individual taxpayer response to tax cuts 1982 1984 with implications for the revenue maximizing tax rate abstract this paper measures the response of taxpayers to the u s personal rate reductions from 1982 to 1984 a baseline income distribution is created to describe what level and distribution could be expected in the absence of tax changes comparison of this baseline with actual tax return data shows that at least one sixth and probably one quarter of the revenue ascribable to the rate reductions was recouped by changes in taxpayer behavior the data also show that federal income tax revenue would have been maximized at a tax rate of about 35 percent and total income tax revenue maximized at a total tax rate of about 40 percent

the political economy of urban food security in sub saharan africa abstract sub saharan african cities in the late 1990s face a daunting set of problems including rapid growth increasing poverty deteriorating infrastructure and inadequate capacity for service provision even as a renewed debate is shaping up around issues of urban development there is little attention given to the question of urban food security whereas in the 1970s and 1980s urban food problems in africa commanded political attention the nature of urban food insecurity in the 1990s is such that it has tended to lose political importance this is largely because in the 1970s the problem was one of outright food shortages and rapid price changes that affected large portions of the urban population simultaneously the impact of structural adjustment continued rapid growth and an increase in poverty make urban food insecurity in the 1990s primarily a problem of access by the urban poor under circumstances where the urban poor spend a very large portion of their total income on food urban poverty rapidly translates into food insecurity the lack of formal safety nets and the shifting of responsibility for coping with food insecurity away from the state towards the individual and household level has tended to atomize and muffle any political response to this new urban food insecurity this paper briefly reviews urban food insecurity and generates a set of empirical questions for an analysis of food and livelihood security in contemporary urban sub saharan africa and then examines historical and contemporary evidence from kampala uganda and accra ghana to suggest some tentative conclusions

oligopoly game price makers meet price takers abstract the paper studies an oligopoly game where firms can choose between price taking and price making strategies on a mixed market price takers are always better off than price makers though the profits of both types decline in the number of price takers we investigate and confront two possibilities of firms decisions about their types forward looking equilibrium reasoning and backward looking individual learning we find that the cournot outcome is the only equilibrium prediction and it is learnable if firms are sufficiently sensitive to profit differences however with a larger number of firms a unilateral deviation from cournot behavior becomes profitable under learning this incentive creates a space for permanent oscillations over different markets with a positive but low number of price takers

can fao s measure of chronic undernourishment be strengthened abstract in its sixth world food survey released at the 1996 world food summit the food and agriculture organization of the united nations fao reported that 841 million people in developing countries are chronically undernourished this number and its country and regional level disaggregations have proved tremendously useful to countless development aid agencies and researchers in the context of a recent wave of new nationally representative household food consumption and expenditure surveys this paper examines the estimation methodology underlying the food insecurity measure which relies on national aggregate measures of food availability and distribution the paper finds that the measure largely reflects national food availabilities and does not adequately capture people s ability to gain access to food the ultimate key to food security the implications for the indicator s use by policy makers in geographical targeting and tracking changes in food insecurity over time are drawn out the paper concludes by arguing that the time has come to review the potential for employing the new household survey data along with new methods to strengthen the empirical foundations of fao s measure

on the complexity of strategy switching dynamics abstract a new approach has been proposed to analyze the strategy switching dynamics in a discrete model or a non cooperative game with the following characteristics i the agents are motivated by absolute payoffs rather than relative ones ii the payoffs vary as the composition of the population changes iii the agents are boundedly rational in the sense that they can only predict the outcomes of their own actions rich dynamic phenomena are exhibited for such discrete dynamic models or games the approach is then applied to explore the relative profitability of price taking behavior in a quantity competing heterogeneous oligopoly

female headed households and female maintained families are they worth targeting to reduce poverty in developing countries controversy exists over whether to target public and private sector programs to female headed households in developing countries in the attempt to combat poverty and social disadvantage the issues related to the definition and measurement of female headship and the importance of the concept for development policy are discussed a systematic review is then presented of the empirical evidence on the relation between female headship and poverty if female headed households tend to be poorer on average than other households headship should seriously be considered as a potentially useful criterion for targeting antipoverty interventions especially in developing countries where means testing is not feasible the authors examine the potential costs and benefits of targeting female headship and review the experience of chile one of the few countries which has targeted female headship through government intervention and the only one which has evaluation data available the analysis of the project experience is used along with a review of the empirical evidence to answer the question of the desirability and efficiency of targeting female headship in order to reduce poverty in developing countries

strategy subsets closed under rational behavior a set of strategy profiles is here said to be closed under rational behavior curb of it contains all its best replies each curb set contains the support of at least one nash equilibrium in mixed

on measuring child costs with applications to poor countries the theoretical basis for measuring child costs is discussed and detailed consideration is given to two straightforward procedures for calculation engel s food share method and rothbarth s adult good method each of these methods embodies different definitions of child costs so that the same empirical evidence can generate quite different estimates depending on the method used it is shown that true costs are generally overstated by engel s method and understated by rothbarth s procedure although the latter unlike the former can provide a sensible starting point for cost measurement our estimates from sri lankan and indonesian data suggest that children cost their parents about 30 40 percent of what they spend on themselves

the impact of changes in common property resource management on intrahousehold allocation abstract in developing countries common property resources cprs can be an important source of income for certain individuals within households this paper demonstrates that if changes in the management of cprs impose fixed costs on them or cause a decline in the prices of goods produced from it the intrahousehold allocation of resources may alter in a manner detrimental to those individuals the paper also shows that the assumption of a unitary household model causes the detrimental effects of certain cpr policy interventions to be overlooked although the model is narrowly conceived the results can be generalised to examples where households have members who specialise in different economic activities outside the home

simulating the revenue elasticity of an individual income tax abstract the revenue elasticity of an idealized income tax depends upon the threshold median income and income inequality numerical simulations facilitate comparison of elasticities in different economies and underline the dangers of the constant elasticity assumption in certain cross sectional studies

poverty and household size the widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy the scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view we find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0 6 this turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales by contrast some measures of child nutritional status indicate an elasticity of unity consideration of the weight attached to child versus adult welfare may help resolve the non robustness of demographic profiles of poverty excerpt

gender differentials in farm productivity implications for household efficiency and agricultural policy abstract within many african households agricultural production is simultaneously carried out on many plots controlled by different members of the household detailed plot level agronomic data from burkina faso provides striking evidence of substantial inefficiencies in the allocation of factors of production across the plots controlled by different members of the household production function estimates imply that the value of household output could be increased by 10 15 by reallocating currently used factors of production across plots this finding contradicts standard models of agricultural households a richer model of behaviour which recognizes that the individuals who comprise a household compete as well as co operate has important implications for the structure of agricultural production and for the design of agricultural policy

are urban poverty and undernutrition growing some newly assembled evidence abstract the population of the developing world is becoming more urban are poverty and undernutrition beginning to relocate to urban areas as well we use survey data on poverty from eight countries and on child undernutrition from 14 countries to address this question using data from the past 15 20 years we find that in a majority of countries the absolute number of poor and undernourished individuals living in urban areas has increased as has the share of overall poverty and undernourishment coming from urban areas given these trends and the current stock of knowledge as to the levels determinants and solutions to urban poverty and undernutrition we argue for more research on these issues

measuring food insecurity the frequency and severity of coping strategies abstract defining and interpreting food security and measuring it in reliable valid and cost effective ways have proven to be stubborn problems facing researchers and programs intended to monitor food security risks this paper briefly reviews the conceptual and methodological literature on food insecurity measurment describes a particular method for distinguishing and measuring short term food insecurity at the household level and discusses ways of generalizing the method the method developed enumerates the frequency and severity of strategies relied on by urban households when faced with a short term insufficiency of food this method goes beyond more commonly used measures of caloric consumption to incorporate vulnerability elements of food insecurity as well as the deliberate actions of household decision makers when faced with food insufficiency

the elasticity of the u s individual income tax its calculation determinants and behavior houthakker hendrik s and lester d taylor consumer demand in the united states analyses and projection cambridge harvard university press 1970 juster f thomas and lester d taylor toward a theory of saving behavior american economic review 65 may 1975 203 209 juster f thomas and paul wachtel a note on inflation and the saving rate brookings papers on economic activity 3 1972 765 778 lehman stephen c federal personal income taxes liabilities and payments surv ey of current business 58 may 1978 28 33 maddala g s econometrics new york mcgraw hill 1977 modigliani franco and charles steindl is a tax rebate an effective tool for stabilization policy brookings papers on economic activity 1 1977 175 203 park thae s federal personal income taxes liabilities and payments survey of current business 60 mar 1980 30 32 taubman paul personal saving a time series analysis of three measures of the same conceptual series this review 50 feb 1968 125 129 u s bureau of economic analysis unpublished computer printout of revised nipa data 1981 u s council of economic advisors economic report of the president washington d c u s government printing office 1977 1981 u s internal revenue service statistics of income individual income tax returns washington d c u s government printing office 1947 1979 wright colin saving and the rate of interest in arnold c harberger and martin j bailey eds the taxation of income from capital washington d c the brookings institution 1969 275 300

are women overrepresented among the poor an analysis of poverty in 10 developing countries abstract this paper presents new evidence on the proportion of women in poverty in 10 developing countries it compares poverty measures for males and females and for male and female headed households and investigates the sensitivity of these measures to the use of per capita and per adult equivalent units and different definitions of the poverty line while poverty measures are higher for female headed households and for females the differences are significant in only a fifth to a third of the datasets the contribution of female headed households to aggregate poverty is less than that of females due to the low population share of the former stochastic dominance analysis reveals that differences between male and female headed households and between males and females are often insignificant except for ghana and bangladesh where females are consistently worse off these results suggest that cultural and institutional factors may be responsible for higher poverty among women in these countries our results point to the need to analyze determinants of household income and consumption using multivariate methods and to give greater attention to the processes underlying female headship

targeting the poor in mexico an evaluation of the selection of households into progresa abstract in this paper we conduct an evaluation of the targeting method used by health education and nutrition program progresa of mexico to identify beneficiary households we address two key questions a how well does progresa s targeting perform and b how does the program perform in terms of its impact on poverty alleviation relative to other feasible methods and transfer schemes the first question is accomplished by comparing progresa s method to an alternative selection method based on household consumption which is our preferred measure of welfare we employ the concepts of undercoverage and leakage and find that progresa selection method is more effective in identifying the extremely poor localities or households but less so when it comes to distinguishing among localities or households in the middle of the scale to address the second question we compare the potential impact of progresa on poverty alleviation against uniform transfers that involve no targeting at all targeting based on consumption and geographic targeting i e targeting at the locality level rather than at the household level we find that progresa s method of targeting households outperforms uniform coverage and targeting at the locality level in terms of reducing the poverty gap and severity of poverty indices even after taking into account the economic costs of targeting but the closeness of progresa s performance to what could be achieved by geographic targeting alone raises some serious questions about the costs and benefits associated with the practice of household targeting within poor localities

modelling the effects of income growth and discretionary change on the sensitivity of uk income tax revenue in hutton and lambert ig80 a henceforth hl an exact formula for calculating the elasticity of the income tax was given and applied to the united kingdom for the period i973 4 to i977 8 the formula i in hl was of the form y i e 2 where el relates to the marginal rate structure and 2 to allowances during a period of rapid growth in nominal incomes the elasticity y was found to vary considerably from year to year and it was noted that since z2 was the dominant term the scale of allowances must play a large part in determining the sensitivity of total tax revenue to growth in incomes since these allowances are determined annually by the government and income tax revenue forms about 30 of total tax revenue it is worth exploring further the effects of discretionary change upon the elasticity in this paper we develop a simplified model of the uk income tax which enables the variations in elasticity from year to year to be broken down into components identifiable with income growth and discretionary changes in allowances marginal rates and thresholds the structure of the paper is as follows first a brief comparison of the uk and us income taxes points clearly to the particular features of the uk tax which are responsible for the relative instability of the uk elasticity then a simple analytical model is proposed which incorporates these features and provides the means of assigning relative importance to the various determinants of change in the elasticity by applying the model to data for i973 4 to i977 8 we find that income growth and discretionary change in allowances were indeed the principal and offsetting effects on the elasticity during this period and all other factors were of relatively minor importance appendix i contains the technical results and in appendix ii the potential of the model for answering similar questions about changes in per capita income tax liabilities is indicated and a simple measure of fiscal drag is obtained

the income earned by women impacts on welfare outcomes abstract this paper provides an updated review of the evidence on income pooling across household members income pooling is one of the main predictions of the unitary model of the household new studies come to much the same conclusion as do past studies income pooling and the unitary model are rejected the paper then looks beyond the mere rejection of the unitary model and explores some of the issues that arise first what is the progress in testing the restrictions imposed by non unitary models of the household second what are the implications of rejection of the unitary model for policy and program design finally what are some of the challenges faced by programs and policies that internalize the rejection of income pooling in terms of impact evaluation

economies of scale household size and the demand for food household scale economies are plausibly attributed to shared household public goods that make larger households better off at the same level of per capita resources larger households should therefore have higher per capita consumption of private goods such as food provided that they do not substitute too much toward the effectively cheaper public goods the evidence shows exactly the opposite data from rich and poor countries indicate that at constant per capita total expenditure the per capita demand for food decreases with household size and that it does so most in the poorest countries where substitution should be the least

a positive approach to non cooperative games abstract population steady states are defined for non cooperative games played repeatedly by individuals drawn from large populations these steady states balance the tendencies of immigration to an emigration from strategies according to certain simple measures of their relative performances approximate values for these steady states are computed for some examples and appear intuitively more plausible as descriptors of play than do nash equilibria

whose education matters in the determination of household income evidence from a developing country the plan of this article is as follows section ii discusses the data used and presents a few descriptive statistics on headship in ghana and labor activities of ghanaian households section iii presents three simple paradigms about whose education matters in regression models of household income this section also describes the composition of household income and proposes the appropriate explanatory variables for estimation section iv describes the estimation methodology consistent estimates for the farm and off farm income functions are obtained by using j l powells censored least absolute deviations estimators standard errors are obtained by using a bootstrap methodology that mimics the two stage sample design section v contains a summary of the estimation results most notably the results suggest that the allocative effect is the largest effect for total income while the productivity effect appears to dominate when considering farming and nonfarming activities separately all specifications of household income and its components reject the use of the minimum level of household schooling as well as the schooling level of the head of the household section vi provides some concluding comments excerpt

social stability and equilibrium in the field of noncooperative game theory nash equilibrium nash 1951 has played a central role as a solution concept in bold strokes one may discern two major interpretations of nash equilibrium in the context of rational players the first which is close to the eductive interpretation of binmore 1987 1988 and the complete information interpretation of kaneko 1987 assumes that the game is played exactly once if it is a repeated game the repetition occurs once and the players have sufficient knowledge and ability to analyze the game in a rational manner sometimes it is assumed that all players have consistent hierarchies of beliefs where the game and their priors are common knowledge bayesian interpretation such as proposed by aumann 1987 advanced this idea to the level that the players have a common prior from this point of view however nash equilibrium seems far from being satisfactory

evaluating effective income tax progression abstract an algorithm to compute effective income tax progression is devised for use when taxes are a function of both money income and other socioeconomic attributes and the data is in grouped summary form suppressing non income information effective progression can be evaluated at percentiles in the distribution of either money or equivalent income the normative significance of the new measures is explained in both cases the methodology is illustrated by application to u s individual income tax annual data for 1950 1987 yielding contour plots which show how effective progression has varied across the income distribution and with the passage of time

gender headship and intrahousehold resource allocation abstract household head as reported in household surveys may not always identify the main economic provider and decision maker within the household research based on this definition of headship may lead to misleading conclusions on the link between gender and poverty treating female headed households as a homogenous group can also be inappropriate results from jamaica show that it is not female headedness per se that is associated with child welfare but the absence of a potential female decision maker within the household

a naive but optimal route to walrasian behavior in oligopolies a paradoxical phenomenon where irrationality or ignorance lead to higher profits is shown to prevail in an oligopolistic market where three firms produce a homogeneous product with identical technologies under the conventional assumption on the convexity of cost function the profit made by a naive price taker will always be higher than or at least as much as the other two rivals no matter what kind of strategies the latter may take and whether they form a coalition or not by sticking to the price taking strategy a firm always gains a positive profit improvement should any one of its rivals try to upgrade from price taker to the cournotor with these incentives a firm prefers to remain as a naive price taker

the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior in households whose allocation decisions can be represented as nash bargained household decisions extrahousehold environmental parameters eeps serve as pure shifters of the threat points the comparative statics of changes in demands due to changes in these eeps are given these are incorporated into a comprehensive statement of the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior including a nash generalization of barten s 1966 fundamental matrix equation of the theory of consumer demand estimation and data requirements are discussed along with nested testing of the following structure the neoclassical model is nested in the nash bargained model which in turn is nested in an unrestricted model of household demands emphasized throughout is the enriched menu of explanatory variables for demand analysis provided by the nash model as well as the model s ability to jointly analyze i household formation and ii intrahousehold allocation decisions

repayment performance in group based credit programs in bangladesh an empirical analysis abstract this paper analyzes the repayment rates of 128 credit groups belonging to three group based credit programs in bangladesh the association for social advancement asa the bangladesh rural advancement committee brac and the rangpur dinajpur rural service rdrs using tobit analysis specific tests are performed on the following hypothesized determinants group size size of loans degree of loan rationing enterprise mix within groups demographic characteristics social ties and status and occurrence of idiosyncratic shocks the paper concludes that if basic principles of prudential banking are adhered to repayment rates can be good even in poor and remote communities the important thing for financial institutions is to tailor services such that it becomes worthwhile for the poor to establish a profitable long term association in addition more freedom to members in the process of group formation is recommended

the long run benefits of chaos to oligopolistic firms abstract conventional economic beliefs that equilibrium is better than disequilibrium and stability is better than fluctuation are challenged with a heterogeneous oligopolistic model that consists of a naive firm and a group of sophisticated firms the naive firm is assumed to adopt a simple cobweb strategy while the sophisticate firms who command all market information form a collusion and best respond the naive firm s current action when the market equilibrium is unstable the naive firm is able to turn an explosively diverging market into a bounded but chaotic one by adopting simultaneously a cautious adjustment strategy that is limiting the growth rate of output there exists an upper bound such that as long as the growth rate does not exceed this bound the average profits made by all oligopolistic firms are higher than their respective equilibrium profits moreover the average economic surplus can also be higher than the equilibrium surplus in this sense chaos is beneficial not only to all oligopolistic firms but also to the economy as a whole

on the measurement of poverty official statistics in the united states and the united kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970 s and the 1980 s but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings in particular the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism this paper re examines three basic issues in measuring poverty the choice of the poverty line the index of poverty and the relation between poverty and inequality one general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted there is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line affecting both its level and its structure in this situation we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering the first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons illustrating their application by reference to data for the united states the choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed in the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class which includes many of those proposed give the same ranking those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded the third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare

working women in an urban setting traders vendors and food security in accra abstract data collected from a 1997 household survey carried out in accra ghana are used to look at the crucial role that women play as income earners and securing access to food in urban areas one third of the households surveyed are headed by women for all households women s labor force participation is high with 75 of all households having at least one working woman the high number of female headed households and the large percentage of working women in the sample provide a good backdrop for looking at how women earn and spend income differently than men in an urban area livelihood strategies for both men and women are predominantly labor based and dependent on social networks for all households in the sample food is still the single most important item in the total budget yet important and striking differences between men s and women s livelihoods and expenditure patterns exist compared to men women are less likely to be employed as wage earners and more likely to work as street food vendors or petty traders women earn lower incomes but tend to allocate more of their budget to basic goods for themselves and their children while men spend more on entertainment for themselves only despite lower incomes and additional demands on their time as housewives and mothers female headed households petty traders and street food vendors have the largest percentage of food secure households women may be achieving household food security but at what cost this paper explores differences in income expenditure and consumption patterns in an effort to answer this question and suggests ways that urban planners and policy makers can address special concerns to working women in urban areas

expenditure behavior and children s welfare an analysis of female headed households in jamaica abstract evidence from jamaica shows that the sex and union status of the household head can have a significant influence on household expenditure behavior with implications for individual household members while the presence of a female decision maker generally increases the share of the household budget allocated to child and family goods female headed households fhhs also spend more on adult wear and less on health lower health expenditures are partially offset by the differential use of other health inputs in fhhs these differences in resource allocation may explain why poorer fhhs do not necessarily have lower children s outcomes in developing countries

melioration learning in games with constant and frequency dependent pay offs abstract the paper explores the implications of melioration learning an empirically significant variant of reinforcement learning for game theory we show that in games with invariable pay offs melioration learning converges to nash equilibria in a way similar to the replicator dynamics since melioration learning is known to deviate from optimizing behavior when an action s rewards decrease with increasing relative frequency of that action we also investigate an example of a game with frequency dependent pay offs interactive melioration learning is then still appropriately described by the replicator dynamics but it indeed deviates from rational choice behavior in such a game

market access by smallholder farmers in malawi implications for technology adoption agricultural productivity and crop income abstract in malawi maize is the major crop and food staple given limited off farm employment opportunities much needed increases in household income for improving food security must come from gains in agricultural productivity through better technology and more profitable crops in the past hybrid maize and more recently tobacco were promoted by policy for increasing smallholder income an analysis of determinants of adoption of these two crops and related income effects is presented apart from factor endowment and exposure to agroecological risks differences in the household s access to financial and commodity markets significantly influence its cropping shares and farm income