much the equalizing force of earnings mobility has changed in france in the 1990 s for this purpose we use a representative three year panel the french labour force survey we develop a model of earnings dynamics that combines a flexible specification of marginal earnings distributions to fit the large cross sectional dimension of the data with a tight parametric representation of the dynamics adapted to the short time series dimension log earnings are modelled as the sum of a deterministic component an individual fixed effect and a transitory component which is assumed first order markov the transition probability of the transitory component is modelled as a one parameter plackett copula we estimate this model using a sequential expectation maximization algorithm we exploit the estimated model to study employment earnings inequality in france over the 1990 2002 period we show that in phase with business cycle fluctuations a recession in 1993 and two peaks in 1990 and 2000 earnings mobility decreases when cross section inequality and unemployment risk increase we simulate individual earnings trajectories and compute present values of lifetime earnings for various horizons inequality presents a hump shaped evolution over the period with a 9 increase between 1990 and 1995 and a decrease afterwards accounting for unemployment yields an increase of 11 moreover this increase is persistent as it translates into a 12 increase in the variance of log present values the ratio of inequality in present values to inequality in one year earnings a natural measure of immobility or of the persistence of inequality remains remarkably constant over the business cycle

short versus long run implications of trade liberalization for poverty in three developing countries the impacts of global trade reform on poverty are a key concern in the current trade negotiations under the doha development agenda the aggregate poverty impacts of trade reform are in turn strongly linked to the impacts of such reforms on the rural population as they constitute the overwhelming majority of the poor in almost all developing countries this paper uses a new micro simulation methodology designed to analyze this critical issue the methodology is first explained and then applied to three developing countries of particular interest chile malawi and vietnam a key feature is the distinction between the short run impacts of reform where many factors most importantly selfemployed labor of the poor tend to be immobile between sectors and the longer run impacts when factors find their highest return regardless of the sector of employment this distinction makes an enormous difference and

relative prices and investment rates abstract we construct a panel for the price of aggregate investment over consumption and report the following observations 1 relative price differences across countries are large over the entire sample period and this conclusion is not affected by excluding non tradable consumption goods 2 relative price dispersion has decreased during the sample period 3 relative price changes are not persistent across periods while average price levels are moreover the persistence in relative price levels is higher for countries at low relative prices we show that the relative price of investment is negatively correlated with investment rates in a cross section of countries the standard one sector growth model is a natural framework to study quantitatively the effects of barriers to capital accumulation since there is a very simple mapping between barriers to investment and relative prices in this environment we simulate a calibrated version of the model in which barriers follow a stochastic process common to all countries and estimated using relative price data and obtain statistics for investment rates that closely resemble what we observe in the data in particular the model accounts for 90 of the 1985 gini index of relative investment rates and the decline in investment rate dispersion over time the model has two limitations as a theory of development first it cannot account for the income disparity in the data unless we assume unmeasured capital with barriers affecting the broad measure of capital second even under these extreme assumptions the model cannot account for the evolution of income disparity over time

the role of copulas in the housing crisis abstract due to its simplicity and familiarity the gaussian copula is popular in calculating risk in collaterized debt obligations but it imposes asymptotic independence such that extreme events appear to be unrelated this restriction might be innocuous in normal times but during extreme events such as the housing crisis the gaussian copula might be inappropriate this paper explores various copula specifications and finds that the degree to which housing prices are related based on the gaussian copula is too small compared with real housing price data

matching to share risk without commitment this paper studies the effect of limited commitment on sorting when two sides of a frictionless market form pairs to share risk on each side agents are identical except for their risk preferences first we provide analytical results when transfers do not condition on the history of shocks more risk averse agents can commit to larger transfers as long as their consumption is less risky than their endowment with sufficiently large idiosyncratic risk and sufficient discounting of the future matching is positive assortative unlike under full commitment second we find positive assortative stable matchings when transfers are history dependent using a numerical algorithm

would freeing up world trade reduce poverty and inequality the vexed role of agricultural distortions trade policy reforms in recent decades have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming agriculture in developing countries yet global trade in farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade in nonfarm goods those distortions reduce some forms of poverty and inequality but worsen others so the net effects are unclear without empirical modeling this paper summarizes a series of new economy wide global and national empirical studies that focus on the net effects of the remaining distortions to world merchandise trade on poverty and inequality globally and in various developing countries the global linkage model results suggest that removing those remaining distortions would reduce international inequality largely by boosting net farm incomes and raising real wages for unskilled workers in developing countries and would reduce the number of poor people worldwide by 3 percent the analysis based on the global trade analysis project model for a sample of 15 countries and nine stand alone national case studies all point to larger reductions in poverty especially if only the non poor are subjected to increased income taxation to compensate for the loss of trade tax revenue

changes in the structure of global food demand may 1998 purdue agec staff paper 98 5 a newly developed demand system is used to estimate the response of food and food product demand to per capita expenditure changes the resulting engel elasticities are then used to project food and food product demand in 2020 assuming per capita expenditure and population changes results suggest that while food expenditure is projected to grow it accounts for a smaller proportion of total expenditure further analysis indicates change in the composition of food demand away from a grain and towards livestock is projected to occur in lower income countries in 2020

assortative matching and risk sharing abstract this paper explores the sorting patterns in a two sided matching market where agents facing different risks match to share them when preference belongs to the class of harmonic absolute risk aversion hara the risk premium is perfectly transferable within each partnership thus a stable match minimizes the social cost of risk in the systematic risk model where agents are ranked by their holdings of a common risky asset the convexity of the joint risk premium in joint risk size leads to negative assortative matching nam in the idiosyncratic risk model where agents are ranked by their independent riskiness in the sense of second order stochastic dominance ssd nam arises when preference exhibits decreasing absolute risk aversion dara in the sense of ross and riskier background risk leads to more risk averse behavior however nam may fail to arise when riskier background risk leads to more risk tolerant behavior

assimilation in the risk preferences of spouses we use correlations in the risk preferences of spouses as a testbed of whether preferences are socially transmitted rather than being innate as traditionally assumed in economics we obtain rich measurements of the risk preferences of cohabiting spouses in the rural ethiopian highlands this allows us to use correlation coefficients at the level of the couple in regression analysis we find a strong correlation between the strength of the correlation in risk preferences within a couple and how long a couple has been married this provides direct evidence for assimilation in the risk preference of spouses and thus for social transmission of preferences assortative mating appears to be less important

what impact does the choice of formula have on international comparisons in this paper an empirical comparison of a number of alternative multilateral index number formulae is undertaken the magnitude of the effect of choosing one formula over another is ascertained using an appropriate cross sectional data set constructed under the auspices of the eurostat oecd purchasing power parity programme to this end a new indicator is proposed that facilitates the measurement of the difference between two sets of bloc consumption shares each computed using a different multilateral comparison method jel classification c31 c43 c81 e31 f31 o57 quel impact est ce que le choix des formules a sur les comparaisons internationales ce memoire propose une comparaison empirique d un certain nombre de formules de nombres indices multilateraux on tente de jauger la magnitude de l impact du choix d une formule plutot qu une autre en utilisant une base de donnees transversales appropriee construite sous l egide du programme de parite du pouvoir d achat eurostat ocde on propose un nouvel indicateur qui facilite la mesure de la difference entre deux ensembles de patterns de consommation chacun calculea l aide d une methode de comparaison multilaterale differente

structural change and poverty in africa a decomposition anakysis for cote d ivoire abstract this paper provides evidence that economic destabilization and the absence of managed structural change in an economy can be more harmful to the welfare of the poor than the process of adjustment itself evidence comes from four consecutive years of household survey data from cote d ivoire spanning both a period of adjustment and destabilization these constitute a unique data base in africa to assess the impact of structural change on the poor the analytic methodology used is that of static and dynamic decomposition of poverty measures along policy relevant dimensions

the role for low carbon electrification technologies in poverty reduction and climate change strategies a focus on renewable energy mini grids with case studies in nepal peru and kenya abstract as a potential poverty reduction and climate change strategy this paper considers the advantages and disadvantages of using renewable energy technologies for rural electrification in developing countries although each case must be considered independently given a reliable fuel source renewable energy mini grids powered by biomass gasifiers or micro hydro plants appear to be the favoured option due to their lower levelised costs provision of ac power potential to provide a 24 h service and ability to host larger capacity systems that can power a wide range of electricity uses sustainability indicators are applied to three case studies in order to explore the extent to which sustainable welfare benefits can be created by renewable energy mini grids policy work should focus on raising awareness about renewable energy mini grids improving institutional technical and regulatory frameworks and developing innovative financing mechanisms to encourage private sector investments establishing joint technology and community engagement training centres should also be encouraged

housing market interventions and mobility an international comparison government interventions in housing markets usually have a strong side effect of lowering residential mobility interventions tend to raise the price of owner occupied dwellings and to lower rents compared with household incomes an index of these two tendencies is calculated for major conurbations of 16 countries among these switzerland south korea sri lanka and the former german democratic republic are of particular interest the rank order correlation of the index with residential mobility appears to be strong 0 962 and with an elasticity of 0 815 three quarters of the variance is explained no correlation was found with the home ownership rate in so far as lower mobility impairs housing welfare market interventions should be avoided but it is recognised that such interventions primarily reflect concern for equity and externalities

the heterogeneity of the consumer s preferences over time a system wide analysis of discrete panel data abstract the paper uses the individual and overall tests of heterogeneity for two complete piglog models of expenditure equations fitted to discrete survey data to investigate a possible change in the consumer s preferences in australia between 1975 76 and 1983 84 the evidence lends support to the hypothesis of significant behavioral change and also indicates that this change is attributable mainly to the convolution of the consumption patterns in current housing costs and food

economic information versus quality variation in cross country data data quality in the penn world tables varies systematically across countries that have different growth rates and are at different stages of economic development thus intro ducing measurement error correlated with variables of economic interest we explore this problem with three examples from the literature showing that the problem appears to be minor in growth convergence regressions but serious in estimating the effect of income volatility on growth and in a cross country lest of the permanent income hypothesis the results suggest at the least a need for performing appropriate sensitivity tests before draw

financing low carbon energy access in africa modern energy access in africa is critical to meeting a wide range of developmental challenges including poverty reduction and the millennium development goals mdgs despite having a huge amount and variety of energy resources modern energy access in the continent is abysmal especially sub saharan africa only about 31 of the sub saharan african population have access to electricity while traditional biomass energy accounts for over 80 of energy consumption in many sub saharan african countries with energy use per capita among the lowest in the world there is no doubt that africa will need to increase its energy consumption to drive economic growth and human development africa also faces a severe threat from global climate change with vulnerabilities in several key areas or sectors in the continent including agriculture water supply energy etc low carbon development provides opportunities for african countries to improve and expand access to modern energy services while also building low emission and climate resilient economies however access to finance from different sources will be critical in achieving these objectives this paper sets out to explore the financial instruments available for low carbon energy access in africa including the opportunities markets and risks in low carbon energy investments in the continent

negative assortative matching of risk averse agents with transferable expected utility abstract i give necessary and sufficient conditions for expected utility to be transferable among agents with different state independent risk preferences who share a risk they cannot influence in an assignment game where participants choose partners based on risk aversion the conditions permit a simple proof that matching is negative assortative

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

analyzing comovements in housing prices using vine copulas i introduction when housing prices were rapidly appreciating from 1999 to 2006 investment firms created structured securities by combining mortgages from houses located in different parts of the country and then traders bought and sold those securities and also pieces of those securities called tranches in secondary markets the most familiar of those structured securities was the collateralized debt obligation cdo the main appeal of cdos rested in the belief that due to the localized nature of housing markets houses in separate geographic markets would be unlikely to simultaneously experience large decreases in prices credit rating agencies offered support to this thinking by awarding many cdos the highest possible safety rating however it soon became clear that cdos offered less diversified protection than originally thought when starting in 2006 housing prices in different geographic areas even those located far apart simultaneously plummeted in value as a consequence cdos lost much of their value with the global cdo market shrinking from 482 billion globally in 2007 to only 8 billion in 2010 1 in the wake of the housing crisis financial analysts and policy makers have questioned why compared to pre crisis expectations housing prices showed strong correlations across different geographic areas in addition a branch of research has emerged that attempts to identify sources of and quantify magnitudes of housing price comovements apergis and payne 2012 barros gil alana and payne 2012 the popular press quickly assigned blame to the statistical method used to analyze linkages between housing markets the gaussian copula li 2000 notably the march 2009 issue of the technology magazine wired featured an article on the gaussian copula entitled recipe for disaster the formula that killed wall street similar ideas have reached the general public through the works of nassim taleb taleb 2007 the gaussian copula became popular due in part to its link to the familiar multivariate normal distribution but the multivariate normal distribution has asymptotic independence such that events regardless of the strength of their correlation become independent if one pushes far enough into the tails embrechts mcneil and straumann 2002 thus in the midst of the housing crisis which might be thought of as a lower tail event the gaussian copula predicted near independence in price movements across different areas when in fact prices plummeted simultaneously throughout most of the united states but the gaussian copula s link to the normal distribution was not its only appeal perhaps a bigger reason for its popularity was that the gaussian copula much like the related normal distribution readily extends to higher dimensions certainly credit rating agencies were not considering simple bivariate movements between two locations but rather multivariate movements across many locations recent studies argue that alternative specifications especially copulas that depart from normality more accurately reflect correlations in housing price movements during extreme market swings ho huynh and jachochavez 2014 zimmer 2012 however those improved fits have been achieved only in bivariate models that compare housing price movements between two locations it remains an open question whether non gaussian copulas can accurately reflect housing price movements in higher dimensional settings unfortunately copulas other than the gaussian do not readily extend to higher than bivariate dimensions nelsen 2006 105 attempts to develop higher dimensional copulas some of which are discussed below either impose unrealistic restrictions or present difficulties when applied to data as an alternative this article develops multivariate models of housing price comovements based on vine copulas the approach requires marginal distributions which financial analysts should know with some certainty and bivariate copulas which have well understood statistical properties

extending the sample size in cross country demand analysis abstract results from different phases of the international comparison project and from different sets of countries are compared and combined

a modified implicit directly additive demand system a recently developed demand system nicknamed aidads an implicit directly additive demand system offers an approach to capturing consumer preferences across a wide range of expenditure levels aidads generalizes the les by assuming marginal budget shares vary with utility and hence with expenditure like the les aidads includes subsistence parameters that define minimum consumption levels here we present a modified aidads maidads that replaces the constant subsistence parameters with functions that also vary with utility these transformed subsistence levels are referred to as minimum consumption quantities this model is applied to the 1996 international consumption project data as these data span a wide range of expenditure levels maidads offers a viable alternative for the estimation of a global demand system results suggest minimum consumption quantities for staple grains livestock other food products alcohol and tobacco clothing and footwear and transport and transport services vary

true world income distribution 1988 and 1993 first calculation based on household surveys alone the paper derives world income or expenditure distribution of individuals for two years 1988 and 1993 it is the first paper to calculate world distribution for individuals based entirely on household survey data from 91 countries and adjusted for differences in purchasing power parity between the countries measured by the gini index inequality increased from an already very high 63 in 1988 to 66 in 1993 the increase was driven more by rising differences in mean incomes between the countries than by rising inequalities within countries the most important contributors were rising urban rural differences in china and slow growth of rural incomes in south asia compared to several large developed market economies

enabling private sector investment in microgrid based rural electrification in developing countries a review access to electricity is widely recognized as an important factor for economic and social development low rates of access particularly in remote rural areas in regions such as sub saharan africa south asia and southeast asia have led developing nations and international organizations to set ambitious goals to expand the reach of electricity decentralized solutions such as microgrids have been proposed as cost effective solutions to reaching communities located far from central grid infrastructure lack of capital from public and donor sources has severely impeded achieving access goals leading to calls for greater private sector participation in electrification activities however due to the high level of risk associated with decentralized electrification projects in low income areas marginal expected returns on investment and a lack of clear and effective public policy the private sector has not shown significant interest in participating in such projects the purpose of this paper is to review barriers to private sector participation in decentralized electrification projects and to identify solutions that have been implemented and proposed to overcome these barriers the barriers discussed include unsecure revenue streams inability to finance projects and long term project risks such as grid encroachment the range of interventions and business models reviewed include methods to secure reliable demand subsidy models risk guarantees and different revenue models this paper does not include an analysis of the effectiveness of the different interventions described future research should evaluate the relative costs and benefits of these interventions in order to provide robust policy guidance to decision makers in developing countries

an implicitly additive demand system the problem of endowing large applied general equilibrium models with numerical values for parameters is formidable for example a complete set of own and cross price elasticities of demands for the monash model of the australianeconomy involves in excess of 50000 items invoking the minimal assumptions that demand is generated by utility maximization reduces the load to about 26000 obviously still a number much too large for unrestrained econometric estimation to obtain demand systems estimates for a dozen or so generic commodities at a top level of aggregation categories like food clothing and footwear etc typically johansen s lead has been followed and directly additive preferences imposed upon the underlying utility function with the move beyond one step linearized solutions of applied general equilibrium models the functional form of the demand system adopted becomes an issue the most celebrated of the additive preference demand systems the linear expenditure system les has one

scaling up finance for off grid renewable energy the role of aggregation and spatial diversification in derisking investments in mini grids for rural electrification in india abstract today about 1 1 billion people lack access to electricity worldwide it is estimated that annual investments of 48 billion usd are required to meet the target of the sustainable development goals of providing universal electricity access by 2030 the need for private investments to meet this target is evident but small scale electrification projects are often unattractive for private investors due to unfavourable risk return profiles and small investment volumes both issues can potentially be addressed by aggregating projects into diversified portfolios an approach commonly used by investors in several contexts but little investigated in the context of rural electrification this paper addresses the question of how spatial diversity in a portfolio can be used to reduce investment risks and increase investment volumes through a mixed method approach involving three steps i identification and classification of investment risks for renewable energy mini grid projects ii qualitative analysis of the correlations between investment risks for different projects through interviews and iii quantitative estimation of the cost of capital and derisking effects of spatial diversification strategies for an experimental portfolio in india we discuss the implications for policymakers in promoting and facilitating the ability of private sector investors to aggregate small scale electrification investments

nutrition transition and the structure of global food demand estimating future demand for food is a critical aspect of global food security analyses the process linking dietary changes to wealth is known as the nutrition transition and presents well identified features that help to predict consumption changes in poor countries this study proposes to represent the nutrition transition with a nonhomothetic flexible in income demand system known as the modified implicitly directly additive demand system maidads the resulting model is transparent and estimated statistically based on cross sectional information from faostat it captures the main features of the nutrition transition rise in demand for calories associated with income growth diversification of diets away from starchy staples and a large increase in caloric demand for animal based products fats and sweeteners the estimated model is used to project food demand between 2010 and 2050 based on a set of plausible futures trend projections and shared socioeconomic pathways scenarios the main results of these projections are as follows 1 global food demand will increase by 46 less than half the growth in the previous four decades 2 this growth will be attributable mainly to lower middle income and low income countries 3 the structure of global food demand will change over the period with a 95 increase in demand for animal based calories and a much smaller 18 increase in demand for starchy staples and 4 the analysis of a range of population and income projections reveals important uncertainties depending on the scenario the projected increases in demand for animal based and vegetal based calories range from 78 to 109 and from 20 to 42 respectively

the need for improved financial reporting of a developing country energy utility abstract some consideration has been given to regulatory and institutional reforms to facilitate sustainable development in electricity usage in papua new guinea but little attention has been paid to bringing about full compliance of financial reporting expectations of the country s main energy utility examining documentary evidence of the audit reports of the auditor general s office of papua new guinea this study considers the financial reporting compliance of png power for the period 2007 2013 and the means by which compliant reporting may be improved the results of the study reveal that the financial statements of png power are late and receive disclaimers of opinion from the auditor general s office which suggest that png power s stakeholders are not receiving accurate and reliable financial information to make informed decisions about sustainable development of electricity usage and planning in papua new guinea the study reveals that it would take little resources to improve png power s reporting which in turn could enhance national energy policy decision making and energy utility accountability

user cost and housing tenure in developing countries abstract this paper reports on research conducted at the world bank to increase understanding of developing country housing markets in particular of housing demand behavior the objectives of the paper are 1 to briefly review recent evidence on housing demand parameters in developing countries including new estimates for colombia egypt el salvador ghana india jamaica korea and the philippines and 2 to examine similarities and differences among cities in housing demand the analysis emphasizes differences in housing demand by tenure particularly for renters and owners but also for squatters and non squatters and paralleling the literature in developed countries stresses the importance of accounting for the impact of income and relative prices on housing demand

the social costs of higher food prices some cross country evidence abstract this paper uses cross country data from 34 developing countries to examine the correlation between the real cereal price paid by consumers aggregate calorie intake and the infant mortality rate the results suggest that higher cereal prices across countries are associated with higher infant mortality the elasticity is between 0 2 and 0 6 however this correlation does not exist using time series data for individual countries the results require further investigation nevertheless they suggest that although the short run costs of higher farm prices may not immediately be evident there may be important long run social costs

economic policy and the relative price of services in ldcs abstract low relative prices of nontraded services are a feature of developing economies recent explanations focus on structural issues such as factor endowments and returns to scale this paper argues that economic policy may also contribute to low ldc service prices in a three sector model with wage differentials financial repression unambiguously depresses both per capita real income and the price of nontraded goods in contrast to most current models tariffs and production subsidies can also depress nontraded goods prices

the long run impact of biofuels on food prices more than 40 of us corn is now used to produce biofuels which are used as substitutes for gasoline in transportation biofuels have been blamed universally for past increases in world food prices and many studies have shown that these energy mandates in the us and eu may have a large 30 60 impact on food prices in this paper we use a partial equilibrium framework to show that demand side effects in the form of population growth and income driven preferences for meat and dairy products rather than cereals may play as much of a role in raising food prices as biofuel policy by specifying a ricardian model with differential land quality we find that a significant amount of new land will be converted to farming which is likely to cause a modest increase in food prices however biofuels may increase aggregate world carbon emissions due to leakage from lower oil prices and conversion of pasture and forest land for farming

financing off grid sustainable energy access for the poor this paper examines the role of public instruments in promoting private finance to achieve off grid sustainable energy access renewable energy technologies are increasingly becoming the cheapest solutions for off grid energy access the dramatic uptake of mobile phones in developing countries shows how quickly decentralized services can develop on a commercial basis under the right conditions and raises the prospect that private finance could also drive decentralized energy access for the poor indeed there are already a number of instances of clean energy solutions such as solar portable lights household biogas units or solar home systems that have managed to scale up through leveraging private finance however the experience gained from first generation market development projects show that in almost all cases significant public resources have been necessary to increase the affordability of clean energy technologies provide access to financing for the poor and remove non economic barriers such public interventions may be funded by international public finance domestic budgets and carbon finance despite mounting fiscal constraints facing governments worldwide the emergence of new sources of climate finance and the political momentum in support of energy subsidy reforms as well as new programming modalities offer opportunities to leverage additional resources to achieve universal energy access by 2030

rural electrification policy and institutional linkages some of the problems that have besieged rural electrification in most developing countries include inadequate policies weak institutional frameworks and limited financing in the last two decades governments in developing countries have been making various efforts both at the policy level and in financing to facilitate increased levels of rural electrification however the introduction of market based reforms in the power sector in the last decade has affected the institutional and financing arrangements for rural electrification the reforms have also affected the rate of electrification and affordability of electricity there is need therefore to establish the extent to which the reforms have affected access and affordability of electricity in rural areas and to develop appropriate policy and the supporting institutional structures to align rural electrification with reformed power sectors it is cardinal to establish how privatised and commercialised power companies in a reformed power sector could contribute to rural electrification and the role of governments and government agents in facilitating expanded access to electricity in rural areas

factor endowments nontradables prices and measures of openness abstract the familiar dollar index of country openness is obtained essentially by attempting to remove the influence of nontradables prices from data on country price levels with residual price differences hypothesised to measure trade impediments differences in nontradables prices are in turn hypothesised to reflect differences in factor endowments which dollar proxies by gdp per capita this paper examines both the theoretical and empirical biases introduced to estimates of nontradables prices by using this proxy we show that while the approach provides a reasonable approximation on average relatively agricultural land or labour abundant countries are particularly poorly captured by gdp per capita

access to electricity in small island developing states of the pacific issues and challenges abstract energy poverty is widespread in small island developing states sids of the pacific it is estimated that 70 percent of pacific islander households do not have access to electricity which is equivalent to access rates in sub saharan africa and slightly below the average for low income countries pacific sids face unique challenges in expanding access to electricity given that their populations are spread across tens of thousands of islands governments and development partners in pacific sids continue to prioritise development of electricity grids as is evident in ongoing subsidisation of grid based power consumption and the establishment of ambitious grid based renewable energy targets this paper argues that traditional approaches to rural electrification which prioritise grid extension are not suited to the pacific islands region increased funding should be directed by both governments and development partners towards rural electrification especially in off grid areas where isolated systems are more appropriate institutional reform is also important regulatory reform is needed for power utilities to extend electricity grids into rural areas institutional arrangements that facilitate the sustainable operation and maintenance of off grid systems also need to be established past donor and government funded off grid rural electrification projects have rarely been sustainable alternative approaches involving payment of output based subsidies to energy service companies are worth exploring although will only succeed where sound regulatory arrangements are in place

institutional barriers to a perfect policy a case study of the senegalese rural electrification plan abstract this paper investigates the political and institutional factors that have influenced the success of the senegalese rural electrification action plan plan d action senegalais d electrification rurale paser paser is of interest because its innovative design attracted extensive offers of finance from donors and independent power providers however it has had limited effect on electrification levels this paper examines paser s progress and problems in detail with the aim of informing rural electrification policy internationally an extensive literature review was combined with 26 semi structured stakeholder interviews to produce a snapshot of the plan s status after its first decade of operation paser s experiences are compared with other reform based rural electrification initiatives across sub saharan africa paser has faced significant institutional and political barriers with delays arising from organisational opposition inconsistent ministerial support protracted consultations and the inherent challenges of implementing an innovative policy framework in a country with limited institutional capacity the development of human and institutional capacity has been compromised by inconsistent political commitment such experiences mirror those of electrification initiatives across sub saharan africa whilst paser s successes in garnering external support and fundraising are noteworthy and won praise from early reviews in terms of delivery the plan has failed to resolve common institutional barriers

agricultural research spending must increase in light of future uncertainties abstract agricultural productivity depends critically on investments in research and development r d but there is a long lag in this response failing to invest today in improvements of agricultural productivity cannot be simply corrected a few decades later if the world finds itself short of food at that point in time this fundamental irreversibility is particularly problematic in light of uncertain future population income and climate change as portrayed in the ipcc s shared socio economic pathways ssps this paper finds the optimal path of agricultural r d spending over the 21st century for each ssp along with valuation of those regrets associated with investment decisions later revealed to be in error the maximum regret is minimized to find a robust optimal r d pathway that factors in key uncertainties and the lag in productivity response to r d results indicate that the whole of uncertainty s impact on r d is greater than the sum of its individual parts uncertainty in future population has the dominant impact on the optimal r d expenditure path the robust solution suggests that the optimal r d spending strategy is very close to the one that will increase agricultural productivity fast enough to feed the world under the most populous scenario it also suggests that society should accelerate r d spending up to mid century thereafter moderating this growth rate

an empirical analysis of risk aversion and income growth risk aversion enters many theoretical models of human capital investment but attitudes toward risk have not been incorporated in empirical models of human capital investment this article develops a model of the joint investment in financial wealth and human wealth to show that human capital investment is an inverse function of the degree of relative risk aversion using data from the survey of consumer finances i find that wage growth is positively correlated with preferences for risk taking more educated individuals are also more likely to be risk takers thus risk taking explains a portion of the returns to education

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

world food demand long term projections of global food demand are heavily dependent on which functional form of the food demand equation is used given that real incomes can change substantially over the long term key elements are the dependence of the income elasticity on income which ensures that the food budget share always lies within the 0 1 range and the role of income inequality this article analyzes these issues proposes a new functional form that deals with them and presents estimates of income and price elasticities for food in 138 countries copyright 2012 oxford university press

marriage markets and assortative mating with household public goods theoretical results and empirical implications this paper analyzes marriage market equilibria when the gains from marriage result from joint consumption of household public goods assuming transferable utility within marriage the paper proves that marriage markets will be characterized by positive assortative mating on wealth when spouses differ only in endowments and the gains to marriage result only from public goods when spouses differ in wages and household public goods are produced at home the results imply offsetting effects with public good economies creating an incentive for positive assortative mating on wages and gains from specialization creating an incentive for negative assortative mating on wages the results help explain the persistent lack of empirical support for becker s prediction of negative assortative mating on wages and have implications for empirical analysis of all joint living arrangement decisions

the prospects for local private investment in tanzania s rural electrification abstract the aim of this paper is to investigate whether local investors are capable of establishing and managing power sector enterprises in tanzania the paper then examines the extent to which this capability could be harnessed to enhance rural electrification especially of the poor the data used were obtained from interviews of power sector stakeholders three major conclusions arise from the findings first it seems that substantial local ownership is possible in small power enterprises but is limited in the larger ones second available evidence suggests that the terms and conditions of local financial institutions are major constraining factors on the ability of local investors to mobilise finance locally third it appears that on the overall technical managerial and professional capabilities needed to set up operate and manage independent power production ipp and independent power distribution ipd enterprises exist locally

access and affordability of electricity in developing countries summary a key objective of developing countries is to provide affordable access to modern energy services in order to support economic and social development the paper presents a number of arguments for why and in which way energy access and affordability can play a key role in national development programs and in achieving the millennium development goals approaches for measuring accessibility and affordability are presented drawing on case studies of bangladesh brazil and south africa countries with different rates of electrification affordability of using electricity is examined in relation to the energy expenditure burden for households and time consumption conclusions focus on lessons learned and recommendations for implementing policies instruments and regulatory measures to tackle the challenge of affordability

estimating consumer demands across the development spectrum maximum likelihood estimates of an implicit direct additivity model abstract this paper characterizes consumer demand patterns across the development spectrum using elasticity estimates from a demand system possessing non linear engel effects demands for six broadly defined goods are then projected under the assumption that per capita expenditure growth rates differ across the development spectrum such projections illustrate the extent to which non linear income effects generate more plausible demand responses estimated marginal budget shares for food decline in a logistical manner and range from about 0 5 for ethiopia to less than 0 05 for the usa engel elasticities for food range from 0 95 for ethiopia to less than 0 1 for the usa

privatization and economic growth an empirical investigation from a sample of developing market economies this paper explores the economic determinants of privatization programmes and the macroeconomic impact of this institutional reform on the growth rate of the gdp a sample of thirty five developing market economies is considered over the 1988 92 period probit and tobit models are used to identify the determinants of successful privatization programmes then regressions are run where probabilities probit and expected values tobit are successively included as additional regressors beside the potential influence of other economic policy variables a significant positive effect is highlighted giving evidence of the importance of divestiture the economic effect is found to be stronger when this institutional reform took place in industry or infrastructure

world product and income international comparisons of real gross product the volume reports on the third phase of the united nations international comparison project icp the main results provide comparisons of real gross domestic product gdp per capita for thirty four countries in 1975 quantity and price comparisons are given also for personal consumption capital formation and public consumption and further subdivisions of final expenditures on gdp are estimated

coupling couples with copulas analysis of assortative matching on risk attitude we investigate patterns of assortative matching on risk attitude using self reported ordinal data on risk attitudes for males and females within married couples from the german socio economic panel over the period 2004 2012 we apply a novel copula based bivariate panel ordinal model estimation is in two steps first a copula based markov model is used to relate the marginal distribution of the response in different time periods separately for males and females second another copula is used to couple the males and females conditional on the past distributions we find positive dependence both in the middle of the distribution and in the joint tails and we interpret this as positive assortative matching pam hence we reject standard assortative matching theories based on risk sharing assumptions and favor models based on alternative assumptions such as the ability of agents to control income risk we also find evidence of assimilation that is pam appearing to increase with years of marriage jel c33 c51 d81