is economic growth good for the poor tracking low incomes using general means in this paper we propose the use of an alternative methodology to track low incomes based on atkinson s 1970 family of equally distributed equivalent income functions which are called general means here we provide a new characterization of general means that justifies their use in this context our method of evaluating the effects of growth on poor incomes is based on a comparison of growth rates for two standards of living the ordinary mean and a bottom sensitive general mean the motivating question is to what extent is growth in the ordinary mean accompanied by growth in the general mean a key indicator in this approach is the growth elasticity of the general mean or the percentage change in the general mean over the percentage change in the usual mean our empirical analysis estimates this growth elasticity for a data set containing 144 household surveys from 20 countries over the last quarter century among other results we find that the growth elasticity of bottom sensitive general means is positive but significantly smaller than one this suggests that the incomes of the poor do not grow one for one with increases in average income

information exchange in policy networks information exchange in policy networks is usually attributed to preference similarity influence reputation social trust and institutional actor roles we suggest that political opportunity structures and transaction costs play another crucial role and estimate a rich statistical network model on tie formation in the german toxic chemicals policy domain the results indicate that the effect of preference similarity is absorbed by institutional relational and social opportunity structures political actors choose contacts who minimize transaction costs while maximizing outreach and information we also find that different types of information exchange operate in complementary but not necessarily congruent ways

has the internet increased trade developed and developing country evidence developing countries export more to developed but not other developing countries when internet penetration is higher although this could be because internet penetration stimulates exports it could also be because trade openness encourages internet use to test the direction of causation we allow internet use to be determined endogenously using countries regulation of data services as an instrument the results suggest that access to the internet does improve export performance in developing countries although not in developed countries in other words improving internet access in a developing country will stimulate exports from that country to rich countries jel f15

poverty under the kuznets process the object of this paper is to investigate the behaviour of poverty indices during the course of development since development is a complex process one cannot hope to capture in a single model all its different facets thus for example the famous lewis 1954 model although it highlights the role of surplus labour in fixing the supply price of labour to the industrial sector assumes identical real incomes for workers in the rural and urban sectors so that it is not rich enough to provide a vehicle for analysing inequality or poverty an alternative model which also focuses on the transfer of population from the rural to the urban sector in the course of development but nevertheless permits the analysis of distributional change is that due to kuznets 1955 in the simplest version of the kuznets process the population is seen as composed of two distributions a high mean income but high inequality distribution in the urban sector and a low mean income and low inequality distribution in the rural sector and the process of development is characterised as an increase in the population share of the urban sector it is from the workings of such a process that kuznets 1955 hypothesised his famous inverse u relation between inequality and development which we have analysed elsewhere anand and kanbur 1981a our object here is to extend this analysis to an investigation of poverty under the kuznets process while the kuznets model permits an analysis of distributional change it suffers from the drawback that it does not contain an adequate explanation of how and why the population shift takes place we will take up this point later on in this paper where a model of migration is presented which does indeed rationalise the kuznets process section i sets up the kuznets process formally and analyses the behaviour of two classes of poverty indices section ii traces the poverty implications of the todaro 1969 model of migration and arrives at conclusions somewhat different from those of fields 1979 section iii winds up the paper

state lottery adoptions as policy innovations an event history analysis two types of explanations of state government innovation have been proposed internal determinants models which posit that the factors causing a state government to innovate are political economic and social characteristics of a state and regional diffusion models which point toward the role of policy adoptions by neighboring states in prompting a state to adopt we show that the two are conceptually compatible relying on mohr s theory of organizational innovation then we develop and test a unified explanation of state lottery adoptions reflecting both internal and regional influences the empirical results provide a great degree of support for mohr s theory for the empirical analysis we rely on event history analysis a form of pooled cross sectional time series analysis which we believe may be useful in a wide variety of subfields of political science event history analysis may be able to explain important forms of political behavior by individuals organizations or governments even if they occur only rarely

a two methodology comparison study of a spatial gravity model in the context of interregional trade flows this article argues that the introduction of spatial interactions to model the determinants of origin destination od flows can potentially result in excessive contiguity to explain flows between od regions it is not only what happens in the origin and destination that is relevant but also what happens in their neighbouring regions however what happens if there is a high degree of overlap between origin neighbouring areas and destination neighbouring areas the article presents an empirical illustration to re examine the evidence presented in previous research alama sabater et al 2013 and more closely analyses the territorial level focusing on the case of interregional trade of goods at the nuts3 level spanish provinces we then use two different methodologies within the framework of a spatial gravity equation for interregional trade modelling the findings confirm the importance of spatial dependence on trade flows and in particular that logistics decisions within a province affect shipments

thick and thin borders in the european union how deep internal integration is within countries and how shallow between them the existence of large border effects is one of the main puzzles of international macroeconomics the seminal paper by mccallum found that trade between any two canadian provinces was on average 22 times greater than trade between any canadian province and any united state us although various authors have estimated internal and external border effects for the whole european union and some specific european countries none has done so in the manner that mccallum s seminal paper stymied by lack of data on region to region international trade flows this study uses a novel data set that captures intra and international truck shipments between spanish regions and regions in seven european countries during the period 2004 11 it computes internal and external border effects offering novel results for aggregate flows and the importing countries and estimates several specifications of the gravity equation so as to tackle such issues as the multilateral resistance term heteroskedasticity and zero flows and non linear relation between trade and distance the paper also adds a detailed analysis on the external border effect for each spanish exporting region and each of the seven european countries considered by means of this analysis we shed new light on the relative integration between regions of these seven countries and spanish exporting regions finally we conduct an extrapolation exercise computing the trade potentials that would be expected in a fully integrated europe and estimating how long full integration would take to achieve between each spanish exporting region and each european importing country to this regard two alternative scenarios are considered one using the growth rates of the spanish exports before the crisis 2001 08 and other considering the postcrisis growth rates 2011 13

inequality and development evidence from semiparametric estimation with panel data abstract evidences from nonparametric and semiparametric unbalanced panel data models with fixed effects show that kuznet s inverted u relationship is confirmed when economic development reaches a threshold the model tests justify semiparametric specification the integrated net contribution of control variables to inequality reduction is significant

the conditional effect of specialized governance on public policy what are the policy consequences of creating functionally specialized venues for decision making this study directly compares special districts with general purpose local governments to evaluate how specialization influences responsiveness and policy choice previous theorizing has assumed that specialization should have the same effect across all policy contexts the findings presented here show instead that its effect is conditional on the status of public problems objective conditions related to a policy issue more strongly influence the responsiveness of multipurpose legislatures than that of special districts thus the institutional effect of functional specialization varies with the severity of the public problem the result is that governing structure matters most where problems are least severe the findings demonstrate the importance of considering policy context when analyzing the effects of political institutions

local institutions and the politics of urban growth this article uses a political market framework to analyze how the structure of local political institutions affects the relative political influence of development and environmental interests in the context of urban growth using panel data from 406 florida cities from 1998 to 2003 the empirical analysis finds important interaction effects between the structure of city executive branch institutions and interest group variables the economic and political forces driving urban growth do not operate identically in all cities they vary as a function of institutional context institutional structure helps determine which interest groups have their preferences reflected in local land use changes and development patterns the resulting patterns suggest a sustainability paradox wherein richer environmental interests push for the preservation of environmental amenities while at the same time accelerating the number of residential units built in a community

export performance and trade facilitation reform hard and soft infrastructure summary we estimate the impact of aggregate indicators of soft and hard infrastructure on the export performance of developing countries we derive four new indicators for more than 100 countries over the period 2004 07 estimates show that trade facilitation reforms do improve the export performance of developing countries this is particularly true with investment in physical infrastructure and regulatory reform to improve the business environment the findings provide evidence that the marginal effect of the transport efficiency and business environment improvement on exports appears to be decreasing in per capita income in contrast the impact of physical infrastructure and information and communications technology on exports appears increasingly important the richer a country becomes we also find statistical evidence on the complementarity between hard infrastructure and soft infrastructure as captured by our indicators finally drawing on estimates we compute illustrative ad valorem equivalents of improving each indicator halfway to the level of the top performer in the region

institutional traps and economic growth this article s point of departure is that low quality institutions concentration of political power and material wealth and underdevelopment are persistent over time its analytical model views an equal distribution of political power as a commitment device to enhance institutional quality thereby promoting growth the politically powerful coalition contemplates relinquishing of its power through democratization weighing this advantageous consequence against the limit on own appropriative ability that it entails the possibility of two developmental paths is exhibited with concentration of political and economic power low quality institutions and slow growth and a more equal distribution of political and economic resources high quality institutions and faster growth

new ways of looking at old issues inequality and growth abstract the paper uses new cross country data on income and asset land distribution to show that i there is a strong negative relationship between initial inequality in the asset distribution and long term growth ii inequality reduces income growth for the poor but not for the rich and iii available longitudinal data provide little support for the kuznets hypothesis policies that increase aggregate investment and facilitate acquisition of assets by the poor might thus be doubly beneficial for growth and poverty reduction

growth and poverty revisited from a multidimensional perspective the actual impact of economic growth on poverty reduction is of fundamental importance to the development agenda this paper offers new empirical evidence on growth and poverty measured from a mult

distributional effects of growth and public expenditures in africa estimates for tanzania and rwanda summary in this paper we explore the effects of fiscal policies and growth on measures of household welfare across the distribution of expenditures for two african countries rwanda and tanzania we explore the effect of government expenditures on expenditure growth in each quintile of the expenditure distribution and the effect of growth for each group we find that the benefits of growth are concentrated among the better off sectors of the population in these two countries perhaps to the detriment of the poorer sectors by looking at the effects within a country and across different groups of households and administrative entities we exploit variation in expenditures and growth across and within regions of each country to estimate the elasticities of expenditure with respect to fiscal expenditure and mean expenditure growth at different points of the expenditure distribution using household survey data and government expenditure data at the district level we find that overall mean expenditure growth benefits the top expenditure groups the welfare spillovers are mostly present for top 20 of the expenditure distribution with the middle of the distribution in tanzania responding slightly to these spillovers public social expenditures do not appear to affect inequality considerably but do tend to work toward decreasing inequality however mean expenditure growth is related to increases in inequality in the sense that the richest sectors of the population benefit the most from growth we find that the growth elasticity of expenditure is only above one for the top quintile in both countries in tanzania a 1 increase in average household expenditure is related to a 1 96 expenditure growth in the top quintile and 0 43 in the third quintile in rwanda a 1 increase in average household expenditure is related to a 1 93 increase in household expenditure in the top 20 of the distribution

overcoming collective action barriers to energy sustainability a longitudinal study of climate protection accord adoption by local governments abstract high levels of observed city involvement in energy and climate initiatives indicate that free riding has been much less of a barrier to local climate protection efforts than suggested by theories of collective action this study investigates why local governments have adopted various energy and climate change policy instruments despite the non excludability of climate benefits this paper advances theories of institutional collective action ica and policy diffusion by testing ica based hypotheses that local officials are able to overcome collective action problems to the extent that the costs of these initiatives are minimized through policy network interactions the extent to which climate action produces localized benefits or compliments local environmental development or growth management efforts and the extent to which energy and climate protection efforts generate selective benefits to elected and appointed local government officials who advance their career interests depending on the existing configurations of political system institutions analysis of adoptions of the climate protection agreements by florida cities indicates larger cities are more likely to adopt climate agreement while district elections decrease the likelihood of climate policy adoption moreover economic development rather than growth management or environmental problem situation is linked to climate initiatives

cooperation in common property regimes under extreme drought conditions empirical evidence from the use of pooled transferable quotas in spanish irrigation systems the success of a common property regime can be partially judged on the basis of its ability to handle extreme events that stress its capacity for cooperation this paper compares the performance of 38 irrigation associations in a large irrigation area in spain during a severe drought as a test of hypotheses derived from property right theories the case is particularly interesting because it contains a transferable quota institution that can potentially strengthen the effectiveness of common property regimes in scarcity conditions according to the results the use of transferable quotas across associations can contribute to cooperation and drought performance in this context performance is higher when the associations enjoy 1 effective monitoring systems 2 experience and legitimate leaders and 3 facilitative biophysical conditions like soil water holding capacity the analysis also suggests that biophysical properties like soil water holding capacity may compensate for weaker monitoring or leadership and vice versa

watershed partnerships and the emergence of collective action institutions this paper examines the emergence of local cooperative institutions watershed partnerships that resolve collective action problems involved in the management of natural resources the political contracting approach to institutional supply suggests that watershed partnerships are more likely to emerge when potential benefits outweigh the transaction costs of developing and maintaining new institutions we analyze the impact of social political economic and ecological features of watersheds that affect benefits and transaction costs on the emergence of 958 watershed partnerships in the more than 2 100 watersheds in the united states our findings demonstrate that watershed partnerships are most likely to emerge in watersheds confronting severe pollution problems associated with agricultural and urban runoff with low levels of command and control enforcement and containing the resources to offset transaction costs

a new data set measuring income inequality this article presents a new data set on inequality in the distribution of income the authors explain the criteria they applied in selecting data on gini coefficients and on individual quintile groups income shares comparison of the new data set with existing compilations reveals that the data assembled here represent an improvement in quality and a significant expansion in coverage although differences in the definition of the underlying data might still affect inter temporal and international comparability based on this new data set the authors do not find a systematic link between growth and changes in aggregate inequality they do find a strong positive relationship between growth and reduction of poverty

making the commons work conservation and cooperation in ireland commonage represents land held under common property that incorporates a system of local cooperative arrangements and rules to conserve and manage the irish uplands we analyze the institutional and economic factors that influence the behavior of commonage farmers under a common property regime using a recursive bivariate probit model results show that 1 cooperation has a positive and important impact on commonage conservation 2 agricultural policies by way of livestock premia increase the level of degradation while 3 farm financial support through agrienvironment measures positively affects commonage conservation and encourages cooperation between farmers

promise and pitfalls in the use of secondary data sets income inequality in oecd countries as a case study this paper examines the role of secondary data sets in empirical economic research taking the field of income distribution as a case study we illustrate problems faced by users of secondary statistics showing how both cross country comparisons and time series analysis can depend sensitively on the choice of data after describing the genealogy of secondary data sets on income inequality we consider the main methodological issues and discuss their implications for comparisons of income inequality across oecd countries and over time the lessons to be drawn for the construction and use of secondary data sets are summarized at the end of the paper

financial development growth and the distribution of income a paradigm is presented in which both the extent of financial intermediation and the rate of economic growth are endogenously determined financial intermediation promotes growth because it allows a higher rate of return to be earned on capital and growth in turn provides the means to implement costly financial structures thus financial intermediation and economic growth are inextricably linked in accord with the goldsmith mckinnon shaw view on economic development the model also generates a development cycle reminiscent of the kuznet hypothesis in particular in the transition from a primitive slow growing economy to a developed fast growing one a nation passes through a stage in which the distribution of wealth across the rich and poor widens

the trend behavior of alternative income inequality measures in the united states from 1947 1990 and the structural break this article tests the hypothesis that the time series process of income inequality has experienced a structural break the timing of the structural break is treated as an unknown parameter to be estimated from the data because it is not possible to associate a single episodic policy event with the break year and to avoid bias in favor of a unit root hypothesis if the break was near the selected year for several measures of income inequality a segmented trend model is more appropriate to account for the fundamentals affecting the behavior of income inequality as opposed to a stochastic trend model

growth is really good for the really rich this paper analyzes the relationship between mean income and the income of the rich our methodology closely follows that of dollar and kraay 2002 but instead of looking at the bottom of the distribution we analyze the top we use panel data from the world top incomes database which collects top income data from several countries using tax returns as the raw source we define the rich as earners in the top 10 percent 1 percent 0 1 percent and 0 01 percent of the income distribution we find that economic growth is good for the rich in the sense that the mean income of the top decile of the distribution grows in the same proportion as that of the whole population however we also find that the income of earners in the top percentile of the distribution and above grows in an even larger proportion than average income that is economic growth is really good for the really rich we also find that during economic downturns the average income of top earners responds proportionally less to changes in mean income than during economic expansions our results are robust to different sample specifications

the effect of information and communication technologies on urban structure this paper examines the effects of information and communication technologies ict on urban structure improvements in ict may lead to changes in urban structure for example because they reduce the costs of communicating ideas from a distance hence they may weaken local agglomeration forces and thus provide incentives for economic activity to relocate to smaller urban centres we use international data on city size distributions in different countries and on country level characteristics to test the effect of ict we find robust evidence that increases in the number of telephone lines per capita encourage the spatial dispersion of population in that they lead to a more concentrated distribution of city sizes so far the evidence on internet usage is more speculative although it goes in the same direction we argue that the internet is likely to have similar or even larger effects on urban structures once its use has spread more thoroughly through different economies

scholar participated governance as an alternative solution to the problem of collective action in social ecological systems abstract different from the three classical and popular models of central authority privatization and self governance which have been widely researched and applied in social ecological policymaking in recent years we propose an alternative model for collective action to resolve the problem of the tragedy of the commons our study is based on a series of game theoretic analyses and a field study of combating desertification in seven counties in northwest china the results show that scholars who have comparative advantages in knowledge and information over other social actors such as herders and governments can help game players resolve their collective action dilemma in social ecological systems under certain conditions this positive outcome can be achieved mainly through the participation of scholars as information providers governmental agents scholar entrepreneurs and pure game players

a new database on human capital stock in developing and industrial countries sources methodology and results abstract the paper describes the techniques and data adopted for the construction of a new series of estimates of the stock of education in 85 countries over 28 years 1960 1987 the series are built from enrollment data using the perpetual inventory method adjusted for mortality estimates are corrected for grade repetition among school goers and country specific drop out rates for primary and secondary students enrollment data series used start as far back as 1930 for most countries and even earlier for others this reduces the need for backward extrapolation of enrollments to provide the initial estimates of the investment inventory

the effect of broadband on european union trade a regional spatial approach the positive effect of information and communication technologies ict on trade between countries has been widely studied in the literature but how ict impacts regional trade is limited due to the lack of regional trade data in this paper we test whether broadband as a proxy for ict increases bilateral trade at the regional level in europe we use a novel regional trade database of european union regions and estimate an origin destination flow gravity model for 2007 and 2010 accounting for spatial dependence among trade flows our results indicate that broadband is positive and significant in explaining trade patterns between european regions during both time periods

trade and transport connectivity a spatial approach this article aims to analyse whether transport connectivity affects trade flows using a spatial approach we consider first order contiguity and incorporate logistics network structure dependence in a spatial autoregressive model the results provide evidence regarding the role of the location of logistics platforms for satisfying existing demand for transport structure in spain

the kuznets process and the inequality development relationship abstract in his classic paper on economic growth and income inequality kuznets discussed the process of population shift from traditional to modern activities as the basis for a theory of distributional change during the course of development in this paper we present a formalization of the kuznets process conduct a general analysis of distributional change under this process and derive the functional forms of and conditions for a turning point in the inequality development relationship for six commonly used indices of inequality the functional form appropriate to each index is then estimated using cross section data on 60 developing and developed countries finally some extensions to the initial formalization of the kuznets process are considered

what can new survey data tell us about recent changes in distribution and poverty it has been claimed that in recent times the poor have lost ground both relatively and absolutely even when average levels of living have risen this article tests that claim using household surveys for 67 developing and transitional economies over 1981 94 it finds that changes in inequality and polarization were uncorrelated with changes in average living standards distribution improved as often as it worsened in growing economies and negative growth was often more detrimental to distribution than positive growth overall there was a small decrease in absolute poverty although with diverse experiences across regions and countries almost always poverty fell with growth in average living standards and rose with contraction

the internet and international trade in services the scope for growth of trade in services is vast although services currently make up over 60 percent of world production they account for only about 20 percent of world trade a primary reason why international trade in services has been limited is that the performance of many services necessitates physical contact between producers and consumers a condition that renders service provision to distant locations infeasible new technology in particular the internet provides a medium of exchange that overcomes such historical trading hurdles for many services effectively reducing transport costs from infinity to virtually nothing there is ample anecdotal evidence that the internet is having just this sort of an effect on services trade the accounting firm netlink maintains the books for 6 000 employees in reyanosa mexico from their offices in manhattan infosys of india provides softwareconsulting services to international clients including apple computers lucent technologies and microsoft a medical transcription company in south africa its receives digital recordings from abroad electronically and returns a transcribed text file the next day still the question remains as to whether electronic sharing of information is an important enough development to alter significantly the geography of service provision indeed many services need to be tailored to the consumer s needs and monitored for quality and these are likely to be more effective if the provider is close by and speaks the same language in addition in the event of a dispute resolution will be less complicated if both parties are subject to the same legal system finally there may be security concerns with allowing foreign access to some documents or systems thus for some services especially those where familiarity communication and non standardization contribute to quality the internet would not be expected to have a large impact on international trade to determine whether the internet has significantly affected international service provision in practice we estimate a general model of services trade across countries and examine whether the inclusion of data on internet penetration as measured by the number of internet hosts in a country is statistically significant overall our results offer evidence that the internet is related to growth in services trade after controlling for gdp and exchange rate movements we find that a 10 percent increase in internet penetration in a foreign country is associated with about a 1 7 percentage point increase in export growth and a 1 1 percentagepoint increase in import growth the results are robust to a number of alternative specifications

tax innovation in the states capitalizing on political opportunity this paper assesses the factors that prompt states to adopt taxes during the twentieth century we test five explanations of state tax innovation derived from the literature economic development fiscal health election cycle party control and regional diffusion using event history analysis a pooled cross sectional time series technique while little support is found for the economic development and party control explanations our empirical results are highly consistent with a political opportunity explanation of state tax adoptions 1 the presence of a long time until the next election 2 the existence of a fiscal crisis and 3 the presence of neighboring states that have previously adopted a tax all create opportunities for politicians to shield themselves from the political costs of supporting a tax increase and are all shown by empirical analysis to increase the probability of a tax adoption this empirical evidence is consistent across different tax instruments and different periods of analysis throughout the twentieth century

capital account liberalisation and poverty how close is the link the literature on the theoretical and empirical aspects of the relationship between finance and economic growth is both substantial and extensive the same cannot be said on the relationship between financial development and poverty reduction an equally important aspect in this study we visit the theoretical arguments and conduct an empirical analysis of the relationship between the capital account dimension of financial liberalisation and poverty for developing countries for the period 1985 2005 in particular we employ the system gmm technique to test whether capital account liberalisation has helped alleviate poverty and also whether the extent to which capital account liberalisation affects poverty depends on the quality of institutions we also use ols and iv techniques to verify our findings our findings indicate that there is no statistically significant relationship between the degree of capital account liberalisation during the period and the poverty rate developing countries with higher institutional quality have lower poverty rates but the effect has low statistical significance a higher degree of capital account liberalisation is associated with a lower income share for the poor

factor shares and savings in endogenous growth in models of steady investment driven growth an individual s propensity to save depends on how much of his income is drawn from accumulated factors of production capital rather than from nonaccumulated factors when agents are heterogeneous in this respect growth oriented policies have distributional consequences and in the absence of lump sum redistribution their implementation faces political constraints if the median voter is capital poor relative to the economy s representative agent political interactions tend to slow down growth when policy acts on capital s income share and tend to accelerate it when investment subsidies are the policy instrument of choice copyright 1993 by american economic association

distributive politics and economic growth a crude distinction between economics and politics would be that economics is concerned with expanding the pie while politics is about distributing it in this paper we analyze the relationship between the two we focus on how an economy s initial configuration of resources shapes the political struggle for income and wealth distribution and how that in turn affects long run growth our main conclusion is that inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth retarding policies we derive this result from a simple political economy model of growth and present cross country evidence consistent with it the key feature of our model is that individuals differ in their relative factor endowments we distinguish between two types of factors an accumulated factor called capital and a nonaccumulated factor called labor growth is driven by the expansion of the capital stock which is in turn determined by individual saving decisions long run growth is endogenous as the aggregate production function is taken to be linearly homogeneous in capital and productive government services taken together the provision of government services is financed by a tax on capital because government services are productive a small tax on

economic security and value change confirming inglehart s prediction 1971 of an intergenerational shift toward postmaterialist values a time series analysis controlling for the joint effects of inflation and unemployment demonstrates that there is a statistically significant trend toward postmaterialism in all eight west european countries for which data are available over the past two decades evidence from the 1981 83 and 1990 91 world values surveys indicates that this value shift occurs in any society that has experienced sufficient economic growth in recent decades so that the preadult experiences of younger birth cohorts were significantly more secure than those of older cohorts large intergenerational differences tend to be found in societies that have experienced rapid growth in gross national product per capita and are negligible in societies that have had little or no growth accordingly postmaterialism increased in 18 of the 20 societies on five continents for which we have comparable data over the past decade

broadband in the labor market the impact of residential high speed internet on married women s labor force participation the author investigates how high speed home internet use has affected labor supply using an instrumental variables strategy that exploits cross state variation in supply side constraints to reside

payments for environmental services in watersheds insights from a comparative study of three cases in central america we have compared three cases of payments for water related environmental services pes in central america in terms of socioeconomic background opportunity costs of forest conservation and stakeholders perceptions of the conditions of water resources and other issues we found that in general the opportunity costs are larger than the amounts paid which apparently contradicts the economic foundation of pes schemes and suggests that the role of intangibles is important in inducing participation the results also show that trade offs between different environmental and social goals are likely to emerge in pes schemes posing some doubts as to their ability to be multipurpose instruments for environmental improvement and rural development we also found that pes schemes may work as a conflict resolution instrument facilitating downstream upstream problem solving though at the same time they might introduce changes in social perceptions of property rights

the simultaneous evolution of growth and inequality research on inequality and growth can be divided into two strands one deriving from kuznets and lewis has tried to identify a mechanistic relationship between growth or level of income and inequality the other has tried to find causal explanations of growth and inequality treating each independently in this paper we draw from both strands to test whether growth and inequality are the joint outcomes of other variables and processes we find that simultaneous examination of growth and inequality yields significantly different results and has different consequences for policy from previous independent studies the empirical literature on growth and inequality can be divided into two broad strands one following the pioneering work of kuznets and lewis is motivated by the pessimistic conjecture that the process of growth and development somehow requires increasing inequality at least in the early stages this has led to many efforts to identify a mechanical relationship between the level of development and inequality anand and kanbur 1993 or to determine whether faster growth requires higher or lower inequality the second strand has sought to identify the causal factors influencing the evolution of growth and inequality independently this research has looked either at growth for example barro and sala i martin 1995 or at inequality li et al 1997 but has not tried to identify those factors that might simultaneously influence both growth and inequality 2 thus the literature that looks simultaneously at growth and inequality descending most notably from kuznets 1955 relates them in a mechanistic manner that ignores or minimises the role of other causal factors including policy while the literature that incorporates other causal factors including policies looks independently at growth and inequality neither approach is particularly convincing from a theoretical standpoint the evolution of growth and inequality must surely be the outcome of similar processes in addition neither approach is particularly useful for the policy maker who needs to balance the impact of policies on both growth and distribution in this paper we investigate whether growth and inequality are simultaneously determined and if so whether or not they are subject to

explaining international and intertemporal variations in income inequality this paper explores the propositions that income inequality is relatively stable within countries and that it varies significantly among countries a new and expanded data set provides broad support for both propositions drawing on a political economy and capital market imperfection arguments to explain the intertemporal and international variation in inequality the empirical analysis shows that the predicted variables associated with the first argument a measure of civil liberties and the initial level of secondary schooling and the second argument a measure of financial depth and the initial distribution of land are indeed important determinants of inequality this paper explores two propositions regarding income inequality they are first income inequality is relatively stable within countries and second it varies significantly across countries to illustrate note that the gini coefficient in india remained almost constant for forty years 1951 92 with mean 32 6 and standard deviation 2 0 2 in contrast the variation in gini coefficients across countries is large 61 9 in honduras in 1968 compared with 17 8 in bulgaria in 1976 if substantiated these propositions have potentially significant implications for poverty the significance of the first is obvious barring any fundamental socio political change poverty reduction will depend crucially on the rate of economic growth given this the significance of the second is that in inegalitarian economies the poor will enjoy a smaller share of any national increment in income than in more egalitarian ones drawing on a new and expanded data set on inequality deininger and squire 1996a the first of the paper s three sections conducts standard statistical tests of the two propositions the sample comprises 573 observations on the most common measure of inequality the gini coefficient for 49 developed and developing countries covering the period 1947 94 the results broadly confirm our two propositions specifically analysis of variance anova shows that about 90 of the total variance in the gini coefficients

making meaningful commitments accounting for variation in cities investments of staff and fiscal resources to sustainability environmental sustainability is one of the great challenges of the 21st century a number of explanations have been advanced for why some local governments make strong commitments to sustainability while others do not most of the extant empirical research however has relied on models that employ only one or just a few of these explanations as a result empirical analyses do not encompass a comprehensive set of variables that account for alternative explanations this study begins to fill this lacuna by specifying an empirical model that examines six explanations for local commitment towards sustainability local sustainability priorities regional governance climate protection networks interest group support local fiscal capacity and characteristics of the local governing institution moreover we use the designation of human and financial resources specifically for sustainability to operationalise commitment this is a more substantive measure than has been used in previous studies we accomplish

perspectives of natural resource sector firms on collaborative approaches to governance for water firms in the natural resource sector forestry mining oil and gas and hydroelectric power production are dependent on water in their operations they also affect water quality and quantity through their practices in response to rising costs increasingly restrictive regulations reduced water availability and growing public criticism of industrial water use and management practices companies are attempting to improve their environmental performance one approach being used by firms in the natural resource sector is participation in collaborative multi actor approaches to governance for water a policy delphi survey of 22 representatives from firms in canada s natural resource sector was used to explore the benefits and challenges flowing from natural resource sector firm participation in multi actor collaborative processes the panel identified and then evaluated 67 positions regarding roles benefits and challenges panelists clearly saw many benefits and challenges to companies from becoming engaged in collaborative processes they also were also aware of ways in which the participation of large firms in multi actor collaborative initiatives can create both benefits and challenges for those initiatives the fact that natural resource sector firms do not have to give up their traditional avenues of influence to participate in collaborative initiatives raises concerns about the long term viability of collaboration as a governance strategy

risk bearing and the theory of income distribution this paper develops the stochastic theory of distribution with a dynamic model which focuses on the role of incomplete insurance in generating inequality unlike previous work our approach takes explicit account of the reason for market incompleteness in modeling agents behaviour in particular the amount of risk borne is endogenous using a model of growth with altruism in which agents are risk averse and there is moral hazard we show that lineage wealth follows a markov process which converges globally to an ergodic distribution this also represents the long run population distribution of wealth we discuss the role of particular assumptions such as availability of production loans and unboundedness of utility in yielding the qualitative properties of the distribution of wealth the choice of occupation and the prevention of poverty traps