agricultural productivity hired labor wages and poverty evidence from bangladesh this paper provides evidence on the effects of agricultural productivity on wage rates labor supply to market oriented activities and labor allocation between own farming and wage labor in agriculture to guide the empirical work this paper develops a general equilibrium model that underscores the role of reallocation of family labor engaged in the production of non marketed services at home home production the model predicts positive effects of a favorable agricultural productivity shock on wages and income but the effect on hired labor is ambiguous it depends on the strength of reallocation of labor from home to market production by labor surplus and deficit households taking rainfall variations as a measure of shock to agricultural productivity and using subdistrict level panel data from bangladesh this paper finds significant positive effects of a favorable rainfall shock on agricultural wages labor supply to market work and per capita household expenditure the share of hired labor in contrast declines substantially in response to a favorable productivity shock which is consistent with a case where labor deficit households respond more than the labor surplus ones in reallocating labor from home production

has india s economic growth become more pro poor in the wake of economic reforms the extent to which india s poor have benefited from the country s economic growth has long been debated a new series of consumption based poverty measures spanning 50 years including a 15 year period after economic reforms began in earnest in the early 1990s is used to examine that issue growth has tended to reduce poverty including in the post reform period there is no robust evidence of more or less poverty responsiveness to growth since the reforms began although there are signs of rising inequality the impact of growth is higher when using poverty measures that reflects distribution below the poverty line and when using growth rates calculated from household surveys rather than national accounts the urban rural pattern of growth matters for the pace of poverty reduction however in marked contrast to the period before the reforms urban economic growth in the period after the reforms has brought significant gains to the rural poor as well as the urban poor

agriculture led growth foodgrains versus export crops in madagascar abstract this article compares the growth generating power of alternative agricultural development strategies in madagascar projections from a semi input output model and a recently developed social accounting matrix suggest that both paddy and export crops stimulate strong linkages with other sectors of the malagasy economy but since paddy output can be increased at lower cost investment in rehabilitating small irrigated rice perimeters generates 40 to 100 more gdp than a comparable investment in coffee production paddy also generates greater employment and a more equitable income distribution

discussion of a simulation model for a competitive generation market two sets of authors discuss the paper a simulation model for a competitive generation market see ibid vol 15 no 1 p 250 6 2000 requesting comments and clarification on the proposed simulation tool for mainland spain s competitive electricity market the original authors responses to these discussions are also included

farm productivity and rural poverty in india armed with new data we return to an old question from the pages of this journal to what extent do india s rural poor share in agricultural growth combining data from 24 household sample surveys spanning 35 years with other sources we estimate a model of the joint determination of consumption poverty measures agricultural wages and food prices we find that higher farm productivity brought both absolute and relative gains to poor rural households a large share of the gains was via wages and prices though these effects took time the benefits to the poor were not confined to those near the poverty line

poverty decline agricultural wages and non farm employment in rural india 1983 2004 the authors analyze five rounds of national sample survey data covering 1983 1987 8 1993 4 1999 0 and 2004 5 to explore the relationship between rural diversification and poverty poverty in rural india declined at a modest rate during this period the authors provide region level estimates that illustrate considerable geographic heterogeneity in this progress poverty estimates correlate well with region level data on changes in agricultural wage rates agricultural labor remains the preserve of the uneducated and also to a large extent of the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes although agricultural labor grew as a share of total economic activity over the first four rounds it had fallen back to the levels observed at the beginning of the survey period by 2004 this all india trajectory masks widely varying trends across states during this period the rural non farm sector grew modestly mainly between the last two survey rounds regular non farm employment remains largely associated with education levels and social status that are rare among the poor however casual labor and self employment in the non farm sector reveal greater involvement by disadvantaged groups in 2004 than in the preceding rounds the implication for poverty is not immediately clear the poor may be pushed into low return casual non farm activities due to lack of opportunities in the agricultural sector rather than being pulled by high returns offered by the non farm sector econometric estimates reveal that expansion of the non farm sector is associated with falling poverty via two routes a direct impact on poverty that is likely due to a pro poor marginal incidence of non farm employment expansion and an indirect impact attributable to the positive effect of non farm employment growth on agricultural wages the analysis also confirms the important contribution to rural poverty reduction from agricultural productivity availability of land and consumption levels in proximate urban areas

regional growth linkages from agriculture pioneering research on downstream linkages from agriculture is said to demonstrate that consumption links rather than production links are the main source of indrect growth effects that these consumption links take the form of labour intensive goods and services produced locally and that the largest farm enterprises are most locally multiplicative of activities mopping up surplus rural labour this article has two purposes first the methodologies assumptions and data base for the quantification of the local and non local regional multiplier effects from agricultural development are examined second the contradictory interpretations for agricultural policy which have arisen from these exercises of quantification are discussed and an attempt made to explain their bases

evaluation of alternatives for power system coordination and pooling in a competitive environment the paper defines and classifies essential issues that relate the need for electric power system coordination with the increasing development of competition principles are formulated and a coordination model and a market structure are proposed emphasizing the need for economic dispatch in the wholesale market a detailed comparison is made of the market and pooling implementations developed in argentina and chile countries that have pioneered the creation of competitive markets in the electric energy sector an evaluation of strengths and weaknesses of those two implementations is included

modeling agricultural growth multipliers agriculture s potential as an engine of third world growth depends in large part on the size of the production and consumption linkages it stimulates in rural regions current estimates of agricultural growth multipliers within rural regions vary widely not only because economic structures differ across regions but also because the array of fixed price models most commonly used embody widely differing basic assumptions among fixed price models the semi input output formulation projects the most plausible multipliers but even they overstate the magnitude of growth multipliers by 10 to 25 according to the price endogenous model developed here

poverty and distributional effects of a carbon tax in mexico abstract mexico recently declared ambitious goals in reducing domestic co2 emissions and introduced a carbon tax in 2014 although negative effects on household welfare and related poverty measures are widely discussed as possible consequences empirical evidence is missing we try to fill this gap by simulating an input output model coupled with household survey data to examine the welfare effects of different carbon tax rates over the income distribution the currently effective tax rate is small and has negligible effects on household welfare higher simulated tax rates maintaining the current tax base show a slight progressivity but welfare losses remain moderate welfare losses regressivity and poverty rise more with widening the tax base towards natural gas and the other greenhouse gases methane ch4 and nitrous oxide n2o mainly through food price increases for a complete analysis of the policy we simulate a redistribution of calculated tax revenues and find that the resulting effects become highly progressive also for high rates wider tax bases and even in the absence of perfect targeting of social welfare programs

measuring poverty in a growing world or measuring growth in a poor world the extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years although there are better data than ever before controversies are not resolved a major problem is that consumption measured from household surveys which is used to measure poverty grows less rapidly than consumption measured in national accounts in the world as a whole and in large countries particularly india china and the united states in consequence measured poverty has fallen less rapidly than appears warranted by measured growth in poor countries one plausible cause is that richer households are less likely to participate in surveys but growth in the national accounts is also upward biased and consumption in the national accounts contains large and rapidly growing items that are not consumed by the poor and not included in surveys so it is possible for consumption of the poor to grow less rapidly than national consumption without any increase in measured inequality current statistical procedures in poor

economic reforms in india since 1991 has gradualism worked opinions on the causes of india s growth deceleration vary world economic growth was slower in the second half of the 1990s and that would have had some dampening effect but india s dependence on the world economy is not large enough for this to account for the slowdown critics of liberalization have blamed the slowdown on the effect of trade policy reforms on domestic industry however the opposite view is that the slowdown is due not to the effects of reforms but rather to the failure to implement the reforms effectively this in turn is often attributed to india s gradualist approach to reform which has meant a frustratingly slow pace of implementation however even a gradualist pace should be able to achieve significant policy changes over ten years this paper examines india s experience with gradualist reforms from this perspective

population growth and poverty another look at the indian time series data previous studies of the time trend of rural poverty in india agree in assuming that population size does not influence poverty independently of per capita agricultural output the article examines this assumption for the 1959 160 to 1970 71 period using a pooled model with variable slope coefficients to avoid the problem of collinearity between population estimates and time the results suggest that poverty in india during 1960s was a function of both agricultural production and population but that the properties of this function are significantly different from those generally posited

top indian incomes 1922 2000 this article presents data on the evolution of top incomes and wages for 1922 2000 in india using individual tax return data the data show that the shares of the top 0 01 percent 0 1 percent and 1 percent in total income shrank substantially from the 1950s to the early to mid 1980s but then rose again so that today these shares are only slightly below what they were in the 1920s and 1930s this u shaped pattern is broadly consistent with the evolution of economic policy in india from the 1950s to the early to mid 1980s was a period of socialist policies in india whereas the subsequent period starting with the rise of rajiv gandhi saw a gradual shift toward more pro business policies although the initial share of the top income group was small the fact that the rich were getting richer had a nontrivial impact on the overall income distribution although the impact is not large enough to fully explain the gap observed during the 1990s between average consumption growths shown in national sample survey based data and the national accounts based data it is sufficiently large to explain a non negligible part of it

measuring segregation of the poor evidence from india summary compared to the extensive literature on measurement of poverty the question of how the poor are distributed regionally has received less attention this paper fills the gap in the literature by providing a conceptual framework to measure inequality in the distribution of the poor a poverty segregation curve is used to compare a region s share of the poor population with its share in the overall population a unique contribution of the paper is formulating a generalized version of the poverty segregation curve unlike the segregation curve the generalized segregation curve also takes average poverty rates into account while ranking distributions thus the generalized segregation curve may rank a distribution with substantially lower poverty rates above a distribution with higher poverty rates when differences between their segregation curves are relatively small the segregation curves are used to analyze changes in the distribution of the poor in india since the economic reforms in the early 1990s poverty rates and shares among all states territories and districts in india are estimated using data from the national sample survey organization in 1994 2004 and 2010 in the decades following the reforms india witnessed high growth rates and declining poverty rates despite the reduction in poverty our analysis is the first to reveal that there was a significant rise in segregation of the poor over time some states had disproportionately high share of the poor compared to their share in the total population within states the extent of segregation was lower among some of the poorest states and higher in less poor states the generalized segregation curves show that the substantial decline in poverty rates since the reforms was not adequate to compensate the rise in segregation of the poor increase in segregation was also evident when the poor are identified as those who lacked education health and access to basic services reducing the segregation of the poor is important if india is to attain regionally balanced economic growth

is india s economic growth leaving the poor behind there has been much debate about how much india s poor have shared in the economic growth unleashed by economic reforms in the 1990s the authors argue that india has probably maintained its 1980s rate of poverty reduction in the 1990s however there is considerable diversity in performance across states this holds some important clues for understanding why economic growth has not done more for india s poor india s economic growth in the 1990s has not been occurring in the states where it would have the most impact on poverty nationally if not for the sectoral and geographic imbalance of growth the national rate of growth would have generated a rate of poverty reduction that was double india s historical trend rate states with relatively low levels of initial rural development and human capital development were not well suited to reduce poverty in response to economic growth the study s results are consistent with the view that achieving higher aggregate economic growth is only one element of an effective strategy for poverty reduction in india the sectoral and geographic composition of growth is also important as is the need to redress existing inequalities in human resource development and between rural and urban areas

artificial power markets and unintended consequences administrative pricing rules that try to mimic economic equilibria often fail to capture the complexity of real markets and in that failure can distort incentives as much as or more than cost based pricing in this paper the authors provide three examples of the failure of administrative mechanisms meant to mimic a market two of those examples are very relevant to current debates over industry restructuring in each case the pricing rule fails to maximize social welfare even though in the last two examples production cost is minimized

district level economic linkages in kenya evidence based on a small regional social accounting matrix abstract this paper explores the nature and extent of the economic linkages in a small regional economy defined by a market center and its hinterland in kenya the analysis is based on a set of income and employment multipliers derived from a social accounting matrix estimated for the region issues considered include the impact of production activities on regional value added and employment the influence of sectoral production on the level of household income and the impact of household expenditure on regional value added and the relative significance of production and consumption linkages in terms of stimulating aggregate income the above questions are examined under the assumption of complete excess capacity in regional production and under the assumption of supply constraints in agriculture the usefulness of the analysis for district level economic planning is demonstrated

production prices and poverty in rural india this paper challenges the view that increases in agricultural production have reduced poverty in rural india rural poverty is related directly to the consumer price index number for agricultural labourers and inversely to agricultural production the underlying time trend term indicates a residual rising trend in rural poverty after accounting for the influence of these two factors there are plausible though conjectural reasons for believing that to a significant extent the price factor as well as the variables implicit in the time trend term both derive their strength if not their existence from the nature of the growth processes which have generated the observed growth in agricultural production these results contradict ahluwalia s earlier conclusions even though they are themselves based on essentially the same data set

corporations and local economies in the brazilian amazon the impacts of the mining sectors scheduled investments in southeastern para 2004 2010 southeastern para is an extraordinarily dynamic region there were large cattle ranching projects financed in the 1960s expansion of peasant agriculture mineral projects and gold prospecting followed the ranching projects also important structural transformations reinforced the role of the urban centres and the local rural bases in the logistics of new economic sectors conditioned by the presence of companhia vale do rio doce cvrd in the region since 1985 this article presents the results of an input output analysis of the investment programme of cvrd from year 2004 up to 2010 the main findings are that the mineral sector has achieved a considerable influence over the economy of southeastern para so that during the cycle of investments each 1 in the growth of the mineral production creates growth possibilities of about 0 83 for the agricultural sector and about 0 86 for the local urban sectors considering just the production growth a percentile point will imply growth at respectively 0 73

tariff pass through and the distributional effects of trade liberalization abstract this paper estimates the distribution of welfare gains due to the trade reforms in india by simultaneously considering the effect on prices of tradable goods and wages the cost of consumption for each household is affected by the domestic price changes while wage incomes adjust to these price changes in equilibrium three rounds of the indian employment and consumption surveys are used for the analysis the price transmission mechanisms are estimated for both rural and urban areas to understand the extent to which the trade reforms are able to affect the domestic prices in order to assess the distributional effects a series of nonparametric local linear regressions are estimated the findings show that households at all per capita expenditure levels had experienced gains as a result of the trade liberalization while the average effect was generally pro poor and varied significantly across the per capita expenditure spectrum

the future of small farms trajectories and policy priorities summary while smallholder development has in the past led to reductions in poverty and hunger does this still apply in today s more globalized world this paper reviews the debates on the contemporary role of agriculture in development and the case for small farms in light of the rise of supermarkets lower commodity prices and liberalized trade agricultural research funding environmental change hiv aids and changing policy ideas although the answers vary greatly by context for many low income countries smallholder development remains a key option the policy agenda however has changed in addition to providing public goods the growing challenge is to overcome market failures which is largely a matter of institutional innovation

why has economic growth been more pro poor in some states of india than others abstract we use 20 household surveys for india s 15 major states spanning 1960 1994 to study how the sectoral composition of economic growth and initial conditions interact to influence how much growth reduced consumption poverty the elasticities of measured poverty to farm yields and development spending did not differ significantly across states but the elasticities of poverty to urban and rural non farm output varied appreciably and the differences were quantitatively important to the overall rate of poverty reduction states with higher elasticities did not experience higher rates of non farm growth the non farm growth process was more pro poor in states with initially higher literacy higher farm productivity higher rural living standards relative to urban areas lower landlessness and lower infant mortality

economic growth and equality of opportunity the paper proposes an approach to understand the relationship between inequality and economic growth obtained by shifting the analysis from the space of final achievements to the space of opportunities to this end it introduces a formal framework based on the concept of the opportunity growth incidence curve this framework can be used to evaluate the income dynamics of specific groups of the population and to infer the role of growth in the evolution of inequality of opportunity over time the paper shows the relevance of the introduced framework by providing two empirical analyses one for italy and the other for brazil these analyses show the distributional impact of the recent growth experienced by brazil and the recent crisis suffered by italy from both the income inequality and opportunity inequality perspectives

agricultural growth linkages in guatemala new insights from a value chain approach the agricultural growth linkage debate substantiates that agriculture contributes to economic growth through its linkages to other sectors this paper contributes to the debate by combining a value chain approach with input output analysis results for guatemala show that the sectors linked to agriculture are predominantly informal sectors and that these sectors create less value added but more employment than formal sectors it is also demonstrated that forward linkages are more important than backward linkages in conclusion agricultural linkages to forward sectors have a high potential to generate employment and value added and therefore should be supported by development policies

aspects of moral change in india 1990 2006 evidence from public attitudes toward tax evasion and bribery summary observers have asserted that india s economic rise coincides with moral change this study assesses some notable aspects of this claim by using public attitudes toward tax evasion and bribery as indicators of moral values using repeated cross sectional data from the world values surveys i find that tolerance for tax evasion and bribery grew relatively slightly from 1991 to 1996 and then increased rapidly from 2001 to 2006 double interaction regression models show tolerance converging by gender and religion and tolerance diverging between the poor and non poor however the regional patterns are complex finally university educational attainment is associated with decreasing tolerance

consumer payment minimization in power pool auctions this paper presents a new methodology within the framework of centralized optimization for calculating optimal generation schedules that minimize energy payments by power pool consumers this paper addresses issues related to market structure and the operation of power pools such as bid evaluation generator no load and start up cost recovery generator unit operating constraints and market clearing price determination unlike conventional unit commitment algorithms that minimize total energy production costs the method presented here minimizes payments by power pool consumers a payment minimization objective leads to a different unit commitment and dispatch solution and lower market clearing prices additionally optimal allocation of generator no load and start up costs over the scheduling period is integrated in the bid evaluation process leading to a further reduction in consumer payments

agricultural productivity growth rural economic diversity and economic reforms india 1970 2000 a salient theme in d gale johnson s work is the importance of agricultural development for general prosperity and for economic diversification e g johnson 2000 johnson has also noted that most of the world s poor are engaged in farming so that a key focus of development policy is to raise the incomes of farmers from a global perspective increasing the productivity of agriculture given the fixity of land is necessary for both poverty reduction and the development of the nonagricultural sector at the level of the world agricultural productivity gains poverty reduction and the growth of the nonfarm sector are complements however the question remains whether these observations imply that every poor country should focus its public resources on agricultural development in order to raise the incomes of people now engaged in farming and whether such a policy is necessary for obtaining economic diversity in this article we use the experience of india over the past 30 years to address the issue of whether agricultural technical change actually leads to economic diversification and income growth within the rural sector in the context of an open economy country in which there are cross area trade and capital flows we focus in particular on the rural sector because this is the sector in which linkages between agricultural and nonagricultural sectors are thought to be the strongest we exploit the fact that india has maintained a policy of openness with respect to agricultural technology over this period permitting and actively supporting agricultural development and has moved to a reformed regime in which goods are traded and capital is more mobile in the 1990s evidence on the relationship between agricultural growth and nonfarm

auction implementation problems using lagrangian relaxation lagrangian relaxation lr is used as an auction method for bidding in a deregulated environment this paper focuses on the problems that occur while using lr as an auction method identical or similar units can prevent lr from finding the optimal solution if the units are similar lr may have trouble selecting some of them for the optimal solution a feasible solution may thus not be found since a heuristic selection of which unit data to alter has to be applied this is inequitable to the unit s not selected and may result in lawsuit s because the dispatcher has to use heuristic selection there is no fair solution to these problems the authors suggest previously published methods to implement auctions sensitivity analysis has also been applied in this paper to show that the percentage difference of similarity between units may affect the solution found

evolution and human nature from an economic perspective on individual decision making human beings have three key characteristics preferences beliefs and rationality beliefs are the probabilities with which people think various outcomes will occur conditional on information that might be available preferences are the rankings over the set of gambles that are based on such beliefs over the outcomes rationality is the extent to which people succeed in choosing optimal actions in the light of their beliefs and preferences and the extent to which their beliefs are appropriately modified by their information economists typically impose only rather weak assumptions on preferences for example preferences are taken to be transitive and sometimes less explicitly exogenous and unchanging stronger assumptions are typically imposed on preferences in specific contexts however for example preferences over time might be represented by an additively separable function with constant rate of discount despite widespread recognition that this case is a special one further attitudes to risk are often represented by the expected utility theorem which rests on assumptions that are strong if also appealing the assumptions made on rationality in particular are usually very strong that is rationality in economic models usually entails the exact optimization of preferences and modification of beliefs in accordance with bayes theorem the economist s basic picture of preferences beliefs and rationality has been subject to challenges from a growing number of empirical anomalies the proposed explanations of these anomalies involve relaxing the assumptions that economists make on these preferences beliefs or rationality for example preferences

poverty and growth in india over six decades we study the evolution of consumption poverty measures for post independence india including 20 years since extensive economic reforms began in 1991 progress against poverty was negligible until the mid 1970s after which a downward trend in poverty measures emerged the pace of poverty reduction accelerated in the post reform period despite rising inequality amidst faster growth a key finding is that the relationship to the pattern of growth changed greatly suggesting stronger intersectoral linkages with urban consumption growth benefiting both the rural and urban poor in contrast to the pre reform period growth in primary secondary and tertiary sector outputs yielded similar impacts on poverty

education and household inequality change a decomposition analysis for india previous studies show that rising returns to education have lead to higher wage inequality in developing countries however given the importance of non wage employment and indirect effects of education through labour supply and fertility choices a similar relationship does not necessarily hold for inequality between households based on a decomposition analysis for india we find counteracting impacts of education on household expenditure inequality declining returns to education of household heads reduced inequality driven by the self employed in contrast rising returns to spouses education increased inequality in urban areas we also find that changes in education levels increased rural and urban inequality due to persistently high illiteracy finally the indirect effect on fertility had a small equalizing impact in urban areas but slightly increased inequality in rural areas

a simulation model for a competitive generation market the simulation of a wholesale electricity market should go beyond a simple optimization based on the operating costs of the generating units a model of a competitive electricity market must consider the market structure the strategy of the market participants and any other factor that lead to prices different from costs this paper presents cosmee a model of a wholesale electricity market based on simple bids that estimates expected bid prices and quantities system hourly prices and generation schedules taking into account the bidding strategies of generators and the structure of the market the model reflects the profit maximizing behavior of the market agents subject to different types of constraints cosmee has been used to simulate a real wholesale market