pareto improving campaign finance policy this paper argues that campaign finance policy in the form of contribution limits and matching public financing can be pareto improving even under very optimistic assumptions concerning the role of campaign advertising and the rationality of voters the optimistic assumptions are that candidates use campaign contributions to convey truthful information to voters about their qualifications for office and that voters update their beliefs rationally on the basis of the information they have seen the argument also assumes that campaign contributions are provided by interest groups and that candidates can offer to provide policy favors to attract higher contributions

the gender asset gap land in latin america summary the gender asset gap in latin america with respect to ownership of land is significant in few countries do women constitute even one quarter of the landowners gender inequality in land ownership is related to male preference in inheritance male privilege in marriage male bias in community and state programs of land distribution as well as gender bias in the land market with women less likely than men to be successful buyers but there are also important di erences by gender in how land is acquired inheritance is the primary means by which most women become landowners men are much more likely than women to acquire land through its distribution by communities or the state and via the market factors contributing toward a trend toward greater gender equity in land inheritance and in recent state programs are highlighted 2003 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

private food safety and quality standards for fresh produce exporters the case of hortico agrisystems zimbabwe abstract there is evidence that the challenges of complying with stricter food safety and quality standards are acting to exclude small scale producers from export supply chains for high value agricultural products the case of hortico agrisystems illustrates the considerable challenges and costs faced by supermarket suppliers in sourcing from a broad base of small scale producers in the context of evolving food safety and quality standards while small scale producers are able to achieve levels of compliance at least equal to those of large scale producers multi tiered and dynamic systems of control are required to maintain control these need to include measures that facilitate compliance incentives to reward good performance and penalties to punish non compliance in establishing a sustainable supply system in this context both exporters and small scale producers face a steep learning curve in adjusting to new requirements further emphasising the need for supply chains to be responsive to change

immiserized growth in liberalized agriculture abstract this paper offers a simple model that reconciles rivalrous claims about liberalization s impact on low income agrarian economies growth can accompany smallholder welfare reduction the model developed here reverses the causality of bhagwati s immiserizing growth model price shocks cause welfare effects that drive output response rather than output shocks causing price shocks and then welfare effects as in the trade theoretic original immiserized growth seems a plausible explanation for some important cases e g the malagasay case considered here in which liberalization appears to have engendered both real agricultural growth and heightened food security stress among smallholder food producers

determinants and impacts of rural land market activity evidence from nicaragua summary use of data from nicaragua to examine the performance of land rental and sales markets during 1995 98 which coincide with the implementation of major macroeconomic and sectoral reforms leads to three main conclusions first even though the data point toward an inverse farm size productivity relationship and large differences in land productivity between large and small producers land markets have not led to an equalization of returns among the groups considered second both in 1995 and in 1998 land sales markets have contributed to land concentration suggesting that credit market imperfections impeded demand in land sales markets third the policy reforms undertaken after 1995 have led to a structural shift in the performance of the land rental market instead of transferring land to large owners as it did in 1995 the land market now moves land from large to small producers the quantities involved however remain limited we conclude that if it is to contribute to equity and efficiency liberalization of land sales markets has to be complemented by measures to reduce the attractiveness of speculative land accumulation furthermore measures to reduce the transaction costs of land rental e g titling and to increase effective demand from small producers e g technical assistance and credit will be needed 2003 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

the economic theory of agrarian institutions introduction alternative approaches to the theory of institutions in economic development pranab bardhan rational peasants efficient institutions and a theory of rural organization methodological remarks for development economics joseph e stiglitz part 1 land and labour theories of sharecropping nirvikar singh a comparison of principal agent and bargaining solutions the case of tenancy contracts clive bell contracts with eviction in infinitely repeated principal agent relationships bhaskar dutta et al production relations in semi arid african agriculture hans binswanger et al part 2 credit and interlinked transactions rural credit markets the structure of interest rates exploitation and efficiency kaushik basu credit and agrarian class structure mukesh eswaran and ashok kotwal credit rationing tenancy productivity and the dynamics of inequality avishay braverman and joseph e stiglitz on choice among creditors and bonded labour contracts t n srinivasan some aspects of linked product and credit market contracts among risk neutral agents clive bell and t n srinivasan a note on interlinked rural economic arrangements pranab bardhan interlinkages and the pattern of competition debraj ray and kunal sengupta part 3 marketing and insurance agricultural institutions for insurance and stabilization david m newbery peasants risk aversion and the choice of marketing intermediaries and contracts a bargaining theory of equilibrium marketing contracts pinhas zusman part 4 co operatives technology and the state agricultural producer co operatives louis putterman institutional analysis of credit co operatives avishay braverman and j luis guasch agrarian structure technological innovations and the state alain de janvry et al

an economic model of representative democracy this paper develops an approach to the study of democratic policy making where politicians are selected by the people from those citizens who present themselves as candidates for public office the approach has a number of attractive features first it is a conceptualization of a pure form of representative democracy in which government is by as well as of the people second the model is analytically tractable being able to handle multidimensional issue and policy spaces very naturally third it provides a vehicle for answering normative questions about the performance of representative democracy

can land market reform mitigate the exclusionary aspects of rapid agro export growth abstract agro export growth has been associated with land concentration and employment instability in the wake of exclusionary agro export booms land market reform has been proposed as a way to improve peasant land access through the market developing a model of the economic competitiveness of different classes of producers this paper evaluates the likely effectiveness of land market reform while the model itself gives ambiguous answers numerical simulation identifies a large gap between market price and peasants abilty to pay for land among the components of land market reform policy progressive land taxation appears unlikely to close that competitiveness gap while farm land mortgage banks appear more likely to mitigate exclusionary aspects of growth

rural financial markets in low income countries recent controversies and lessons abstract recently some researchers have criticized traditional agricultural credit policies in low income countries this article identifies the major points of controversy between traditional views and these new views and also summarizes the primary lessons learned from these controversies savings mobilization more flexible interest rate policies less loan targeting and greater emphasis on improving the quality of financial services in rural areas are new views that are emphasized

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

adoption of agricultural innovations in developing countries a survey this paper reviews various studies which have provided a description and possible explanation to patterns of innovation adoption in the agricultural sector the survey points out that the tendency of many studies to consider innovation adoption in dichotomous terms adoption nonadoption may not be appropriate in many cases where the actual decisions are defined over a more continuous range more attention needs to be given to the socio cultural and institutional environment in area studies so that their interrelation with economic factors affecting adoption can be inferred the presence of several interrelated innovations is another aspect that needs to be considered more carefully in future research since a number of simultaneous decisions may be involved furthermore the possibility of regular sequential patterns in adopting components of a new technological package should be specifically addressed in future studies finally the impact of differential adoption rates on land holding distribution merits attention in future research

the provision of public goods under alternative electoral incentives politicians who care about the spoils of office may underprovide a public good because its benefits cannot be targeted to voters as easily as pork barrel spending we compare a winner take all system where all the spoils go to the winner to a proportional system where the spoils of office are split among candidates proportionally to their share of the vote in a winner take all system the public good is provided less often than in a proportional system when the public good is particularly desirable we then consider the electoral college system and show that it is particularly subject to this inefficiency

credit constraints credit unions and small scale producers in guatemala abstract efficient and equitable development outcomes may depend in part on whether formal financial institutions leave low wealth producers tightly constrained in their access to credit if so can cooperative institutions efficiently relax these constraints these issues are explored using survey data gathered from 950 small scale producer households in areas of guatemala with market oriented credit unions that mobilize savings and make unsubsidized loans nonprice rationing by banks is found to be common among lower wealth households while credit unions relax credit constraints for a significant portion of those rationed by banks but not the poorest of the study households

credibility and policy convergence in a two party system with rational voters the traditional approach to modeling political parties behavior based upon the contribution of anthony downs 1957 assumes that the parties unique objective is to win elections thus they maximize their popularity the crucial implication of this assumption for a two party system is that if the two parties have the same information about voters preferences full convergence of policies results from electoral competition this is the crucial implication of the median voter theorem more generally it may be argued that different parties are motivated differently because they represent different constituencies parties may not care only about winning elections per se but also about the quality of the policies resulting from an election in this case the candidates of the two parties view winning an election not only as a goal per se but also as a means of implementing a better policy for their respective constituencies this paper shows that electoral competitions imply dynamic inconsistency if the voters are modeled as rational and forwardlooking agents and parties do not care exclusively about being elected but also about which policy to implement once elected the dynamic inconsistency arises as follows the parties have an incentive to announce convergent platforms to increase their chances of election however if the elected party is not committed to its electoral platform it has an incentive to follow its most preferred policy rather than the policy announced in its platform if voters are rational they account for this incentive thus in general in a one shot electoral game the only timeconsistent equilibrium is one in which no convergence is possible the two parties follow their most preferred policies and the voters rationally expect this outcome full convergence of parties platforms results only as a limiting case when the parties are completely indifferent with respect to the quality of the policies resulting from the election thus these results differ from the existing literature on ideologically motivated politicians for instance donald wittman 1977 1983 randall calvert 1985 which implicitly assumes the possibility of binding commitments to electoral platforms complete or partial policy convergence can be the outcome of political competition if the interaction between the parties and the voters is modeled as an infinitely repeated game in fact if the candidates have concave objective functions the welfare maximizing policy rule implies a complete convergence of parties policies however this cooperative and agreed upon policy may or may not be sustainable as a subgame perfect equilibrium depending on parameter values in particular it depends on the discount rates of the two parties the degree of polarization of their preferences and the relative popu graduate school of industrial administration carnegie mellon university pittsburgh pa 15213 and national bureau of economic research cambridge ma 02138 this paper is based upon a chapter of my unpublished doctoral dissertation at harvard university i am greatly indebted to jeffrey sachs for directing my attention toward these issues and for many conversations i also wish to thank andrew abel dilip abreu olivier blanchard ramon caminal andrew caplin alex cukierman morris fiorina benjamin friedman herschel grossman howard rosenthal and the referees for very useful comments the responsibilitv af anv n mtnkieis af calrirp nfnlv mine the result of policy convergence in a two party system is more general than the median voter theorem for discussions of convergence results not at the median see john ledyard 1984 peter coughlin 1984 coughlin and shmuel nitzan 1981 melvin hinich 1977 for earlier work on spatial competition see richard mckelvey 1975 hinich ledyard and peter ordeshook 1972 1973 and the references quoted therein the present paper focuses on the result of convergence rather than on the median voter theorem per se

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

the impact of market friendly reforms on credit and land markets in honduras and nicaragua summary this article explores the impacts on credit access and agrarian structure of land market liberalization policies undertaken in honduras and nicaragua during the 1990s like liberalization efforts pursued in many latin american countries these market friendly reforms were designed to activate land transfers and enhance agricultural efficiency in large part by improving the access of the rural poor to both credit and land markets panel data sets gathered in honduras and nicaragua are used to compare title credit and land access patterns before and after the reforms descriptive nonparametric regression analyses show that despite major gains in titling across the land size spectrum and some increase in land market activity the other hoped for improvements in credit and land access did not occur and appear unlikely to occur without further policy attention to credit markets

the case for responsible parties electoral platform convergence is perceived unfavorably by both the popular press and many academic scholars arguably to paraphrase it does not provide enough choice between candidates this article provides a formal account of the perceived negative effects of platform convergence we show that when parties do not know voters preferences precisely all voters ex ante prefer some platform divergence to convergence at the ex ante median after characterizing the unique symmetric equilibrium of competition between responsible policy motivated parties we conclude that all voters ex ante prefer responsible parties to opportunistic purely office motivated ones when parties are sufficiently ideologically polarized that platforms diverge but not so polarized that they diverge excessively however greater polarization increases the scope for office benefits as an instrument for institutional design we calculate the socially optimal level of platform divergence and show that office benefits can be used to achieve this first best outcome if parties are sufficiently ideologically polarized

fair trade organic coffee rural livelihoods and the agrarian question southern mexican coffee families in transition summary we use a random sample of coffee producing households in southern mexico to compare opportunities associated with government subsidies and migration to the role of fair trade organic coffee in household livelihoods although land and labor returns among fair trade organic coffee growers are higher than for conventional growers differences in yields are more important than price premiums moreover investment in education and labor opportunities outside coffee dominate those in fair trade organic coffee the results highlight the value of an integrated approach to the agrarian question that improves productivity and prices and supports other pathways for improving incomes

agro export production and peasant land access examining the dynamic between adoption and accumulation abstract new technologies and export opportunities have often contributed to dualistic agrarian structure and intense social conflict in latin american a switching regression model developed in this paper explicitly links export adoption and land accumulation patterns controlling for pre existing differentiation processes applied to survey data gathered from peasant households in guatemala the model provides evidence of equitable structural change induced by a recent export boom in vegetable crops however the optimism of these results is tempered by consideration of the unfavorable longer term market dynamics confronting small scale producers

land reform as commenced business the evidence against stopping abstract in the new paradigm institutions are long term endogenous thus the aims of land reform must be compatible with replace or substitute for initial incentives and power structures many reforms e g compulsory collectives are not redefinition of land reform is therefore needed yet the case for private land redistribution with ceilings remains the inverse relationship rests firmly on lower cost labor transactions in small farms though large but competitive transport or processing firms which enjoy lower cost capital transactions may be needed crucial is the impact of the postreform structure on livelihoods especially for the growing rural majority near landless workers new style market based reforms have potential probably best combined with old style ceilings substantial compensation with urban taxpayers sharing costs alternative off farm prospects and progressive taxes on large landholdings or bequests

revenue non equivalence between auctions with soft and hard closing mechanisms new evidence from yahoo abstract we use a unique dataset to examine the revenue differences between auctions with a hard close ending rule versus those with a soft close ending rule we find that selling items using the soft close rule increases the selling price by an amount between 25 and 44 or 13 20 percent over the hard close format one possible theoretical explanation for these results is that the hard close ending rule accommodates the practice of sniping which leads to a lower expected selling price we find empirically that a lack of experience could help to explain why in spite of the revenue differences some sellers select the hard close ending rule

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

optimal districting with endogenous party platforms representation is one of the most important criteria by which to judge electoral systems in this paper i focus on one aspect of representative democracy the formation of electoral district boundaries it is well known that majoritarian systems give rise to highly biased seat vote curves causing representation to be less than ideal what should therefore be the optimal constituency design when the objective is to maximize voters welfare i show that when parties take account of districting while setting platforms then the district design problem reduces to a very simple rule do nothing when voters are risk neutral and when voters are risk averse choose a bias that is against the largest partisan group calibrating the model on data of the u s state legislative elections during the 1990s i show that the welfare gain due to optimal districting is very small

poverty livelihood and class in rural south africa abstract using data from a national living standards survey undertaken in late 1993 this paper disaggregates and explores the economics of livelihood generation and class in rural south africa in an effort to contribute to the ongoing and vociferous debate in south africa about poverty and its alleviation pursuant to the suggestion of participants in a recent participatory poverty assessment this paper analyzes what might be termed the class structure of poverty after exploring the range of claiming systems and livelihood tactics available in rural south africa the paper offers a first look at who the poor are by disaggregating the rural population into discrete livelihood strategy classes non parametric regression methods are used to then estimate and graphically explore the nature of the livelihood mapping between endowments and real incomes in addition to identifying those endowment combinations that map to consumption levels below the poverty line the asset basis of poverty the topography of the estimated livelihood mapping helps identify the constraints that limit household s ability to effectively utilize their assets and endowments these results suggest that poverty is a matter of not only having few assets but also of constraints which limit the effectiveness with which those assets are used and poverty and livelihood policy needs to be designed accordingly

socially optimal districting a theoretical and empirical exploration this paper investigates the problem of optimal districting in the context of a simple model of legislative elections in the model districting matters because it determines the seat vote curve which describes the relationship between seats and votes the paperrst characterizes the optimal seat vote curve and shows that under a weak condition there exist districtings that generate this ideal relationship the paper then develops an empirical methodology for computing seat vote curves and measuring the welfare gains from implementing optimal districting this is applied to analyze the districting plans used to elect u s state legislators during the 1990s

rural poverty in latin america determinants and exit paths abstract while rural poverty in latin america has declined over the last three decades success has been uneven across countries and rural poverty remains huge reduction in the number of rural relative to urban poor has been mainly the outcome of migration not of successful rural development we show that rural incomes are explained by the asset position of households and the characteristics of the context where assets are used given heterogeneity in asset positions and contexts many strategies to escape poverty consequently exist we identify four paths out of poverty exit agricultural pluriactive and assistance successful rural development to promote the agricultural and pluriactive paths requires a wholesale new approach based on regional development decentralization and participation agricultural technology has a role to play in these two strategies in latin america however the bulk of the benefits from technological change has been captured through indirect effects via the price of food employment creation and contributions to aggregate growth

promoting intersectoral growth linkages in rural africa through agricultural technology and policy reform this paper addresses how increased rural incomes in select african cases are spent on consumption items the implications of these patterns for stimulating rural growth and areas of intervention necessary to sustain demand led growth from improved agricultural technology and economic reforms the country studies utilize panel data collected by the international food policy research institute ifpri in collaboration with african institutions and re

economic underdevelopment the case of a missing market for human capital abstract this paper demonstrates that the coexistence of developed and underdeveloped countries can be a stationary equilibrium in a world economy with free trade in consumption goods and physical capital an underdeveloped country is characterized by a high ratio of unskilled workers in the labor force a small stock of physical capital a low gross national product a high rate of return on human capital and a corresponding large wage differential between skilled and unskilled workers the critical assumptions are that future labor earnings cannot serve as collateral on a loan and indivisibilities in education

level playing fields and laissez faire postliberal development strategy in inegalitarian agrarian economies focusing on the rural sector in latin america this paper explores the microeconomic linkages between distribution and growth which drive the possible reproduction of rural poverty over time the result of this exploration is a neostructuralist perspective which argues that actually existing laissez faire agrarian economies do not present a level playing field and that low wealth farms face disadvantages which tend to reproduce or even deepen sectoral inequality the paper then tries to identify the sorts of public policy and collective action which might modify the nature of growth and distribution in post liberalization agrarian market economy

behavioural and material determinants of production relations in agriculture in this essay we develop a framework for analysing the major institutions governing the production and exchange of output and the primary factors of production in rural areas the analysis incorporates general considerations of risk and information constraints jointly with the principal material attributes of agriculture and of agricultural production factors the framework is used to analyse barriers to the existence of the major intertemporal and factor markets it is applied specifically to land scarce environments for which it provides an internally consistent explanation for many of the well documented institutional features of such settings in addition the analysis provides new implications for among other phenomena the inter relationships among ownership holdings operational scale family size and factor productivity for the scarcity of animal rental markets and use of animals as collateral for the renting out of land by small landowners and for the existence of plantations for certain crops

electoral bias and policy choice theory and evidence this paper develops an approach to studying how bias in favor of one party due to the pattern of electoral districting affects policy choice we tie a commonly used measure of electoral bias to the theory of party competition and show how this affects party strategy in theory the usefulness of the approach is illustrated using data on local government in england the results suggest that reducing electoral bias leads parties to moderate their policies

penny capitalism efficient but poor or inefficient and less than second best abstract a re examination of sol tax s classic research from guatemala reveals that the data actually portray a real world example of the theory of second best early empirical evidence of an inverse relation between farm size and the labor land and output land ratios and case in which concentrated resource ownership in a setting of information and monitoring problems combined with missing or imperfect asset markets generates a pareto inefficient outcome the contemporary revelance of this finding is that it contributes to an understanding not only of persistent allocative inefficiency in guatemalan agriculture but also of the relative failure of the green revolution in latin america as compared with asia

the future of small farms new directions for services institutions and intermediation summary efficient pre and post harvest services are essential if small farms in high potential areas are to intensify production contribute to economic growth and reduce poverty they also matter if small farms in marginal areas are to manage their natural resource base in the face of growing population pressure and climate change difficulties that smallholders face in accessing services are reviewed showing how incentives for commercial delivery of services to smallholders differ between staple food traditional cash crop and high value product supply chains the major challenge in service delivery to smallholders in much of africa concerns coordination of service development and delivery different forms of intermediary institution for achieving such coordination are examined

distributive politics and the costs of centralization this paper studies the choice between centralization and decentralization of fiscal policy in a political economy setting with centralization regional delegates vote over agendas comprising sets of region specific projects the outcome is inefficient because the choice of projects is insufficiently sensitive to within region benefits the number of projects funded may be non monotonic in the strength of project externalities the efficiency gains from decentralization and the performance of constitutional rules such as majority voting which may be used to choose between decentralization and centralization are then discussed in this framework weaker externalities and more heterogeneity between regions need not increase the efficiency gain from decentralization

optimal gerrymandering sometimes pack but never crack standard intuitions for optimal gerrymandering involve concentrating one s extreme opponents in unwinnable districts packing and spreading one s supporters evenly over winnable districts cracking these intuitions come from models with either no uncertainty about voter preferences or only two voter types in contrast we characterize the solution to a problem in which a gerrymanderer observes a noisy signal of voter preferences from a continu ous distribution and creates n districts of equal size to maximize the expected number of districts she wins under mild regularity conditions we show that cracking is never optimal one s most ardent supporters should be grouped together moreover for sufficiently precise signals the optimal solution involves creating a district that matches extreme republicans with extreme democrats and then continuing to match toward the center of the signal distribution jel d72

non traditional crops traditional constraints long term welfare impacts of export crop adoption among guatemalan smallholders this study documents the long term welfare effects of household non traditional agricultural export ntx adoption the analysis uses a unique panel dataset which spans the period 1985 2005 and employs difference in differences estimation to investigate the long term impact of non traditional agricultural export adoption on changes in household consumption status and asset position in the central highlands of guatemala given the heterogeneity in adoption patterns the analysis differentiates the impact estimates based on a classification of households that takes into account the timing and duration of non traditional agricultural export adoption the results show that while on average welfare levels have improved for all households irrespective of adoption status and duration the extent of improvement has varied across groups long term adopters exhibit the smallest increase in the lapse of two decades in spite of some early gains conversely early adopters who withdrew from non traditional agricultural export production after reaping the benefits of the boom period of the 1980s are found to have fared better and shown greater improvements in durable asset position and housing conditions than any other category

rural market imperfections and the farm size productivity relationship evidence from pakistan the subject of this article is the relationships between farm size and productivity and between farm size and profitability in the developing countries the recent controversies over the inverse size output relationship are reviewed and a framework is provided that explains the inverse relationship based on plausible assumptions about imperfections in the markets for labor land credit and risk from this framework a set of testable hypotheses are derived the hypotheses are tested on recent farm level panel data from pakistan a strong inverse relationship between farm size and yield is present in the sample even when household fixed effects are used to account for unobserved heterogeneity moreover the suggested market imperfections framework is consistent with the data

is bioprospecting a viable strategy for conserving tropical ecosystems many prominent scientists avidly advocate bio prospecting the systematic search for new com mercial applications for biota especially hithertounstudied species as a mechanism for inducingtropical biodiversity conservation by making itcommercially attractive wilson 1992 reid et al 1993 paho 1996 weiss and eisner 1998 bio prospecting s premise is that nature contains hid den assets of potentially huge yet unknownmagnitude to humankind that can motivate andeven nance biodiversity conservation in the trop ics this undiscovered genetic or biochemical in formation is commonly framed in the context ofpotential improvements in medicine or food thusde ning a massive global population of potentialbene ciaries it is further argued that bioprospect ing can affect social and economic development indeveloping countries by rewarding biota rich butincome poor tropical communities that preserveand wisely manage their genetic resources thepremise of bioprospecting coupled with the claimthat practically all of humankind stands tobene t and perhaps most especially the poorestof the poor naturally leads to an urgent desire toconserve tropical biodiversity in order to enablediscovery extraction and value adding transfor mation of tropical biota speci cally it is claimed that bioprospectingstimulates conservation through two mechanisms first bioprospecting rms should be willing topay to preserve biodiversity for its innovationoption value since they stand to reap direct nan cial bene ts from any marketable discoveries sec ond conditional on an increase in life sciences rms willingness to pay for conservation localinhabitants and landholders valuation of biodi versity will change to the extent that they asstewards over biodiverse habitats are compen sated for their contribution to bioprospecting ac tivities to date most attention with respect to

cash crops in developing countries the issues the facts the policies the issue of cash crops is profoundly controversial the debate uses different definitions of the term and slides across levels of analysis from the household to the international economy it also cuts across arguments crops countries and time periods this paper sets out to order the debate it deals first with definitions and taxonomy and then reviews issues connected with cash crops and a growth b distribution c food security d dependency and e the environment the paper concludes that with appropriate policies cash crops can offer a route to equitable growth