partial vertical integration risk shifting and product rejection in the high value export supply chain the ghana pineapple sector summary high value export supply chains hold potential to improve smallholders welfare but their relative production inefficiency and moral hazard problems can cause exporters to prefer vertically integrated plantation production however pineapple exporters in ghana produce both for their own account and purchase from smallholders we hypothesize that vertical integration is only partial because exporters face large market risks that smallholders surprisingly are better able to absorb we show empirically that exporters average rejection rate of export quality fruit is high and varies in response to unanticipated fluctuations in european demand these results support the hypothesis and are consistent with theories of partial vertical integration but not the standard principal agent paradigm

specific experience household structure and intergenerational transfers farm family land and labor arrangements in developing countries data from indian rural household survey was used to test th hypothesis that the coexistence in traditional rural societies of extended intergenerational families infrequent land sales and high reliance on family members as farm laborers is the result of the economic advantages which accrue from the knowledge gained by farming a particular ploy of land over a long period of time the land specific experience of elderly members of a intergenerational household who farmed the land as a child and then as an adult are expecially critical in adverse weather years most previous investigators attributed the existence of multigenerational households the use of family members rather than hired laboreds and the infrequency of land sales to deficiencies in the market i e labor market imperfections and an absence of capital insurance and asset markets in the present investigations these same characteristics are viewed as having an economic advantages a model for estimating the contribution of the experience of the elderly household members to agricultural profits was developed and applied to data from a 3 year panel study of 2900 indian rural farm households the data was collected between 1968 71 by the national council of applied economic research the survey collected information on farm profits farm inputs demographic characteristics and the effects of weather conditions on profits a major limitation of the study was a lack of information on the duration of land ownership age of household members was substituted as a proxy for duration of ownership findings were consistent withe the hypothesis in poor agricultural years gross returns for households which contained an elderly household member were greater than the gross returns for comparable households which did not contain an elderly member the economic advantages of specific knowledge embodied in the experienced elderly farmer were comparable to the economic advantages which accrued to households whose members were more educated the hypothesis cannot fully explain the existence of intergenerational families since there is a relatively large proportion of such families among nonfarm families in many countries including india findings suggest that intergenerational families may provide for more occupational diversity and thereby reduce income risks the specific experience hypothesis has policy implications if technological changes are introduced the value of specific experience may be lost and the frequency of intergenerational households may decline the hypothesis may also explain why farmers are reluctant to agree to land redistribution and consolidation schemes this reluctance may disappear after sufficient technological change has occurred

mfca extension from a circular economy perspective model modifications and case study abstract as an innovative method of environment management accounting ema a model of material flow cost accounting mfca is widely used in the field of cost calculation in the manufacturing process industry and it has obtained a level of achievement in recent years based on the existing literature in the field this report argues that the application of the current mfca model in the process industry has defects such as content restrictions a single accounting index simple methodology and one sided conclusions among others this paper combines the current mfca model with the 3r principle of a circular economy ce and the industry characteristics of high consumption and pollution the research focuses on the iron and steel industry as a representative of a process manufacturing industry and forms a modified mfca model for an iron and steel enterprise according to the perspective of ce the modifications we make to the model occur in the fields of model content the accounting index the methodology of application and the extension of functionality finally through a specific case study this report verifies the comprehensive utility of the proposed modified model in general the modified mfca may to a certain extent be considered innovative in its approach to information and data connections extension of methods and procedures modes of disclosing information construction of evaluation analysis and management of circular decision making each of these elements is conducive to realizing a triple win situation for the conservation of resources energy providing an economic value add reducing the environmental load and enhancing the sustainable development of a resource constrained process industry

economic relationship between access to land and rural poverty in nepal in the present socio economic structure of nepal land is the main source of income and consumption for the majority of nepalese this study analyses the economic relationship between access to land and poverty in nepal by establishing the link between land and consumption as well as land and income a generalised additive model gam and ordinary least squares ols demonstrate that greater access to land increases income and consumption of the household and thereby reduces poverty the significant marginal value of land for both consumption and income implies that an effective land reform policy could well be an effective approach to alleviate rural poverty however land reform must come as part of a larger overhaul cluster analysis shows that land reform should target appropriate subgroups within the community in order to differentiate those who would make use of the extra land from those who would not and apply appropriate strategies to each subgroup it reveals the importance of subgroups in determining an appropriate strategy for tackling poverty

a retrospective impact evaluation of the tamil nadu empowerment and poverty alleviation pudhu vaazhvu project abstractcommunity based livelihood interventions which focus directly on increasing income and employment have become an increasingly important component of large scale poverty reduction programmes we evaluate the impact of a participatory livelihoods intervention the tamil nadu empowerment and poverty reduction pudhu vaazhvu project pvp using propensity score matching methods the paper explores the impact of pvp on its core goals of empowering women and the rural poor improving their economic welfare and facilitating public action we find significant effects of pvp on reducing the incidence of high cost debt and diversifying livelihoods we also find evidence of women s empowerment and increased political participation

from sick man of europe to economic superstar germany s resurgent economy in the late 1990s and into the early 2000s germany was often called the sick man of europe indeed germany s economic growth averaged only about 1 2 percent per year from 1998 to 2005 including a recession in 2003 and unemployment rates rose from 9 2 percent in 1998 to 11 1 percent in 2005 today after the great recession germany is described as an economic superstar in contrast to most of its european neighbors and the united states germany experienced almost no increase in unemployment during the great recession despite a sharp decline in gdp in 2008 and 2009 germany s exports reached an all time record of 1 738 trillion in 2011 which is roughly equal to half of germany s gdp or 7 7 percent of world exports even the euro crisis seems not to have been able to stop germany s strengthening economy and employment how did germany with the fourth largest gdp in the world transform itself from the sick man of europe to an economic superstar in less than a decade we present evidence that the specific governance structure of the german labor market institutions allowed them to react flexibly in a time of extraordinary economic circumstances and that this distinctive characteristic of its labor market institutions has been the main reason for germany s economic success over the last decade

trade and manufacturing jobs in germany the german economy exhibits rising service and declining manufacturing employment but this decline is much sharper in import competing than export oriented branches we first document the individual level job transitions behind those trends they are not driven by manufacturing workers who smoothly switch to services the observed shifts are entirely due to young entrants and returnees from non employment we then investigate if rising trade with china and eastern europe causally affected those labor flows exploiting variation across industries and regions we find that globalization did not speed up the manufacturing decline in germany it even retained those jobs in the economy

prohibition of factor market exchanges and technological choice in chinese agriculture this article constructs a model of technological choice in an economy where market exchanges in land and labour are prohibited empirical data on demand for tractors tractor usage and chemical fertilisers in china are employed to test several hypotheses derived from the theoretical model the theory implies that the impact of relative factor scarcity on the pattern of technological choice in such an economy is similar to that in a market economy as postulated by the hicks ruttan hayami binswanger hypothesis of induced technological change the empirical evidence is found to be consistent with the implications of the model

informal financial markets under liberalization in four african countries abstract this paper presents survey evidence from four countries on how informal financial agents serve market niches that banks cannot readily reach their methodologies are effective in keeping down transaction costs and default risk relative to banks although informal agents exercise monopoly power in dualistic markets liberalization of repressive financial policies has had little effect on formal financial deepening while informal finance has continued to grow the paper concludes that informal financial institutions are an important vehicle for mobilizing household savings and financing small businesses and it recommends that informal finance be better integrated into financial development strategies

inter organizational cost management systems the case of the tokyo yokohama kamakura supplier chain abstract japanese firms are opting to blur their organizational boundaries in many ways approaches adopted include sharing research and development projects placing their employees in other firms and the development of inter organizational cost management systems blurring organizational boundaries improves the efficiency of the entire value chain from raw material to customer organizational blurring typically occurs when information that is critical to one firm is possessed by another firm either further up or down the value chain the two or more firms then create relationships that share organizational resources including information the sharing of resources improves both inter and intra organizational coordination a field study analyzing the cost management practices of three japanese firms in the same supplier chain identified the development of inter organizational cost management systems these systems are designed to create downward cost pressures on the entire supplier chain this pressure is achieved through several different mechanisms including target costing systems minimum cost investigations and quality price functionality tradeoffs these mechanisms relieve sales of the responsibility for pressuring manufacturing on cost and allows them to focus on other areas of coordination between the functions the objective of these inter organizational systems is to identify innovative ways to reduce the cost of the products supplied by the chain in theory these mechanisms should result in lower cost products by allowing all of the firms in the chain to share information this sharing leads to better solutions to the cost reduction problem by designing products jointly the firms can try to reach a global minimum cost instead of a series of local minimum costs

segmentation in the informal credit markets the case of the philippines this paper explains market segmentation that occurs in the philippine informal credit markets through the matching of borrowers and lenders by their occupational specializations to internalize transaction costs and facilitate economic activity the regression results support a predictable pattern of matching farmer lenders with borrowers specialized in non farm activities and trader lenders with borrowers specialized in farming

us manufacturing understanding its past and its potential future abstract the development of the us manufacturing sector over the last half century displays two striking and somewhat contradictory features 1 the growth of real output in the us manufacturing se

should african rural development strategies depend on smallholder farms an exploration of the inverse productivity hypothesis in africa most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms an underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the african context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale a premise supported by the often observed phenomenon that staple cereal yields decline as the scale of production increases this paper explores a research design conundrum that encourages researchers who study the relationship between productivity and scale to use surveys with a narrow geographic reach when policy would be better served with studies based on wide and heterogeneous settings using a model of endogenous technology choice the authors explore the relationship between maize yields and scale using alternative data since rich descriptions of the decision environments that farmers face are needed to identify the applied technologies that generate the data improvements in the location specificity of the data should reduce the likelihood of identification errors and biased estimates however the analysis finds that the inverse productivity hypothesis holds up well across a broad platform of data despite obvious shortcomings with some components it also finds surprising consistency in the estimated scale elasticities

landownership concentration and the expansion of education we study the relationship between large landownership concentration and the expansion of mass education in nineteenth century prussia cross sectional estimates show a negative association between landownership concentration and enrollment rates fixed effects panel estimates indicate that regions with an initially stronger landownership concentration exhibit increasing enrollment rates this relationship is not driven by differences in the supply of schooling we argue that the implementation of agricultural reforms including the stepwise abolition of serfdom is an important driver of the change in enrollment the results are consistent with the interpretation that emancipation from labor coercion increased the private demand for education

material flow cost accounting looking back and ahead abstract material flow cost accounting mfca combines physical flows and monetary units and is located between energy and material efficiency analyses environmental management and managerial accounting procedures since the development of iso 14051 2011 research and application in industry increased but still some theoretical methodological and practical gaps exist this special volume addresses some of the existing deficits and shows the fertile contribution of mfca on resource efficiency as can been seen by the articles and case studies in this special volume mfca still is continuously spreading into further countries and the methodology is extended refined and elaborated and increasingly applied in combination with various other tools and concepts the main challenges are still the continuous implementation of the method in industry and the public dissemination of the results

rural wages labor supply and land reform a theoretical and empirical analysis land reform is one of the most mentioned of the theoretical policy instruments discussed in the development literature yet relatively little attention has been paid to the wage rate consequences of such a program despite the fact that perhaps more than one half of rural families in a developing country receive a substantial proportion of their income from wage earnings in agriculture one reason for this lacuna may be that the determination of wages and family labor supply in the agricultural sector of ldcs has also been somewhat neglected particularly in the context of a heterogeneous labor force 2 the subsistence or institutional wage models of w arthur lewis john fei and gustav ranis and gerald rodgers for instance offer no theory of how rural wage levels or differentials are set and thus provide little guidance on how wage rates would be affected by changes in land ownership patterns more recently pranab bardhan and t n srinivasan david newbery and clive bell and pinhas zusman who formulate general equilibrium market or bargaining models determining endogenously the rental share paid by tenant sharecroppers have assumed that agricultural wage rates are exogenous or determined only by nonagricultural factors all of these models assume that rural labor is homogeneous another reason why the potential wage impact of a land reform program may have received little attention is that models of peasant family behavior such as those of a k sen dipak mazumdar and robert mabro typically embody two restrictive assumptions which would tend to make the equalization of landholdings appear wage augmenting although this implication has never been formally derived these assumptions are that 1 agriculture is dualistic with small farm families facing lower shadow prices of labor leisure than large farm landlords because of impediments to labor mobility and 2 agricultural households are dichotomous small farmers employ family labor and maximize utility while large farms only utilize wage labor and maximize profits data from a 1970 71 allindia survey of over 5 000 households collected by the national council of applied economic research3 indicate however that almost all cultivator households large and small participate actively in the labor market as either buyers or sellers of labor services with almost 88 percent of households cultivating a gross cropped area less than 1 5 acres utilizing some hired labor seventynine percent of these small farm households associate professor yale ujniversity the research embodied in this paper was supported in part by a grant from the ford and rockefeller foundations program in support of social science and legal research on population policy and with funds from the u s agency for international development under order no aid otr 1432 helpful suggestions and comments were provided by james l mccabe mark gersovitz an anonymous referee the managing editor and members of the economic growth center yale university i am also grateful to the members of the research program in development studies princeton university for the use of their facilities research assistance was provided by james devine anne morgan and roberta robson inotable exceptions are r albert berry mark gersovitz and m a rahman all of these authors however employ geometric analyses with differing assumptions leading to wholly different predictions regarding wage effects none consider the heterogeneity of agricultural labor pay attention to questions of stability or attempt to apply their models to data 2lnformation on the differential impact of alternative agricultural policies including land reform on sex or age specific wage rates is not only important in settling income distribution and equity issues but as suggested in an article by the author and robert evenson may have significant implications for population growth and schooling as well 3for a more detailed discussion of these data see the author

informal finance through land pawning contracts evidence from the philippines land pawning contracts have increased in importance in philippine rice growing villages and this article examines the determinants of choice of pawning contracts and the observed loan size the analysis shows that pawning is an informal credit instrument used by small farmers to obtain large loans to finance productive investments such as non farm employment where the returns to investment are high the econometric results suggest that poorer farm households pawn out land while wealthier farm households pawn in the observed loan size is explained by reputation of pawners and rice cropping intensity in the region

land tenure differences and investment in land improvement measures theoretical and empirical analyses this article develops a theoretical framework to examine the relationship between land tenure arrangements and households investment in soil improving and conservation measures it then analyzes this relationship with a multivariate probit model based on detailed plot level data from villages in the brong ahafo region of ghana a major hypothesis tested is that investment in productivity enhancing and conservation techniques are influenced by land tenure arrangements the theoretical analysis and empirical results generally reveal that land tenure differences significantly influence farmers decisions to invest in land improving and conservation measures the findings also show that tenure security does affect farm productivity

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

collective agricultural production a solution for transition economies abstract the paper examines theoretical reasons and provides examples for productivity differences between agricultural service cooperatives and collectives service cooperatives can utilize economies of scale enhance competitiveness and provide technical information advantages that often outweighed problems of free riding low investment and excessive political intervention agricultural collectives while not adding substantial advantages are in addition associated with problems of supervision and effort supply tendencies to substitute casual workers or mechanization for regular members and low investment incentives while collective forms of organization in transition economies respond to high risk and market imperfections they do so inefficiently policies that create conditions for service cooperatives to compete may lead to large productivity gains

introduction of material flow cost accounting mfca to the supply chain a questionnaire study on the challenges of constructing a low carbon supply chain to promote resource efficiency the purpose of the present article is to identify the requirements and challenges of promoting a low carbon supply chain caused by the introduction of material flow cost accounting mfca to this end the role of an mfca leader company within the low carbon supply chain was examined next the results of a questionnaire study that was carried out in 2012 were shown in the second part of the paper the questionnaire was sent to the listed industrial enterprises 1 561 enterprises in japan and the response rate was 22 8 356 questionnaires received the status quo of information sharing between the buyers and suppliers along the supply chain preconditions and requirements for introducing mfca was considered the study showed that setting environmental indicators as performance evaluation criteria of a company s purchasing department as well as explaining the performance of mfca to the purchasing department on the one hand and promoting inter organizational information sharing between buyers and suppliers on the other are important steps in order to effectively introduce mfca in the supply chain