a multiplier decomposition method to analyze poverty alleviation abstract the objective of this paper is to present a multiplier decomposition method focusing on poverty alleviation the decomposition captures the various mechanisms and linkages through which a production sector s output contributes to poverty alleviation within a socioeconomic system represented by a social accounting matrix sam it is shown that a multiplier can be broken down into two multiplicative effects the distributional and interdependency effects the decomposition method is applied to the case of indonesia a key policy implication is that the human capital of the poor needs to be enhanced if they are not to be sealed off from the industrialization process

cost sharing arrangements under sharecropping moral hazard incentive flexibility and risk this paper explains the rationale and describes the characteristics of cost sharing arrangements in rural developing economies focusing on the risk and incentive properties of alternative cost contracts and on their flexibility their ability to adapt to environmental changes it is shown that where labor inputs are difficult to monitor the rule that cost shares and output shares be equalized will not hold and is not constrained pareto efficient and that cost sharing contracts have a decided advantage over contracts which specify the level of inputs whenever there are asymmetries of information regarding production technology between the landlord and the tenant

wage vacancy contracts and coordination frictions abstract we consider a directed search model with risk averse workers and risk neutral entrepreneurs who can set up firms that post wage vacancy contracts i e contracts where firms can make payments to more than one applicant and where the payments can be different for each applicant and be contingent on the number of applicants we establish that the type of contracts the literature focuses on are not offered if firms can post wage vacancy contracts we show that there exists an equilibrium satisfying a monotonic expected utility property which is efficient furthermore we investigate the role of wage vacancy contracts on welfare and competition

a theory of interlinked rural transactions this paper argues that the interlinking of labor output and credit contracts often observed in rural economies can be regarded as an attempt to improve allocative efficiency in the face of moral hazard it advances an economic explanation of the phenomenon which is rooted in the view that prevalent modes of transaction of which interlinked contracts are an example are shaped by technological considerations interlinking is shown to be an efficient economic response to unequally distributed information arising from the uncertainty which characterizes subsistence agriculture all pareto efficient allocations require a combination of wage cum output sharing with consumption credit contracts the analytical framework set up to demonstrate the results is used to examine the response of the contractual parameters to changes in i the returns to alternative occupations available to tenant laborers ii the cost of credit to the village economy and iii the riskiness of cultivation the analysis concludes that public policy to alleviate rural poverty must recognize the relationships between technological considerations and modes of transaction in the absence of a complete set of markets

the impacts of petroleum price fluctuations on income distribution across ethnic groups in malaysia crude oil price hikes have compelled governments of developing countries to let domestic prices of energy increase fiscal priorities made it impossible to fully compensate the hikes by raising energy subsidies this paper examines the potential impacts of a limited deregulation of the petroleum price on the income distribution in malaysia paying specific attention to differences in impacts on major ethnic groups we introduce an extended social accounting matrix sam model which not only incorporates substitution possibilities among production inputs and consumption goods but also allows for the exogenous determination of the price of intermediate inputs the results of simulations indicate that distributional impacts of rising petroleum prices tend to be regressive affecting poor people more severely than richer people all ethnic groups experience income loss with the real incomes of malay households which are relatively poor on average more than the chinese and indian households which are the generally richer

search theoretic models of the labor market a survey we survey the literature on search theoretic models of the labor market we show how this approach addresses many issues including the following why do workers sometimes choose to remain unemployed what determines the lengths of employment and unemployment spells how can there simultaneously exist unemployed workers and unfilled vacancies what determines aggregate unemployment and vacancies how can homogeneous workers earn different wages what are the tradeoffs firms face from different wages how do wages and turnover interact what determines efficient turnover we discuss various modeling choices concerning wage determination and the meeting process including recent models of directed search

the impact of research led agricultural productivity growth on poverty reduction in africa asia and latin america abstract twenty percent of the world s population or 1 2 billion live on less than 1 per day 70 of these are rural and 90 are in asia and sub saharan africa research led technological change in agriculture generates sufficient productivity growth to give high rates of return in africa and asia and has a substantial impact on poverty currently reducing this number by 27 million per annum whereas productivity growth in industry and services has no impact the per capita cost of poverty reduction by means of agricultural research expenditures in africa is 144 and in asia 180 or 50 cents per day but this is covered by output growth by contrast the per capita cost for the richer countries of latin america is over 11 000

theories of share tenancy a critical survey for the past 2 decades the problems of agricultural tenancy have attracted a great deal of attention not only from agricultural economists but also from economists in general as a typical example of agencyprincipal contract relations despite the prolific growth of literature both theoretical and empirical there has been little convergence in opinions on tenancy contracts the divergence has been especially great on the understanding of the causes and the effects of sharecropping tenancy much confusion underlying the widely divergent perspectives has stemmed from partial treatments of contractual choice which unduly limit the optimizing behavior of contracting parties and the options of contract forms this essay aims at clarifying the sources of the confusion by reviewing the past literature in light of the more general theory of agency principal relations the agency theory in order to examine the problems of various theoretical models in a unified framework in section ii we first develop the basic framework of a general model of tenancy contract in section iii we clarify in terms of the general model contradictions latent in the traditional marshallian theory which asserts that share tenancy is inefficient because of the disincentive effect of cropsharing on the tenant s work effort in section iv we attempt to show that recent efforts to reconstruct the theory based on the traditional assumption have not yet been quite successful section v draws implications and testable hypotheses from more general theories incorporating the aspects of risk and uncertainty section vi tests allocational and distributional implications of those alternative hypotheses based on the summary of evidence col

price dispersion with directed search we model a market where identical buyers direct their search to identical capacity constrained sellers sellers cannot fully commit to the list price so strategic bargaining may determine the sale price we study search and pricing behavior in symmetric equilibrium sale prices exhibit equilibrium dispersion as they respond naturally to local demand conditions uncoordinated search decisions lead to equilibrium demand heterogeneity so sellers realizing large demand bargain prices up we characterize the sale price distribution parametrically studying how different commitment limitations and market features affect pricing and surplus shares we also determine endogenously

interlocking transactions obstacles precursors or instruments of agrarian capitalism abstract rural labor arrangements often change rapidly and in ways that prevailing theories cannot explain explicit understanding of the exercise of power in rural society sheds considerable light on how and why rural labor arrangements change in the course of economic development this paper shows how different labor tying arrangements embody exclusionary mechanisms that can serve as instruments of both labor management and social control macro political and economic conditions shape the ways in which these mechanisms operate and are in turn influenced by them viewing labor arrangements in this way helps resolve problems confronted by the prevailing theories and allows for a broader understanding of dynamic processes

directed search and firm size standard directed search models predict that larger firms pay lower wages than smaller firms contrary to the data this article proposes one way to obtain this positive size wage differential in a directed search setting i posit that there is an optimal size associated with a firm a firm suffers a penalty by not operating at its optimal size i show that if this penalty is sufficiently large the size wage differential will be obtained my model also gives a new way to look at the data because it highlights the importance of the distinction between intended and realized firm sizes

equilibrium wage dispersion and interindustry wage differentials this paper develops a search theoretic explanation of interindustry wage differentials given coordination problems in the labor market the probability of filling a vacancy is an increasing function of the wage offered in equilibrium firms that find vacancies more costly will offer higher wages the model thus explains the persistence of interindustry wage differentials and their correlation with industry average capital labor ratio and profitability additionally the model predicts that high wage firms will receive more applications per job opening and that wages in the labor market will behave as strategic complements

mechanism design by competing sellers a dynamic model with many sellers and buyers is constructed agents failing to trade may trade in the next period an equilibrium is found where sellers hold identical auctions and buyers randomize over the sellers they visit the distribution of buyer valuations is endogenous an auction with efficient reserve is an optimal mechanism from each seller s point of view in spite of the ability of any seller to alter the distribution of buyer types participating in the seller s mechanism by altering the mechanism copyright 1993 by the econometric society

growth and inequality in india analysis of an extended social accounting matrix summary based on an extended social accounting matrix sam for 2002 03 this study shows how sectoral growth in india affects inequality a breakdown of the wage account into three educational levels and 10 sectors of employment improves the link between sectoral expansion and household income in the sam the results show that only agricultural growth reduces inequality while growth in heavy manufacturing and services sectors raises inequality given india s current growth pattern inequality is likely to increase further in an analysis of the standard sam growth in any sector would appear to reduce inequality which underlines the importance of our extension

sorting through search and matching models in economics toward understanding assortative matching this is a self contained introduction to research on search and matching we first explore the nontransferable and perfectly transferable utility matching paradigms and then a unifying imperfectly transferable utility matching model motivated by some unrealistic predictions of frictionless matching we flesh out the foundational economics of search theory we then revisit the original matching paradigms with search frictions we finally allow informational frictions that often arise such as in college student sorting

measuring changes in poverty a methodological case study of indonesia during an adjustment period analysis of the effects of policy changes on the poor is often hindered by the difficulties inherent in measuring poverty and comparing levels of poverty before and after policy changes this article outlines two techniques which can overcome many of these measurement problems stochastic dominance conditions which can facilitate a robust poverty ranking of distributions of living standards and a decomposable poverty index which allows measured changes in aggregate poverty to be disaggregated into their various components such as the changes among population subgroups and growth and redistributive components these techniques can be applied to a wide range of indicators of economic well being and poverty lines and to assumptions about the poor the approaches are illustrated using household survey data from indonesia before and after external shocks and the subsequent structural adjustment program in the mid 1980s the study finds that favorable initial conditions and pro poor pattern of growth enabled indonesia to maintain its momentum in poverty alleviation during the period

moral hazard and marshallian inefficiency evidence from tunisia abstract we formalize the link between optimal cost sharing contracts and the production technology in the presence of moral hazard by appealing to several well known results from duality theory building on intuitions from the interlinkage literature we show that optimal contractual structure is determined by the i substitution possibilities that exist between different observable factor inputs as well as ii between these inputs and unobservable effort we endogenize contractual choice using landlord characteristics as instruments exploiting the fact that in our dataset landlords interact with several tenants and vice versa the approach is applied to an unbalanced plot level panel of cost sharing contracts in a tunisian village using a translog representation of the restricted profit function contractual terms are found to be a significant determinant of input use and therefore lead to marshallian inefficiency while the optimality of the underlying contractual structure is rejected

the effects of location and sectoral components of economic growth on poverty evidence from indonesia abstract in this paper we investigate the relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction by differentiating growth and poverty into their sectoral composition and urban rural location using data from indonesia we find that rural services growth reduces poverty in all sectors and locations however urban services growth has the largest effect on poverty in most sectors finally we also find that rural agriculture growth strongly reduces poverty in rural areas the largest contributor to poverty in indonesia this implies that while agriculture growth in rural areas still plays a major role in reducing poverty policies that enable strong growth in the services sector in both urban and rural areas would expedite poverty reduction

credit and sharecropping in agrarian societies this paper considers a model of linkage between land labor and credit transactions in the context of sharecropping the paper s objectives are a to derive and characterize the equilibrium in a model of a land scarce labour abundant economy under sharecropping given an infinitely elastic supply of identical sharecroppers at a reservation utility and b to demonstrate that in an imperfect market a landlord may offer credit to his tenant sometimes even at a subsidized rate of interest without necessarily insisting that the sharecropper borrow only from him precluding an involuntary linkage between credit and land transations it has been demonstrated that regardless of the presence or absence of linkage or any other control by the landlord as long as he can vary the size of the plot given to a tenant and there are enough potential tenants in equilibrium contracts a tenants utility under sharecropping will be the same as that which he could have obtained as a full time wage laborer this result implies that policies other than land reform will not affect the welfare of tenants

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

structural path analysis and multiplier decomposition within a social accounting matrix framework the main purpose of this paper is to apply structural path analysis to a social accounting matrix sam framework because the sam is a comprehensive essentially general equilibrium data system the whole network through which influence is transmitted can be identified and specified through structural path analysis the latter provides an alternative and much more detailed way to decompose multipliers as compared with the traditional treatment of stone 1978 and pyatt and round 1979 this paper consists of five sections the first one reviews the sam framework as a basis for multiplier analysis and multiplier decomposition in particular the additive decomposition in terms of transfer open loop and closed loop effects is succinctly presented section ii applies this conventional decomposition to a sam of south korea to illustrate with eleven specific cases the effects of an exogenous injection on the endogenous accounts of the sam i e the incomes of the factors household groups and production activities section iii is devoted to the presentation of the elements of structural analysis and more particularly the transmission of economic influence within a structure finally section iv applies structural path analysis to the south korean sam and compares and contrasts the multiplier decomposition which it yields with the alternative decomposition discussed in section ii the comparison is the more significant in that the two decomposition methods are applied to the same eleven selected cases spanning a variety of sectors i e poles of origin for the injection and sectors poles of destination the empirical analysis in section iv suggests that structural path analysis applied to a sam is a potentially operationally useful technique within which a whole series of policy issues can be addressed the final section is devoted to a brief summary and conclusions

credit layering in informal financial markets abstract informal lenders with access to markets or capital often find it attractive to delegate loan provision to downstream lenders who have an information or enforcement advantage in dealing with particular borrowers in this paper we examine the conditions under which such an arrangement is preferred by two informal lenders a landlord and a merchant who compete in loan provision to tenant farmers differentiated by wealth we show that credit layering is preferred only when tenants are sufficiently poor in this case the trader lends to tenant farmers via a contract with their landlord otherwise only the trader lends as a consequence a pattern of borrowing emerges in which relatively wealthy tenants borrow from merchants while poor tenants borrow mainly from their landlords interlinkage between land and credit thus arises only for a subset of tenants and purely as a consequence of credit layering this pattern is shown to be supported empirically

wage vacancy contracts and multiplicity of equilibria in a directed search model of the labour market this paper studies a directed search model of the labour market which is standard in all aspects except two first we allow firms to post wage vacancy contracts advertising the number of workers they would pay as well as the payment all will receive second we consider two cases one where workers are risk neutral and one where workers are risk averse both in finite and large economies our paper shows that when firms post wage vacancy contracts whether workers are modelled as risk neutral or risk averse matters the types of symmetric equilibria and the nature of multiplicity of equilibria are different somewhat surprisingly when there are finite numbers of risk neutral workers and firms we obtain a finite number of symmetric equilibria but when workers are risk averse we obtain a continuum of equilibria furthermore our paper sounds a cautionary note on using large economies as an approximation of finite economies when workers are risk neutral the nature of equilibrium is preserved going from a finite to a large economy but the nature of equilibrium is different when workers are risk averse les contrats salaire emploi et la multiplicite des equilibres au sein d un modele de recherche dirigee applique au marche du travail cet article etudie un modele de recherche dirigee applique au marche du travail qui differe du modele standard en deux points premierement les entreprises peuvent proposer des contrats dits salaire emploi qui en plus du salaire indiquent le nombre de travailleurs qu un employeur est dispose a recruter deuxiemement nous considerons deux cas un ou les travailleurs ne presentent pas d aversion au risque et l autre ou ils sont averses au risque a chaque fois pour des economies avec une nombre fini puis infini d agents l article demontre que la presence ou non d aversion au risque a de l importance quand les entreprises peuvent proposer des contrats salaire emploi car les types d equilibres symetriques et la nature des multiplicites different dans les deux cas par exemple si l on considere une economie avec un nombre fini de travailleurs il existe un nombre fini d equilibres symetriques lorsque les travailleurs ne presentent pas d aversion au risque alors qu il en existe un continuum lorsque les travailleurs sont averses au risque qui plus est l article invite a la prudence en utilisant une economie a nombre infini d agents comme approximation d une economie peuplee d un nombre fini d agents car en allant de l une a l autre la nature des equilibres est preservee dans le cas de travailleurs ne presentant pas d aversion au risque alors qu elle change lorsque les travailleurs sont averses au risque

estimating the relative benefits of agricultural growth on the distribution of expenditures does the sectoral composition of aggregate economic growth affect poverty we ask whether agricultural growth in developing countries increases the expenditures of poorer households more than growth in other sectors while some reduced form analyses have tackled this question using either country level time series data regional panel data for one country or cross sectional country data this paper is unusual in using panel data for many countries we improve on much of the existing literature by devising an instrumental variables strategy to correct for the endogeneity of sectoral gdp growth involving averaging over sectoral income growth rates for neighboring countries our principal finding from our instrumental variable estimator is that the estimated elasticities associated with growth in agricultural income are significantly greater than for non agricultural income for all but the extreme top and bottom deciles in the middle range of the income distribution the effect of a given gdp growth due to agriculture is 3 4 times larger than if it was due to non agricultural activities having established that on average growth in gdp originating in agriculture is more beneficial for poorer deciles we finally explore whether this is a pattern which holds across different groupings of countries a second important finding is that there is heterogeneity across some groupings most particularly we find that it is the poorest people in the poorest countries for whom agricultural income growth is the most beneficial

ex ante price offers in matching games non steady states a matching problem is considered in which sellers can publicly commit to a trading price that differs from the price at which buyers expect to trade elsewhere in the market when demand and supply are nearly equal the equilibrium ex ante price offer lies below the price associated with the nash bargaining split this relationship reverses when the level of excess demand is large sellers always have an incentive to make ex ante offers when prices elsewhere are determined by nash bargaining this can be interpreted to mean that nash bargaining is an unstable pricing institution copyright 1991 by the econometric society

sectoral growth and poverty alleviation a multiplier decomposition technique applied to south africa abstract how does an increase in a sector s output affect poverty alleviation in this paper a multiplier decomposition for a socioeconomic system represented by a social accounting matrix sam is used to study this linkage the decomposition applied to south africa reveals that growth in agriculture services and some manufacturing sectors can alleviate poverty for the black african population for sectoral growth to be effective however the need for appropriate skill acquisition for the poor must be addressed directly only long term policies geared towards improving both economic growth and the human capital stock of the poor can lead to significant poverty alleviation

directed search and optimal production abstract i consider a model of directed search where strategic sellers advertise general trading mechanisms a mechanism determines the number of buyers that will get served and the side payments as a function of ex post realized demand buyers observe these advertisements and visit one seller without being able to coordinate their visiting strategies despite the oligopolistic nature of the model all symmetric equilibria are constrained efficient in small markets multiple equilibria exist that are not payoff equivalent this indeterminacy vanishes as the market grows large i provide closed form solutions for equilibrium prices profits and the matching function under any parameter values

directed search with multi vacancy firms abstract i construct a directed search model in which firms decide whether to enter a market and how many positions to create within this framework the number of firms and the size of each firm are determined endogenously wages play an allocative role in the matching process and the frictions inherent in this process derive from the equilibrium behavior of workers and firms i characterize the unique equilibrium comparative statics generate testable implications for cross sectional variation in matching efficiency as well as the dynamic behavior of vacancies and unemployment moreover allowing for ex ante heterogeneity across firms the model can easily and naturally generate the observed relationship between firm size wages profitability and hiring

pricing and matching with frictions suppose that n buyers each want one unit and m sellers each have one or more units of a good sellers post prices and then buyers choose sellers in symmetric equilibrium similar sellers all post one price and buyers randomize hence more or fewer buyers may arrive than a seller can accommodate we call this frictions we solve for prices and the endogenous matching function for finite n and m and consider the limit as n and m grow the matching function displays decreasing returns but converges to constant returns we argue that the standard matching function in the literature is misspecified and discuss implications for the beveridge curve

sharecropping and the interlinking of agrarian markets one of the often noted features of less developed agrarian economies is the existence of interlinkages among the land labor credit and product markets the landlord is often the supplier of credit he frequently purchases and markets the output of the tenant farmers and often sells raw materials and even consumption goods to his tenant farmers how can this phenomenon be explained what are the welfare consequences of attempts to restrict these practices which often seem to constitute restraints on free trade these are the questions to which this paper is addressed a general set of arguments applicable to both competitive and noncompetitive environments are presented to situations where all the terms of the contract are determined in an optimal way as well as to situations where many of the terms are specified institutionally section i examines interlinked credit and tenancy contracts section ii examines interlinked marketing and tenancy contracts section iii points out the possible interlinking between labor contracts and consumption goods markets and section iv presents the different equilibrium frameworks discussed in the paper such as monopoly monopsony competition and equilibria with surplus labor

the composition of growth matters for poverty alleviation this paper contributes to explain the cross country heterogeneity of the poverty response to changes in economic growth it does so by focusing on the structure of output growth the paper presents a two sector theoretical model that clarifies the mechanism through which the sectoral composition of growth and associated labor intensity can affect workers wages and thus poverty alleviation then it presents cross country empirical evidence that analyzes first the differential poverty reducing impact of sectoral growth at various levels of disaggregation and the role of unskilled labor intensity in such differential impact the paper finds evidence that not only the size of economic growth but also its composition matters for poverty alleviation with the largest contributions from labor intensive sectors such as agriculture construction and manufacturing the results are robust to the influence of outliers alternative explanations and various poverty measures

the sectoral structure of poverty during an adjustment period evidence for indonesia in the mid 1980s the authors examine the structure of poverty in indonesia by sector of employment and how it changed during the adjustment period 1984 to 1987 they find that while aggregate poverty decreased during the period the gains to the poor were quite uneven across regions and sectors gains to the rural sector in key regions were quantitatively important to indonesia s success in alleviating poverty they found most poverty exists and most gains in alleviating poverty were made in the rural farming sector these gains were associated with crop diversification and continued growth in off farm employment the government s adjustment program favored rural areas and were crucial to indonesia s evident success at maintaining momentum in alleviating poverty however one should not underrate the favorable conditions in indonesia when adjustment started

agricultural growth and poverty in an archetypical middle income country chile 1987 2003 is a reduced share of agriculture in the economy an obstacle for the agricultural sector to play an important role in poverty alleviation what is the key channel if any by which agriculture is benefiting the poor in chile that would be worthwhile to promote in other countries by answering these questions we expand the literature on poverty and composition of growth by proposing a methodology that allows to disentangle the mechanisms by which agricultural growth can be poverty reducing we find that in chile agriculture plays a large role in reducing poverty and most of this effect is channeled through the labor market

technical change labor use and income distribution in the muda irrigation project factors influencing the performance of net farm income in families who adopted the double cropping regime in malaysia are analyzed in light of the muda irrigation project which supplies off season water to approximately 250 000 acres of padi land in n w malaysia from 1970 when water was first released to 1975 when the full feasible command area was served most of the project area s 50 000 farm families switched from single to double cropping this switch was accompanied by an extremely rapid adoption of short maturing improved varieties of rice and large increases in yield in both seasons the result of this technical change was an increase in padi production from 384 721 tons in 1969 to 795 830 tons in 1974 approximately 50 percent of the country s production there were also important changes in net farm income labor use and output and factor prices factors related and unrelated to the muda project are found to have caused these changes

stagflationary effects of monetary stabilization policies a quantitative analysis of south korea this paper presents a macro model of the korean economy that focuses on short run macro economic adjustment and more in particular on the transmission channels of monetary policy between the financial and the real sector of the economy in addition to the usual link between monetary policy and aggregate demand via investment the link between monetary policy and the supply side of the economy via the financing of working capital with borrowed funds is incorporated this link can potentially reverse the short run impact of tight money on inflation and aggregate the impact on output both export prices and domestic prices show a significant sensitivity to cost of financing working capital this credit supply side link gives a stagflationary bias to restrictive credit policies the empirical relevance of this phenomenon is strongly supported by the simulation results derived with the model structurally section 2 of the paper focuses on the real sector part of the model section 3 discusses the financial sector in section 4 different monetary stabilization packages are simulated using the model presented in sections 2 and 3 and alternative policy measures are discussed the simulation runs show strong short run stagflationary effects of tight money policies

beyond agriculture versus non agriculture decomposing sectoral growth poverty linkages in five african countries summary africa s development debate is often cast as agriculture versus non agriculture with agriculture s proponents arguing that agricultural growth is more effective at reducing poverty this dual economy perspective overlooks the heterogeneity within and synergies between these two broad sectors recent studies decompose agriculture into subsectors and find that agricultural growth led by smallholder farmers is even more effective at reducing poverty than larger scale estate farms in contrast few studies estimate subsectoral growth poverty linkages for non agriculture yet we strongly expect for example that growth led by informal traders or foreign owned mining companies will have quite different implications for poverty reduction different perspectives on what constitutes non agriculture might therefore explain divergent views on its relative importance for poverty reduction to address this gap in our understanding we estimate sectoral poverty growth elasticities using economy wide models for five african countries while our estimated elasticities are higher for agriculture than for non agriculture as a whole the extent to which this is true varies considerably across nonagricultural subsectors and across countries we find that the poverty growth elasticities for trade and transport services and manufacturing especially agro processing are often close to and sometimes exceed agriculture s this means that growth led by these nonagricultural subsectors might be as effective as agriculture at reaching the poor this confirms the need for a more nuanced treatment of non agriculture in africa s policy debate and may explain conflicting perspectives on agriculture s role vis a vis non agriculture

linear sam models for inequality changes analysis an application to the extremadurian economy social accounting matrices are adequate databases for the economic modelling these matrices emphasize the role of households in the economy and so they usually disaggregate the household sector into several groups this disaggregation allows social accounting matrices to be used for diverse income distribution analysis the objective of this work is to use the linear sam models to study how inequality is modified by several exogenous injections of income the set of multipliers and indicators presented is applied to the economy of extremadura a region situated in the southwest of spain in particular together with the accounting multipliers two redistributed income matrices are presented to show how changes in final demand and in income transfers cause opposite effects in inequality for contrasting these results gini and theil indices are also used finally a major reduction in both would result from an appropriate re allocation of transfers