the dynamic cost and persistence of asset inequality in an agrarian economy abstract a growing literature suggests that asset inequality can be economically costly in the presence of agency costs that constrain labor and capital markets unclear in this literature is whether asset markets and optimal individual accumulation of self finance capacity suffice to eliminate costly inequality over time this paper uses numerical dynamic programming methods to explore this question with a model of an initially inegalitarian agrarian economy while an egalitarian asset distribution emerges over time the process involves sufficiently great productivity losses along the way that a redistributive policy could improve on the market s performance by both equity and efficiency criteria

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

does child labor decline with improving economic status between 1993 and 1997 child labor in vietnam declined by nearly 30 percent while the country s gdp grew by nearly 9 percent per year on average using a simple nonparametric decomposition i investigate the relationship between improvements in per capita expenditure and child labor with a panel data set that spans this episode of growth in vietnam improvements in per capita expenditure can explain 80 percent of the decline in child labor that occurs in households whose expenditures improve enough to move out of poverty this finding suggests a previously undocumented role for economic growth in the amelioration of child labor

how does land fragmentation affect off farm labor supply panel data evidence from china abstract this article provides a deeper theoretical understanding of the linkages between land fragmentation and off farm labor supply in china andinvestigates this relationship empirically in a more direct way than does the existing literature drawing upon a rural household panel data setcollected in zhejiang hubei and yunnan provinces from 1995 to 2002 we estimate the effects in two steps first we estimate the effect of landfragmentation on labor productivity second we estimate the effect of land fragmentation on off farm labor supply the production function resultsshow that land fragmentation indeed leads to lower agricultural labor productivity implying that land consolidation will make on farm work moreattractive and thus decrease off farm labor supply however the effect of land consolidation on off farm labor supply is not signi cant one likelyexplanation for this result may be the potentially imperfect labor markets jel classi cations j22 q15 q24 r23 keywords

forest clearing in rural livelihoods household level global comparative evidence summary this paper examines the factors that influence rural household decisions to clear forestland we use a large dataset comprising 7172 households from 24 developing countries twenty seven percent of sampled households had converted forest to agriculture during the previous 12 months clearing on average 1 21 ha male headed households with abundance of male labor living in recently settled places with high forest cover unsurprisingly tended to clear more but regional peculiarities abounded households with medium to high asset holdings and higher market orientation were more likely to clear forest than the poorest and market isolated households questioning popular policy narratives about poverty driven forest clearing

land rental development via institutional innovation in rural jiangsu china previous studies have demonstrated that there are two important preconditions for encouraging land rental in agriculture out migration and the enhancement of security and transferability of land rights focusing on the latter we scrutinize the impacts of institutions aimed at facilitating land use dynamism particularly the rural shareholding cooperatives rscs which have been established recently at the local level in rural china in general we find that rscs can pave the way for the extension of property rights to farmland and promote more efficient land use patterns using survey data collected from 300 village committees in rural jiangsu province we estimate the effectiveness of rscs in encouraging land rental our analysis reveals that rscs can serve as intermediate agents for reducing transaction costs associated with exchange of land use rights and thereby not only encourage land rental consolidation activities but also enable the entry of non farm household entities into the farm business

local versus global separability in agricultural household models the factor price equalization effect of land transfer rights commonly employed global tests for separability between production and consumption decisions are theoretically inappropriate when the market failures creating non separabilities differentially constrain some but not all households simulated maximum likelihood estimates using chinese panel data reject the restrictions implied by a global separability test in favor of regime specific or local separability tests the estimates also show that a global approach to separability obscures the significant effect that less encumbered land transfer rights would have on shadow factor price equalization across households and allocative efficiency the findings on transfer rights suggest a resolution to the debate in china on further property rights reform copyright 2002 oxford university press

do overlapping property rights reduce agricultural investment evidence from uganda the need for land related investment to ensure sustainable land management and increase productivity of land use is widely recognized however there is little rigorous evidence on the effects of property rights for increasing agricultural productivity and contributing toward poverty reduction in africa whether and by how much overlapping property rights reduce investment incentives and the scope for policies to counter such disincentives are thus important policy issues using information on parcels under ownership and usufruct by the same household from a nationally representative survey in uganda the authors find significant disincentives associated with overlapping property rights on short and long term investments the paper combines this result with information on crop productivity to obtain a rough estimate of the magnitudes involved the authors make suggestions on ways to eliminate such inefficiencies

national wage trends and migration in a chinese village economy a micro level modeling approach based on a composite utility function china s economy is experiencing a regime shift away from a fully elastic supply of labor from a large pool of rural surplus labor and toward a situation of increasing labor scarcity and rising wage rates moreover faster wage increases in the regions of origin of many rural urban migrants are likely to affect the dynamics of inter regional migration these wage trends have implications at the local level in particular in a setting in which migration connects rural communities to the national labor market and in which migration is of high importance for the livelihoods of rural households taking a village perspective this article develops a village computable general equilibrium model to study local impacts of current wage trends in china as a central piece of the model the role of access to migration for household livelihoods is recognized access to migration is linked to household demographics and included in the model through a composite utility function that captures household preferences and disutilities associated with alternative off farm activities simulation results illustrate how households utility considerations affect migration responses to national wage changes statements about possible impacts on village level labor supply land use and agricultural production are made when migration wages and local off farm wages are simulated to increase an overall increase in household and village migration and a higher supply of labor to local off farm labor markets is accompanied by a contraction of farm production although land is reallocated between households with different migration responses total agricultural output declines

the economics of child labor if child labor as a mass phenomenon occurs not because of parental selfishness but because of the parents concern for the household s survival the popular argument for banning child labor loses much of its force however this assumption about parental decision making coupled with the assumption of substitutability in production between child and adult labor could result in multiple equilibria in the labor market with one equilibrium where children work and another where adult wage is high and children do not work the paper establishes this result and discusses its policy implications copyright 1998 by american economic association

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

agrarian structure and agricultural practice typology and application to western sudan a typology of models that explain patterns of variation in farm endowments and farm practices and yields shows that insecurity in renting land financing constraints and the absence of insurance generate patterns of factor use quite different from the famous inverse relationship caused by labor supervision problems one might expect to observe positive relationships between wealth and yields village level data from western sudan confirm that such positive relationships are not a theoretical curiosity wealthy farmers have higher levels of output per hectare because they use more labor per hectare insurance and financing constraints appear to be the crucial market failures

efficiency and equity impacts of rural land rental restrictions evidence from india recognition of the potentially deleterious implications of inequality in opportunity originating in a skewed asset distribution has spawned considerable interest in land reforms however little attention has been devoted to fact that in the longer term the measures used to implement land reforms could negatively affect productivity use of state level data on rental restrictions together with a nationally representative survey from india suggests that contrary to original intentions rental restrictions negatively affect productivity and equity the restrictions reduce the scope for efficiency enhancing rental transactions that benefit poor producers simulations suggest that by doubling the number of producers with access to land through rental from about 15 million currently liberalization of rental markets could have far reaching impacts

inverse productivity or inverse efficiency evidence from mexico abstractusing a unique panel data set from rural mexico we find strong evidence of a negative relationship between farm size and both productivity and technical efficiency large farms not only have a lower value of output per hectare than small farms they also produce further from the efficiency frontier our findings suggest that in spite of the ongoing transformation of agricultural supply chains and economists recommendations for small farmers to exit crop production there may be sustained advantages for smallholder farms our analysis offers new insights into inverse farm size relationship the productivity efficiency relationship and the use of stochastic frontier techniques

child labor cause consequence and cure with remarks on international labor standards although the literature on child labor is enormous it lacks a common theoretical foundation in this paper analytical survey of this field is provided keeping in mind that this is an area where the primary reason for theorizing is ultimately to influence policy overall it is noted that the literature on child labor is an illustration of abundance and anarchy although empirical writings on child labor are numerous they are not usually founded on theory it is argued that there is much that can be done in curbing the issue of child labor several theories were studied in this paper including collaborative intervention such efforts include public action which alters the economic environment such that the parents of their own accord prefer to withdraw the child from labor force another strategy involves the government a legal intervention is enforcing a total ban on the subject although such interventions have good intentions some of them may not be feasible in general it is better to take economy wide measures against child labor and if there is to be a sector specific ban it should be based on the working conditions of that sector rather than the destination of the goods

do codes of conduct improve worker rights in supply chains a study of fair wear foundation the rise of private regulation of sustainability in global production networks has led to intensive debates about the impact of this regulation at the point of production yet few empirical studies have systematically examined this impact in practice based on multiple factory audits of 43 garment factories conducted by the multi stakeholder initiative fair wear foundation we show that codes of conduct improve although marginally worker rights on an overall level but that few significant results are found for specific worker rights our findings also lend support to the widespread argument that codes have uneven impact furthermore we show that even rigorous multi stakeholder factory audits seldom are able to identify process rights violations such as those affecting freedom of association and discrimination and that auditing is thus is more fundamentally flawed than assumed in previous research given companies extensive investments in private regulation of worker rights the findings have important implications for both scholars and managers

a note on multiple general equilibria with child labor abstract it has been conjectured that the child labor market may exhibit multiple equilibria this paper develops the concept of a wage bill curve and establishes the multiple equilibrium result in a general equilibrium model thereby clarifying the circumstances where child labor should be banned

revisiting supplier compliance with mnc codes of conduct recoupling policy and practice at chinese toy suppliers does private regulation of workers rights in global value chains improve working conditions on the factory floor drawing on one of the first systematic longitudinal studies of supplier compliance with multinational corporation mnc codes of conduct this paper finds in contrast to previous research substantial improvements over time while in 2004 the four examined chinese toy suppliers violated most of the evaluated code of conduct criteria and consciously decoupled the code of conduct policy from actual practices by 2009 they had recoupled policy and practice and complied with nearly all examined criteria except working hours the paper contributes to the private regulation literature by challenging previous research claims identifying factors that could make private regulation effective and outlining a research method for empirically studying the effects of codes of conduct over time the paper also contributes to new institutional theory by discussing how recoupling could be influenced by two factors not identified in previous research i trusting relationships between the organization and the stakeholder exerting pressure and ii factors unrelated to main external pressures leading to accidental recoupling

food for thought the effects of school accountability plans on school nutrition abstract with the passage of the no child left behind act of 2001 school accountability is now federal law continuing the recent trend of states implementing significant accountability systems for schools this paper studies an unusual yet powerful school response to accountability systems using disaggregated school lunch menus from a random sample of school districts in virginia we find that schools threatened with accountability sanctions increase the caloric content of their lunches on testing days in an apparent attempt to boost short term student cognitive performance moreover we find that the schools that responded the most along these dimensions experienced the greatest improvements in standardized test scores

the relation between farm size and farm productivity the role of family labor supervision and credit constraints abstract the paper shows that if the performance of hired farmhands is affected by supervision from family members and if the availability of credit is dependent on the amount of land owned then a systematic positive or negative relationship between per acre yields and farm size will prevail a model with no supervision effects on labor productivity would predict that yields are unaffected by farm size the paper also investigates the relation between land utilization and owned holding size when land rental possibilities are limited results are shown to be compatible with various observed patterns in ldcs

traditional vs modern production systems price and nonmarket considerations of cacao producers in northern ecuador many factors besides profit maximization such as nonmarket ecological and social benefits influence smallholder households to adopt a specific agricultural production system or sell in a particular market thus different analytical techniques are needed that take into consideration more than monetary income to fully capture these additional benefits to better understand the production decisions of smallholder farmers we build on previous work on the household model and shadow wage estimation to develop a shadow wage for ecuadorian cacao producers that includes these nonmarket benefits we found that the shadow wage correctly indicated that on average these households would prefer to use an agroforestry production system instead of the more profitable modern system because of the nonmarket benefits received from the former system

using shadow wages to estimate labor supply of agricultural households with few exceptions most studies of the labor demand and supply decisions of agricultural households in developing countries have relied on the empirical advantages of separability given the questionable nature of some of the assumptions sufficient for separability i apply a recent methodology that accounts for the simultaneity between the production and consumption decisions of a farm household using data from rural india direct estimates of the marginal productivities shadow wages of family male and female labor are derived from a cobb douglas agricultural production function the estimated shadow wages and income are then used as regressors in a structural model of labor supply

land inheritance and market transactions in uganda studies on the role of nonmarket land transactions remain limited this paper addresses two questions is land inheritance driven by underdeveloped land markets how does land inheritance influence land disposal and acquisition we use a switching regression model on household data from rural uganda we find that the initially landless or near landless households due to little or no land inheritance obtain land through land markets while those that are land rich dispose of land through land sales and bequests the results suggest that a process of land equalization is unfolding within the sample

wealth risk and activity choice cattle in western tanzania abstract imperfect credit markets force households to use their savings for investment profitable activities often require lumpy investments limiting entry by poorer households resulting in increasing welfare differences in tanzania cattle are a profitable but lumpy investment and a liquid asset for consumption smoothing richer households own substantial cattle herds while poorer households specialize in low return low risk activities a dynamic programming model and simulations are presented to analyze entry into asset accumulation under income risk the evidence suggests that households with lower endowments are less likely to own cattle and returns to their endowments are lower

quality signaling through certification in developing countries this paper studies how signaling the credence attributes of consumer goods distorts their market equilibrium in developing countries costs of certification sunk in order to achieve credibility play a key role in producing an oligopolistic market leading to high prices that form a barrier for consumers in the south to lower the cost certification is better achieved by a single independent body which can be financed either by end consumers through a fee or by public subsidies the paper identifies the conditions under which each funding mechanism is most efficient taking into account the government s budget constraint the theoretical analysis is motivated with reference to agricultural seed certification

are agricultural markets more developed around cities testing for urban heterogeneity in separability in tanzania abstract a key question for policymakers concerned about feeding sub saharan africa s ssa rapidly growing cities is whether or not nearby farms benefit from improved agricultural markets evidence from case studies and agricultural location theory suggest so but urban heterogeneity has not yet been found in a common economic test of functioning agricultural markets the separability result the test is based on a key insight of the agricultural household model which finds that a farm s profit should be maximized independently from household utility given perfect factor markets i e separability but not so if the household faces at least two market failures i e non separability in this paper i test for geographic heterogeneity in separability between rural peri urban and urban districts using 2014 15 data from the world bank s living standards measurement study and integrated surveys on agriculture lsms isa from tanzania i find strong evidence that the correlation between pre harvest labor demand and household size implying non separability in rural areas is significantly weaker in three of tanzania s five largest cities dar es salaam arusha and mbeya given certain assumptions this can be interpreted as evidence of increased agricultural market functionality around these cities relative to rural areas overall these results contribute to the debate on how to achieve urban food security in ssa and give some validity to agricultural location theory and the separability test as tools to help policymakers characterize the nature of agricultural factor markets

household composition labor markets and labor demand testing for separation in agricultural household models this paper tests the separation of farm labor supply and labor demand decisions using the observation that household composition is an important determinant of farm labor use with nonseparation after assessing the conditions under which the test has power against several alternatives an empirical model is developed to test the proposition that farm employment is independent of family composition the model is estimated on a data set from rural java the null hypothesis that farm labor allocation decisions are independent of household structure is not rejected the results are robust to different specifications of the labor demand function copyright 1992 by the econometric society

on price risk and the inverse farm size productivity relationship abstract the oft observed inverse relationship between farm size and productivity has elicited several explanations having important policy and theoretical implications using advances in the analysis of price risk effects on producer behavior and a simple two period model of an agricultural household that both produces and consumes under price uncertainty at the time labor allocation decisions are made this paper demonstrates analytically that a non degenerate land distribution and price risk can together produce an inverse relationship even absent any of the more common explanations empirical evidence from madagascar confirms the plausibility of this intuitive explanation for the phenomenon

the relationship between credit and productivity in chinese agriculture a microeconomic model of disequilibrium credit is an important element in agricultural production systems it allows producers to satisfy the cash needs induced by the production cycle which characterizes agriculture preparation planting cultivation and harvesting of the crops are typically done over a period of several months in which very little cash revenue is earned while expenditures on materials purchased inputs and consumption must be made in cash cash income is received a short time after the harvest in the absence of credit markets farmers would have to maintain cash reserves so as to facilitate production and consumption in the next cycle the availability of credit allows both greater consumption and greater purchased input use and thus increases welfare of the farmers

effects of the internal wage on output supply a structural estimation for japanese rice farmers farmers are offered a higher wage rate by their off farm employers than the rate of remuneration they receive for their labor on their own family farms in japan however it is not possible for them to work for as many hours as they want for their off farm employers at the offered wage rate hence they perceive that they face an imperfectly competitive market for labor with only limited opportunities for wage employment see for example arayama 1986 kang and maruyama 1992 markets for their output and factors of production are observed to be perfectly competitive thus the state of the markets they face proves to be similar to the one producer consumer households face in the circumstances addressed in section 2 2 of the preceding chapter since the market for labor is not a perfectly competitive one because it offers only limited opportunities for wage employment the market wage rate ceases to be relevant in organizing their family farms and in making their choice over their level of consumption they are obliged to form an internal wage rate on their own for these purposes within their households the analytical results in section 2 2 show that the internal wage rate proves to be lower than the market rate and renders their supply of output and their demand for factors of production less elastic than in the instance in which all relevant markets are perfectly competitive in extreme cases it gives rise to a downward sloping supply function of output and upward sloping demand functions for the factors of production

trade openness foreign direct investment and child labor summary the skeptics of globalization argue that increased trade openness and foreign direct investment induce developing countries to keep labor costs low for example by letting children work this article argues that there are good theoretical reasons why globalization might actually have the opposite effect we test this with various measures of child labor and provide the first analysis of foreign investment in addition to trade we present evidence that countries that are more open to trade and or have a higher stock of foreign direct investment also have a lower incidence of child labor this holds for the labor force participation rate of 10 14 year old children the secondary school nonattendance rate and a count measure of economic sectors with child labor incidence as the dependent variables globalization is associated with less not more child labor

modeling farm households price responses in the presence of transaction costs and heterogeneity in labor markets we develop a farm household model to analyze price responses of farm households this model incorporates various types of transaction costs as well as labor heterogeneity nonproportional variable transaction costs or labor heterogeneity imply that production and consumption decisions become nonseparable even when the household buys or sells labor an empirical model is estimated using data from midwest poland the results show that nonproportional variable transaction costs and labor heterogeneity significantly influence household behavior not all price elasticities however change significantly if these are neglected

a simple test of the nutrition based efficiency wage model abstract in the nutrition based efficiency wage model wages in labor markets in developing countries are rigid because lowering them would reduce worker productivity and increase the cost per efficiency unit i evaluate this claim using data from rural india i find that contrary to what has been assumed in these models a wage cut should lower the cost per efficiency unit of labor

a century long perspective on agricultural development this article strategically surveys the past century s literature on agricultural development we organize the discussion around three grand themes that reveal the richness of agricultural development as an intellectual endeavor first we explore the role of agriculture in the broader development process from a macroeconomic and political economy perspective we then examine the role of technological and institutional change in successful agricultural development finally the focus turns to a microeconomic perspective on agricultural household decision making and the problems of imperfect and missing markets asymmetric information and transactions costs that lead to widespread apparent inefficiency and disequilibrium

rental markets for cultivated land and agricultural investments in china the purpose of this paper is to empirically track the progress and consequences of the emergence of cultivated land markets in china since 2000 we draw on a set of nationwide household level panel data for 2000 and 2008 and find that the markets for cultivated land rental have emerged robustly according to our data 19 of china s cultivated land was rented in farm operators in 2008 we also find that the nature of china s cultivated land rental contracts has become more formal and lengthened the period of time that the tenant is able to cultivate the rented in plots while there may be benefits for lessors and tenants our data show that there are falling rates of investment in organic manure the farmers in our sample have reduced organic manure use from 13 tons ha in 2000 to 5 tons ha in 2008 part of this fall is due to the rise of cultivated land rental markets the analysis however does not find that improved property rights in cultivated land rental affect investment largely because property rights have largely been established by 2000 the first year of our sample our results however also show that there are forces that appear to be mitigating the negative consequences of rising cultivated land rental after holding constant initial rental rates and other factors we find that the gap between investment in organic manure in own land and rented in land is narrowing one interpretation of our findings is that if policymakers can find ways to even further strengthen the rights of lessors and tenants as well as lengthen contract periods farmerseven those that rentwill invest more in their land because they will be able to capture the returns to their investments

nutritional efficiency wages and unemployment where s the beef we modify the standard nutritional efficiency wage model to allow for the fact that employers can directly provide calories to their workers rather than paying a higher wage to induce employees to spend more on their own caloric consumption we derive the various theoretical outcomes that are possible depending on the assumptions about the transaction costs of directly providing calories we argue that in most real world situations the ability of employers to directly provide calories undermines the traditional efficiency wage theory as a cause of equilibrium unemployment

how sustainable are sustainable development programs the case of the sloping land conversion program in china summary this paper undertakes a comprehensive assessment of the long run sustainability of one of the world s largest sustainable development programs the slopping land conversion program slcp in china under different plausible post slcp scenarios the analysis is based on farmer contingent behavior post program land and labor decisions as well as choice experiment data our econometric results highlight the main obstacles to the program s sustainability which include specific shortfalls in program implementation and certain institutional constraints namely tenure insecurity and poor land renting rights the use of a choice experiment also reveals unique evidence on rural households preferences over tenure reform in china

shadow wages and peasant family labour supply an econometric application to the peruvian sierra a striking feature of developing economies is the large proportion of the work force that is self employed lack of widespread labor market participation in the agricultural sector can pose a major obstacle to the empirical implementation of economic models of the peasant household whether because wage data are simply not available or because the assumptions required to make use of wage data stretch the bounds of credulity this paper develops a methodology for estimating a structural labor supply model for primarily self employed peasant households which holds under a general agricultural technology and set of labor market conditions the unique feature of the approach is that the opportunity cost of time or shadow wage of household workers is explicitly estimated from an agricultural production function and is subsequently used to identify a set of structural labor supply parameters recent household survey data from rural peru is employed to estimate and perform various diagnostic tests on the model the empirical findings lend support to the hypothesis that peasant households allocate their members time as if to maximize a family utility function and moreover demonstrate the tractability of the shadow wage methodology and its usefulness in estimating more elaborate time allocation models

the potential of land rental markets in the process of economic development evidence from china abstract we develop a model of land leasing with agents characterized by unobserved heterogeneity in ability and presence of an off farm labor market in this case decentralized land rental may contribute to equity and efficiency goals and may have several advantages over administrative reallocation the extent to which this is true empirically is explored using data from three of china s poorest provinces land rental markets and administrative reallocation reallocate land to those with lower endowments but the former are more effective in doing so and have a bigger productivity enhancing effect information on hypothetical market participation suggests that reducing transaction costs in land rental markets could help to realize significant additional productivity gains

rural industry and labor market integration in eastern china abstract this paper tests the competitiveness of the labor market in a semi industrialized county located in eastern china labor market segmentation is linked to the degree of government interventions and the management structures of the local enterprises and two forms of rationing labeled entrance and time rationing are identified a test based on income maximizing behavior is developed to find the form of rationing that is consistent with the data the results show that the labor market is not competitive and time rationing prevails in the county in addition industrial wages are not responsive to experience and education but strongly biased against women and varying to government interventions

the demand for food and calories we investigate nutrition and expenditure in rural maharashtra in india we estimate that the elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to total expenditure is 0 3 0 5 a range that is in accord with conventional wisdom the elasticity declines only slowly with levels of living and is far from the value of zero suggested by a recent revisionist literature in these indian data the calories necessary for a day s activity cost less than 5 percent of the daily wage which makes it implausible that income is constrained by nutrition rather than the other way around

moving off the farm land institutions to facilitate structural transformation and agricultural productivity growth in china agriculture has made major contributions to china s economic growth and poverty reduction but the literature has rarely focused on the institutional factors that might underpin such structural transformation and productivity this paper aims to fill that gap drawing on an 8 year panel of 1 200 households in six key provinces it explores the impact of government land reallocations and formal land use certificates on agricultural productivity growth as well as the likelihood of households to exit from agriculture or send family members to the non farm sector it finds that land tenure insecurity measured by the history of past land reallocations discourages households from quitting agriculture the recognition of land rights through formal certificates encourages the temporary migration of rural labor both factors have a large impact on productivity at about 30 percent each mainly by encouraging market based land transfers a sustained increase in non agricultural opportunities will likely reinforce the importance of secure land tenure which is a precondition for successful structural transformation and continued economic attractiveness of rural areas

child labor in carpet weaving impact of social labeling in india and nepal summary does the labeling of tradable products like carpets which have been produced without child labor increase the welfare of children and their families this paper presents results of surveys conducted in india and nepal the findings suggest a positive link between social labeling and the removal of child laborers for households above the subsistence level however for households below the subsistence level no significant influence has been found

on the discrete version of the aumann shapley cost sharing method each agent in a finite set requests an integer quantity of an idiosyncratic good the resulting total cost must be shared among the participating agents the aumann shapley prices are given by the shapley value of the game where each unit of each good is regarded as a distinct player the aumann shapley cost sharing method charges to an agent the sum of the prices attached to the units she consumes we show that this method is characterized by the two standard axioms of additivity and dummy and the property of no merging or splitting agents never find it profitable to split or to merge their consumptions we offer a variant of this result using the no reshuffling condition the total cost share paid by a group of agents who consume perfectly substitutable goods depends only on their aggregate consumption we extend this characterization to the case where agents are allowed to consume bundles of goods