smallholder market participation concepts and evidence from eastern and southern africa abstract this paper reviews the evidence on smallholder market participation with a focus on staple foodgrains i e cereals in eastern and southern africa in an effort to help better identify what interventions are most likely to break smallholders out of the semi subsistence poverty trap that appears to ensnare much of rural africa the conceptual and empirical evidence suggests that interventions aimed at facilitating smallholder organization at reducing the costs of intermarket commerce and perhaps especially at improving poorer households access to improved technologies and productive assets are central to stimulating smallholder market participation and escape from semi subsistence poverty traps macroeconomic and trade policy tools appear less useful in inducing market participation by poor smallholders in the region

rule making in community forestry institutions the difference women make abstract forest use rules determine what products are extracted from community governed forests in what quantity by what methods and by whom the nature of rules and the process by which they are formulated e g who participates in formulating them can impinge critically on institutional sustainability given their potential impact on the commitment and incentive to protect and on equity and conservation outcomes this is well recognized in the substantial literature on institutions governing common pool resources cprs it is also well recognized although in relation to other types of institutions such as legislatures and village councils that there can be notable differences in women s and men s policy priorities yet there is surprisingly little existing work on or statistical testing of potential gender differences in rule making in institutions managing natural resources such as forests this paper based on the author s primary data for india and nepal seeks to fill this conceptual and empirical gap it examines why we might expect women to favour different rules from men and statistically tests whether the gender composition of the executive committees ecs the main decision making bodies of community forestry institutions cfis in south asia makes a difference to the strictness of forest use rules this is analyzed both by specifying a strictness index which aggregates rules across products and by examining rules for selected products and both for all sample districts together and for each district separately gender is found to make a significant difference to the rules specified but not always in the expected direction given their substantial and daily dependence on local forests especially for firewood and fodder rural women may normally be expected to veer toward lenient rules of extraction in fact groups with more ec women and especially with all women ecs tend to make stricter rules than other groups in most of the sample districts except one district where they tend to make less strict rules greater strictness is attributable especially to the resource constraint faced by all women groups ie cfis with all women ecs which receive smaller and more degraded forests than groups with men less strict rules among cfis in the exceptional district are attributable especially to the disproportionate presence of landless women on their ecs in other words not simply women s presence in rule making but also their economic class can matter strictness also varies by type of product forest and population characteristics the ec s average age and dominant caste and monitoring constraints the potential implications for equity institutional sustainability and forest conservation are also discussed

farmer groups and input access when membership is not enough this paper explores the efficiency of a targeted fertilizer subsidy program administered differently in two nigerian states in 2009 an important dimension along which the otherwise similar programs differed was the fertilizer distribution strategy fertilizer distribution among program participants was done at the individual level for one set of farmers while the fertilizer was given indirectly through a group representative for the other set where fertilizer was given to a group representative for further distribution to members relatives of the farm group s president received more bags of fertilizer than others where fertilizer was given directly to farmers such results did not obtain this differential outcome suggests that while groups may facilitate the process of farmer identification and coordination elite capture and intra group dynamics may affect their efficacy for providing equal access to inputs for members two tier models enable us to model the potentially separate processes that determine participation in the voucher program and the amount of fertilizer received upon deciding to participate with intentions to adopt and scale up voucher programs in various food security and poverty alleviation programs across developing countries it is important to understand when and how farmer groups can affect the successful implementation of such programs

credit market constraints consumption smoothing and the accumulation of durable production assets in low income countries investments in bullocks in india in this paper we formulate and estimate a finite horizon structural dynamic model of agricultural investment behavior that incorporates the major features of low income agricultural environments income uncertainty constraints on borrowing and rental markets and the use of investment assets to generate income and smooth consumption the model is fit to longitudinal indian household data on farm profits bullock stocks and pump sets the estimated structural parameters are used to assess the effects on the life cycle accumulation of bullocks agricultural profits and welfare associated with complete markets and bullock liquidity and with second best policies that provide assured sources of income to farmers and weather insurance

the ethiopian commodity exchange and spatial price dispersion abstract in this article we study the impact of an institutional intervention on market efficiency in ethiopia more specifically we analyze to what extent the ethiopian commodity exchange ecx in combination with regional warehouses have contributed to a reduction in price spreads between regional markets our hypothesis is that warehouses connected to the ecx reduce the dispersion between export prices and local retail prices in different coffee growing areas as well as the dispersion between export prices and local retail prices in different coffee growing areas by doing so the ecx has the potential to improve the market efficiency to identify the causal effect we combine retail price data with information on the gradual rollout of warehouses connected to the ecx from 2007 to 2012 our results suggest that when two markets both have access to an operating warehouse the average price spread is 0 86 1 78 etb lower than it is for markets where at least one part lacks warehouse access this is a substantial reduction considering that the average price spread over the full period is 3 33 etb the main results are robust to various econometric specifications and our analysis thus suggests that local warehouses connected to the ecx have indeed improved market efficiency

the role of rural producer organizations for agricultural service provision in fragile states this article assesses the extent of external linkages and the provision of agricultural services by rural producer organizations in a post conflict setting using new survey data collected by the international food policy research institute in three provinces of the democratic republic of the congo this study finds that various internal and external factors affect the capacity of organizations to interact with external organizations external linkages ability to collect financial support from their members management capacity and formal governance structures all contribute to explaining relative performance in agricultural service delivery we also find that exogenous events affect the relative performance of rural producer organizations our results suggest that closeness to conflict reduces the capacity of producer organizations to provide agricultural services

producer cooperative resettlement projects in zimbabwe lessons from a failed agricultural development strategy abstract zimbabwe epitomizes the contradictions driving the failure of state directed agricultural development policies in its second decade of independence the government takes the credit for the country s agricultural and rural development success zimbabwe s green revolution record in africa is enviable yet this peasantry led success story is problematic it hides serious policy flaws in development strategy namely lack of performance and waste characterizing the model b producer cooperative resettlement projects individually and collectively the cooperatives the government s preferred mode of production are a complete failure lessons for development programs elsewhere and in emergent south africa in particular are clear the political economy of government assistance is not sufficient to produce agricultural surpluses and sustainable development the social economy of cooperation in production organization by africa s traditional farmers also does not necessarily translate into modern cooperatives as zimbabwe s policy makers assumed producer cooperatives are unproductive because of the prevailing organizational culture which enables leading members to seek individual self interest and private gain making it hard for the rank and file to cooperate and work for the common good

sovereign debt as a contingent claim a quantitative approach abstract we construct a dynamic equilibrium model with contingent service and adverse selection to quantitatively study sovereign debt in the model benefits of defaulting are tempered by higher future interest rates for a wide set of parameters the only equilibrium is one in which the sovereign defaults in all states additional output losses however sustain equilibria that resemble the data we show that due to the adverse selection problem some countries choose to delay default to reduce loss of reputation moreover although equilibria with no default imply greater welfare levels they are not sustainable in highly indebted and volatile countries

large scale agricultural investments and smallholder welfare a comparison of wage labor and outgrower channels in tanzania summary this article evaluates household welfare effects of large scale agricultural investments in tanzania one of the main recipients of such investments in africa specifically the article compares households participating in sugar and rice investments through outgrower schemes or as agro industry workers with non participants in terms of household income and income poverty building on primary household data it is one of the first studies to empirically analyze ex post impacts of large scale agricultural investments in africa the analysis draws on cross section survey data of 516 households collected in kilombero district a priority cluster for the southern agricultural growth corridor of tanzania sagcot the results show overall positive household welfare differences between participants of the investments and the respective counterfactual however there are large differences between arrangements and subsectors estimated effects for outgrowers are largest yet for land rich outgrowers more so than for land poor effects for agro industry workers in the sugar investment are significantly larger than for those in the rice investment though in both investments land poor workers seem to benefit hence the study results suggest potential benefits of outgrower schemes and potentials of agro industry wage employment for the land poor to escape extreme poverty yet it also stresses particularly the need to address the constraints of land poor outgrowers qualitative interviews for example pointed to growing risks for land poor outgrowers in the context of rising elite capture by larger outgrowers

exploring spatial dynamics with land price indexes the purpose of this study is to explore the within region spatial dynamics of appreciation and depreciation rates using three different representations of geographical space mean value indexing methods are used to construct global land price indexes sub market land price indexes and local land price indexes using transaction price data for vacant residential land within the city of hamilton ontario between 1995 and 2003 the results are validated against statistics canada s series of new housing price indexes followed by a comparison of the relative performance of the three geographical representations of land price indexes the results indicate that the mean value indexing methods are robust although subject to outliers and sample selection bias and clearly illustrate the spatial dynamics of annual appreciation and depreciation rates across the study area the results also underscore the need for regular surveillance of the spatial dynamics of urban land markets

structure behavior and voter turnout in the united states electoral participation in the united states is examined to provide a clearer account of the effect of the registration requirement on individual voting behavior pooling nes data from 1980 1984 and 1988 i first model with traditional and selection bias techniques the full electorate to distinguish among three groups nonregistrants registered nonvoters and voters analyses limited to recent movers then reported to understand more fully the forces associated with the actual decision calculi of registering and voting the influences of many factors commonly accepted as important determinants of voting are disentangled and their effect at each stage is ascertained factors yielding inconsistent effects in previ research or believed to be unimportant such as race gender attitudes toward the candidates and trust government are shown to deserve closer scrutiny by electoral scholars

cooperative membership and dairy performance among smallholders in ethiopia this study assesses the impact of cooperative membership among dairy producers in selale ethiopia we selected ten impact indicators proportion of dairy income to total household income total dairy income proportion of crossbreed cows to the total number of cows in the herd indicator of technological innovation amount of feed bought another indicator of technological innovation milk production milk productivity commercialization price per liter of milk price per kg of butter and the share of milk production that is processed at the household level in order to minimize the biases that may arise by simply comparing members and non members we employed a propensity score matching technique the empirical analysis shows that cooperatives are strong in facilitating technological transformations and commercialization but weak in offering better prices these findings suggest structural trade offs between different domains of cooperatives action overall our study concludes that cooperatives can be efficient business institutions to foster rural development and food security

collective action initiatives to improve marketing performance lessons from farmer groups in tanzania this study aims to examine the extent to which certain characteristics and asset endowments of smallholder farmer groups facilitate collective action initiatives to improve group marketing performance this is approached through an evaluation of a government led programme in tanzania which is attempting to increase smallholder farmers incomes and food security through a market oriented intervention findings suggest that more mature groups with strong internal institutions functioning group activities and a good asset base of natural capital are more likely to improve their market situation gender composition of groups also affects group marketing performance as an enabling factor for male dominated groups structural social capital in the form of membership in other groups and ties to external service providers and cognitive social capital in the form of intra group trust and altruistic behaviour are not significant factors in a group s ability to improve its market situation

promoting the role of farmer based organizations for value chain integration the tension between a program s targeting and an organization s investment strategy we use new data on 500 farmer based organizations fbos in ghana and regression analysis to reveal determinants of collective investments and the case of the millennium development authority s mida agricultural program in ghana to demonstrate that development programs offering hard incentives may be counterproductive in promoting collective action we show that when a program sets criteria for participation and offers in cash and in kind support to selected fbos it may promote rent seeking and crowd out equity capital formation this is so because fbos may have formed for the sole purpose of benefitting from incentives offered by the program and thus lack an economic justification which is an important condition for progression through the cooperative life cycle further by setting stringent participation criteria the program may end up selecting younger organizations while it is the more consolidated organizations that are able to connect to business development services bds and engage in more offensive collective action

space time approach to commercial property prices valuation there exists three ways of approaching real estate prices the cost approach the market data approach and the income capitalization approach in this article we propose an improvement of the market data approach that takes into account the spatial component in particular we propose a modified market data approach based on interpolation being the structure of the spatial correlation between the prices of properties the main factor to obtain the weights interpolation methods have been widely used for estimating real estate prices but they do not take into account the structure of their spatial dependence although this drawback is overcome by kriged estimation in the case of the prices of commercial properties they do not provide good estimates because the scarceness of the market information this is why auxiliary information is needed and cokriging methods are used to obtain estimates that are more accurate the aim of this article is the comparison of cokriged estimation of premises prices in tw

war and institutions new evidence from sierra leone scholars of economic development have argued that war can have adverse impacts on later economic performance war destroys physical capital and infrastructure and disrupts human capital accumulation and it may also damage institutions by creating political instability destroying the social fabric and endangering civil liberties world bank 2003 understanding war s impact on development is particularly important for sub saharan africa where two thirds of all nations suffered from armed conflict during the 1980s and 1990s the proliferation of armed conflict in the world s poorest region begs the question of what role conflict may be playing in africa s disappointing economic performance yet the net long run effects of war are ambiguous from the point of view of economic theory to the extent that war impacts are limited to the destruction of capital the neoclassical model predicts rapid economic growth postwar converging back to steady state growth several recent papers that study war impacts including in japan donald r davis and david e weinstein 2002 and vietnam miguel and gerard roland 2005 find few persistent local impacts of u s bombing with heavily bombed areas experiencing rapid recovery to prewar population and economic trends this is consistent with the neoclassical model if war s main consequence is to destroy capital war could also affect long run growth either positively or negatively by modifying the scale parameter in the neoclassical growth model for example while the world bank 2003 argues that war has adverse institutional consequences charles h tilly shows how war promoted state formation and nation building in europe historically ultimately strengthening institutions tilly 1975 we study the aftermath of the recent civil conflict in sierra leone one notable aspect of this project is the extensive household data for sierra leone on conflict experiences and on local institutions our results are complementary to the other recent studies mentioned above none of which examines institutional impacts

the impact of a food security program on household food consumption in northwestern ethiopia a matching estimator approach abstract with the financial support from various development partners ethiopia has designed and implemented several programs to improve household food security yet food insecurity is still a major challenge to several millions of people in the country and it is questionable whether the different food security programs implemented over the past years have been successful using a propensity score matching method to control for pre intervention differences this study examined the impact on household food calorie intake of an integrated food security program ifsp which had been implemented in northwestern ethiopia by two non governmental organizations as a case study the estimated results provide evidence that ifsp has a positive and statistically significant effect on food calorie intake in particular ifsp has raised physical food calorie intake by 30 among the beneficiary households however we also found that ifsp has differential impact depending on family size landownership and gender of head of household overall the paper provides evidence that supporting integrated food security programs is important to improve food security in rural areas

linking smallholders to markets determinants and impacts of farmer collective action in kenya summary this article investigates determinants and impacts of cooperative organization using the example of smallholder banana farmers in kenya farmer groups are inclusive of the poor although wealthier households are more likely to join employing propensity score matching we find positive income effects for active group members yet price advantages of collective marketing are small and high value market potentials have not yet been tapped beyond prices farmer groups function as important catalysts for innovation adoption through promoting efficient information flows we discuss the conditions under which collective action is useful and through what mechanisms the potential benefits emerge

insurance market efficiency and crop choices in pakistan this paper tests the efficiency of insurance markets in the pakistan punjab by examining how crop choices are affected by the presence of price and yield risk we estimate reduced form and structural models of crop choices although we cannot reject the hypothesis that village members efficiently share risk among themselves production choices are shown to depend on risk existing risk sharing and selfinsurance mechanisms thus imperfectly protect punjab farmers against village level shocks results also indicate that households respond to consumption price risk thereby suggesting that empirical and theoretical work on risk should avoid putting an exclusive emphasis on yield and output price risk

wealth based trust and the development of collective action interpersonal trust is one possible mechanism by which wealth inequality affects the success of efforts in cooperation specifically the presence of perceived economic differences between members of small agricultural cooperatives in northwest ecuador s agricultural frontier encourages trust in the wealthy thus facilitating co op development during the initial stage of cooperative formation but such inequality and exclusive trust may later negatively affect co op success these generalizations are only possible through refinement of frameworks currently used in the study of heterogeneity and common pool resource management this refinement is made possible by paying closer attention to the operationalization of variables and by synthesizing already existing hypotheses

moving from the stock of social capital to the flow of benefits the role of agency abstract comparing results for 60 villages in rajasthan india it is seen that having a high level of social capital does not always help to achieve high development performance stocks of social capital need to be drawn upon actively and capable agency is necessary in addition to high social capital locally relevant scales of development performance and social capital are devised for making this comparison variables corresponding to other bodies of explanation including extent of commercialization relative stratification and relative need are also examined but a combination of high social capital and capable agency is found to be associated most closely with high development performance

spatial estimation of housing prices and locational rents summary this work stems from the widely accepted hypothesis that housing price is determined by two types of characteristic structural and locational under this hypothesis a methodology is presented for the spatial estimation of housing prices and locational rents the iterative residual kriging irk method the methodological aspects are complemented by the presentation of an application of this methodology to the case of housing in granada spain

modeling determinants of agricultural production cooperatives performance in iran the purpose of this article is to identify the fundamental factors that are key determinants in promoting effective operation of agricultural production cooperatives apcs a theoretical framework determinants of apcs performance was used to analyze the links between the webs of factors a survey method was used to collect data from two southern provinces in iran data were collected from 52 managers and 260 member farmers in 52 apcs using a stratified random sampling method it is concluded that the theoretical model can to a great extent predict the performance of apcs cooperative structure and government support factors are the most important factors explaining the performance of apcs also policy strategies need to focus on conditioning variables that affect the performance of apcs

estimating policy effects on spatial market efficiency an extension to the parity bounds model the standard parity bounds model pbm is extended to allow for dynamic shifts in regime probabilities in response to changes in marketing policy the approach allows estimation of the length of the adjustment period and a statistical test for no policy effects the extended pbm is applied to maize and wheat markets in ethiopia evidence of a dynamic adjustment path is found and grain marketing reforms are found to have improved spatial efficiency in a few markets worsened it in a few others but generally to have had little effect on the spatial efficiency of ethiopian grain markets

collective action in diverse sierra leone communities scholars have identified ethnic divisions as a leading cause of underdevelopment due partially to their adverse effects on public goods we investigate this issue in post war sierra leone one of the world s poorest and most ethnically diverse countries to address concerns over endogenous local ethnic composition we use an instrumental variables strategy using earlier census data on ethnicity and include several historical and geographic covariates perhaps surprisingly we find that local diversity is not associated with worse public goods provision across multiple outcomes and specifications with precisely estimated zeros we investigate the role of historical factors in generating the findings

out of the ashes into the fire the consequences of u s weapons sales for political violence abstract we examine the effect of u s weapons purchases on political violence in 191 countries during the period 1970 2008 our identification strategy exploits exogenous shifts in the cost of purchasing u s commercial weapons through a combination of time variation in u s inflation and cross sectional variation in a country s historical frequency of purchases we find that weapons purchases reduce the likelihood of political repression but increase the likelihood of onset of civil war in purchasing countries the results suggest that state investment in military capability incites civil war in countries where state repression of an aggrieved opposition would have otherwise prevailed

does women s proportional strength affect their participation governing local forests in south asia summary the gender and politics literature has long debated how women s proportional strength affects policy formulation within legislatures studies on gender and environmental governance have focused mainly on women s limited participation in local institutions both bodies of work leave important aspects unexplored the former neglects the in between process the impact of women s numbers on their effective participation such as attending and speaking up at meetings and holding office the latter neglects to ask what impact would increasing women s proportions have on participation and what proportions are effective rigorous empirical analysis is also scarce addressing these gaps this paper based on primary data for community forestry institutions in india and nepal statistically tests if a group s gender composition affects women s effective participation and if there are any critical mass effects the results support the popularly emphasized proportions of one quarter to one third but women s economic class also matters as do some factors other than women s numbers

income smoothing and consumption smoothing one way that risk averse households protect consumption levels is to borrow and use insurance mechanisms another way common in low income economies is to diversify economic activities and make conservative production and employment choices households thus tend toward limiting exposure only to shocks that can be handled with available credit and insurance typically both types of mechanisms are studied independently but much more can be learned by studying them together first we obtain a more complete picture of risks costs and insurance possibilities second it opens the way to considering biases in standard tests of credit and insurance

finding default understanding the drivers of default on contracts with farmers organizations under the world food programme purchase for progress pilot during the past two decades food assistance policy has shifted toward local or regional food purchases and away from purchases from donor countries while most local and regional procurement occurs through hard tendering processes open to large scale firms and farms there is growing interest in identifying how and whether to procure from smallholder farmer organizations to date little is known about the drivers of successful contracting with farmers organizations fos we utilize data from the united nations world food programme purchase for progress pilot in three east african countries to predict defaults on contracts we examine four possible explanations country contexts fo characteristics prior experience with contracts and contract modalities and their relationship to local spot market prices the single most important predictor of default is the increase in market prices between contract approval and delivery yet while increases in market prices are linked to increases in default this relationship is decreasing in contract size indicating search costs associated with breaking contracts our findings yield both generalizable and context specific insights about whether and when procuring from smallholder farmers can be successfully integrated into the food assistance toolkit this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

econometric estimation of producers risk attitudes general methods are proposed for the identification and econometric estimation of the parameters of the distribution of risk attitudes in a producer population the proposed methods also provide the basis for the development of statistical tests of model specification and of behavioral hypotheses econometric risk attitude estimation is shown to be possible under less restrictive conditions than previously believed a moment based version of the general model is applied to indian data and the econometrically estimated risk attitudes are presented and compared to experimental results for a similar group of producers

sovereign debt and reserves with liquidity and productivity crises during the recent financial crisis emerging economies have kept accumulating both sovereign reserves and debt to account for this empirical fact we model the optimal portfolio choice of a sovereign that is subject to liquidity and productivity shocks we determine the equilibrium level of debt and its cost by solving a contracting game between sovereign and international lenders although raising debt increases the sovereign exposure to liquidity and productivity crises the simultaneous accumulation of reserves can mitigate the negative effects of such crises this mechanism rationalizes the complementarity between debt and reserves

financial integration and liquidity crises this paper analyzes the effects of financial integration on the stability of the banking system financial integration allows banks in different regions to smooth local liquidity shocks by borrowing and lending on a world interbank market we show under which conditions financial integration induces banks to reduce their liquidity holdings and to shift their portfolios toward more profitable but less liquid investments integration helps reallocate liquidity when different banks are hit by uncorrelated shocks however when a correlated systemic shock hits the total liquid resources in the banking system are lower than in autarky therefore financial integration leads to more stable interbank interest rates in normal times but to larger interest rate spikes in crises these results hold in a setup in which financial integration is welfare improving from an ex ante point of view we also look at the model s implications for financial regulation and show that in a second best world financial integrati

selection on observed and unobserved variables assessing the effectiveness of catholic schools in this paper we measure the effect of catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores because we do not have a good instrumental variable for catholic school attendance we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables we also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bias based on measuring the ratio of selection on unobservables to selection on observables that would be required if one is to attribute the entire effect of catholic school attendance to selection bias we use our methods to estimate the effect of attending a catholic high school on a variety of outcomes our main conclusion is that catholic high schools substantially increase the probability of graduating from high school and more tentatively attending college we find little evidence of an effect on test scores

wealth weather risk and the composition and profitability of agricultural investments despite the growing evidence that farmers in low income environments are risk averse there has been little empirical evidence on the importance of risk in shaping the actual allocation of production resources among farmers differentiated by wealth the authors use panel data on investments in rural india to examine how the composition of productive and nonproductive asset holdings varies across farmers with different levels of total wealth and across farmers facing different degrees of weather risk income variability is a prominent feature of the experience of rural agents in low income countries the authors report evidence based on measures of rainfall variability that the agricultural investment portfolio behavior of farmers in such settings reflects risk aversion due evidently to limitations on consumption soothing mechanisms such as crop insurance or credit markets the authors results suggest that uninsured weather risk is a significant cause of lower efficiency and lower average incomes a one standard deviation decrease in weather risk measured by the standard deviation of the timing of the rainy season would raise average profits by up to 35 percent among farmers in the lowest wealth quartile moreover rainfall variability induces a more unequal distribution of average incomes for a given distribution of wealth wealthier farmers are willing to absorb significant risk without giving up profits to reduce production risk smaller farmers have to invest their limited wealth in ways that reduce their exposure to risk at the cost of lower profit rates the authors found that at high levels of rainfall variability differences in rates of profit per unit of agricultural assets were similar across classes of wealth but over the sample range of rainfall variability these rates of profit were always higher for the poorer farmers than for the wealthier ones suggesting that the disadvantages of small farmers in risk diffusion are more than offset by their labor cost advantage

peasant household behaviour with missing markets some paradoxes explained a model of peasant household behavior under varying degrees of household specific food and labor market failures is constructed to show that these structural features can explain several well known patterns of peasant response which have often been attributed to peculiar motives presumed specific to peasants the model explains sluggish response to cash crops prices and high instability in perceived food and labor scarcities the key role of manufactured consumer goods prices in stimulating peasants effort in cash crops production the effectiveness of taxation as opposed to incentives in stimulating cash crops production and the key role of technological change in food production to enhance cash crop production results are obtained analytically in the case of one market failure and by numerical simulation with more than one

do icdps work an empirical evaluation of forest based microenterprises in the brazilian amazon this paper evaluates public investments in forest based microenterprises as part of an integrated conservation and development project icdp in the brazilian amazon we combine matching with regression to quantify the effects of program participation on household income wealth and livelihoods we find that participation increased cash and total income and asset accumulation suggesting that the microenterprises contributed to the development goals of the icdp there is no clear evidence however that the microenterprise program helped achieve the icdp s conservation goals of shifting household livelihoods away from agriculture and into sustainable forest use

escaping poverty and becoming poor who gains who loses and why abstract different households have followed very different economic trajectories this study of 35 north indian villages shows members of 11 1 of 6 376 households in these villages have overcome poverty in the last 25 years while members of another 7 9 have fallen into poverty households escape from poverty is assisted by one set of factors but an entirely different set of factors is associated with households decline two distinct sets of policies are required thus one set to promote escape from poverty and another set to arrest decline into poverty poverty has some distinctly local antecedents a methodology for tracking changes in poverty at the local level is developed that community groups and others can use to assess change and examine causes

transactions costs and agricultural household supply response we develop and estimate a model of supply response when transactions costs create a situation where some producers buy others sell and others do not participate in markets we present two rationales for why producing households may have different relationships to the market proportional and fixed transactions costs using data on mexican corn producers we estimate an empirical model that allows for separate tests of the significance of both types of transactions costs revealing that both fixed and proportional transactions costs matter for the estimation the results provide consistent estimates of supply elasticity and measures of the relative importance of factors determining both proportional and fixed transactions costs

child health and conflict in cote d ivoire we examine the impact of the 2002 07 civil conflict in cote d ivoire on children s health status measured by height for age we use pre and post war survey data coupled with information on the location of violent incidents to capture exposure to the conflict of children born during 1997 2007 our results indicate that children from regions more affected by the conflict suffered significant health setbacks compared with children from less affected regions further household level victimization such as war related economic stress health stress and displacement has a large and negative effect on child health in conflict affected regions

participatory exclusions community forestry and gender an analysis for south asia and a conceptual framework abstract the idea of people s participation has long been part of development thinking but today the management of local natural resources by village communities is widely accepted as an institutional imperative it is therefore essential to examine how these institutions perform especially from the perspective of the more disadvantaged based on extensive fieldwork among community forestry groups in india and nepal and existing case studies this paper demonstrates how seemingly participatory institutions can exclude significant sections such as women it provides a typology of participation spells out the gender equity and efficiency implications of such exclusions and analyzes what underlies them it also outlines a conceptual framework to help analyze the process of gender exclusion and how it might be alleviated

does foreign aid target the poorest to examine the extent to which foreign aid reaches people at different levels of wealth in africa i use household surveys to measure the subnational distribution of a country s population by wealth quintiles and match this information to data on the location of aid projects from two multilateral donors within countries aid disproportionately flows to regions with more of the richest people aid does not favor regions with more of the poorest people these findings violate the stated preferences of the multilateral donors under study suggesting that the donors either cannot or are not willing to exercise control over the location of aid projects within countries the results also suggest that aid is not being allocated effectively to alleviate extreme poverty

war and local collective action in sierra leone abstract we study the brutal 1991 2002 sierra leone civil war using nationally representative household data on conflict experiences postwar economic outcomes local politics and collective action individuals whose households directly experienced more intense war violence are robustly more likely to attend community meetings more likely to join local political and community groups and more likely to vote tests using prewar controls and alternative samples suggest that selection into victimization is unlikely to be driving the results more speculatively the findings could help partially explain the rapid postwar political and economic recoveries observed in sierra leone and after several other recent african civil wars

on price risk and the inverse farm size productivity relationship abstract the oft observed inverse relationship between farm size and productivity has elicited several explanations having important policy and theoretical implications using advances in the analysis of price risk effects on producer behavior and a simple two period model of an agricultural household that both produces and consumes under price uncertainty at the time labor allocation decisions are made this paper demonstrates analytically that a non degenerate land distribution and price risk can together produce an inverse relationship even absent any of the more common explanations empirical evidence from madagascar confirms the plausibility of this intuitive explanation for the phenomenon

income and livelihoods in the war in afghanistan we explore the impact of the insurgency and military deployment on the livelihoods of local communities in afghanistan we use monthly wages and commodity prices at the provincial level over the period 2003 09 and look for their response to conflict events and isaf deployment overall we find that prices are more sensitive to deployment than to attacks commodity prices are not significantly affected by insurgent violence which is consistent with coping strategies already in place on the opposite military deployment is associated with an increase in the levels of wages and commodity prices as isaf is a new source of uncertainty

stabilizing food markets in eastern and southern africa a major challenge for agricultural policy in africa is how to address the market instability related causes of low farm productivity and food insecurity this paper highlights structural changes affecting the behavior of food markets in eastern and southern africa and discusses their implications for the design of strategies to stabilize food prices these changes include 1 an increasing trend in maize prices toward import parity levels reflecting an emerging structural maize deficit in much of the region 2 increasingly diversified food consumption patterns in both rural and urban areas 3 highly concentrated marketed maize surplus which have largely unrecognized implications for the magnitude of price risk faced by most farm households and 4 the strategic interactions between private and public marketing actors leading in some cases to heightened market instability and food crises in the prevailing dual market environment now characterizing most of the region greater coordination transparency and consultation between private and public market actors is needed to achieve reasonable levels of food price stability and predictability

a conceptual framework for community based health insurance in low income countries social capital and economic development summary the international policy model linking community based health insurance cbhi and universal coverage for health care in low income countries is implicitly determined by the development of mutual health insurance in 19th century europe and japan the economic and health system frameworks employed in cbhi policy have not sufficiently taken into account contextual considerations social capital theories could contribute to understanding why generally cbhi does not achieve significant and sustainable levels of population coverage a framework of social capital and economic development is used to organize and interpret existing evidence on cbhi this suggests that solidarity trust extra community networks vertical civil society links and state society relations affect the success of cbhi aligning schemes to social determinants of cbhi could result in structures that differ from those proposed by current analytic frameworks

estimating the benefit incidence of an antipoverty program by propensity score matching this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled estimating the benefit incidence of an antipoverty program by propensity score matching conducted between 1997 and 1998 in argentina the study observed that the average direct gain to the participant is found to be about half the gross wage over half of the beneficiaries are in the poorest decile nationally and 80 percent are in the poorest quintile the propensity score matching psm estimator is reasonably robust to a number of changes in methodology participants are more likely to be poor than non participants participants are less well educated live in poorer neighborhoods and are more likely to be members of neighborhood associations and political parties average gains are similar between men and women but are higher for younger workers funding for the study derives from the world bank research committee

international reserves and the maturity of external debt abstract this paper studies how the level of international reserves affects the maturity structure of external debt we show in an illustrative theoretical model that reserves lengthen the maturity of external debt via a flattening of the yield curve using data of 66 emerging and developing countries and applying different econometric approaches we find robust evidence that reserves increase the share of long term in total external debt results hold for private and public external debt individually taking reserves and their effect on the debt maturity structure together they reinforce financial stability

liquidity coinsurance moral hazard and financial contagion we study the propagation of financial crises between regions characterized by moral hazard problems the source of the problem is that banks are protected by limited liability and may engage in excessive risk taking the regions are affected by negatively correlated liquidity shocks so that liquidity coinsurance is pareto improving the moral hazard problem can be solved if banks are sufficiently capitalized under autarky a limited investment is needed to achieve optimality so that a limited amount of capital is sufficient to prevent risk taking with interbank deposits the optimal investment increases and capital becomes insufficient to prevent excessive risk taking thus bankruptcy occurs with positive probability and the crises spread to other regions via the financial linkages opening the financial markets is nevertheless pareto improving consumers benefit from liquidity coinsurance although they pay the cost of excessive risk taking finally we show that in this framework a completely connected deposit structure is more conducive to financial crises than an incompletely connected structure

social capital conflict and welfare abstract this paper analyzes the role of external conflict as a force that can create social capital hostile inter group interactions can help to resolve intra group social dilemmas but these potential gains must be weighed against the insecurity of hostile relations with an out group our central result is that the presence of an outside threat can induce higher levels of social capital either because a protective aspect of social capital comes into play and or as a reallocation of investments from private to social capital given that social capital is potentially subject to free riding the threat by promoting a greater level of social capital can be welfare improving when the threat is severe social capital and welfare are more likely to fall this effect of an external threat on social capital is stronger in poor economies these results can shed light on the sometimes contradicting empirical evidence on the relationship between conflict and social capital

social desirability opportunism and actual support for farmers market organisations in ethiopia one of the striking issues in the literature on farmers market organisations fmos is that farmers generally report quite positive opinions regarding the services of their fmo while at the same

impact of cooperatives on smallholders commercialization behavior evidence from ethiopia this article examines the impact of marketing cooperatives on smallholder commercialization of cereals using detailed household data in rural ethiopia we use the strong government role in promoting the establishment of cooperatives to justify the use of propensity score matching to compare households that are cooperative members to similar households in comparable areas without cooperatives the analysis reveals that although cooperatives obtain higher prices for their members they are not associated with a significant increase in the overall share of cereal production sold commercially by their members however these average results hide considerable heterogeneity across households in particular we find that smaller farmers tend to reduce their marketed output as a result of higher prices whereas the opposite is true for larger farmers

does cooperative membership improve household welfare evidence from apple farmers in china this paper examines the impact of cooperative membership on farm performance indicators such as apple yields net returns and household income using cross sectional data from a survey of farmers in china an endogenous switching regression model that accounts for selection bias is employed in the analysis the empirical results reveal that cooperative membership exerts a positive and statistically significant impact on apple yields farm net returns and household income a disaggregated analysis also reveals that small scale farms tend to benefit more from cooperatives than medium and large farms

why do emerging economies borrow short term the authors argue that emerging economies borrow short term due to the high risk premium charged by international capital markets on long term debt they first present a model where the debt maturity structure is the outcome of a risk sharing problem between the government and bondholders by issuing long term debt the government lowers the probability of a liquidity crisis transferring risk to bondholders in equilibrium this risk is reflected in a higher risk premium and borrowing cost therefore the government faces a tradeoff between safer long term borrowing and cheaper short term debt second the authors construct a new database of sovereign bond prices and issuance they show that emerging economies pay a positive term premium a higher risk premium on long term bonds than on short term bonds during crises the term premium increases with issuance shifting toward shorter maturities this suggests that changes in bondholders risk aversion are important to understand emerging market crises

the health of farmer based organisations in ghana organisational diagnostics and governance implications abstractin this paper we use primary data on 500 ghanaian fbos collected through semi structured interviews and risky dictator games rdg to test the validity of the cooperative life cycle theory and formulate a measure of cooperative health we first define cooperative health as the alignment of heterogeneity in risk preferences and the effectuation of collective investments we then use cluster and correlation analysis to categorize fbos on the basis of their health and correlate these typologies with various performance indicators our findings reveal that organizational health is generally low as there are only a few organizations that manage to provide member farmers with both risk sharing and cost saving opportunities further healthier fbos experience stronger growth in membership while health is lower in fbos that have been established for the purpose of benefitting from external incentives

improving the speed of adoption of agricultural technologies and farm performance through farmer groups evidence from the great lakes region of africa the article examines the effect of membership in farmer groups mfg on adoption lag of agricultural technologies and farm performance in burundi the democratic republic of congo and rwanda we use duration and stochastic production frontier models on farm household data we find that the longer the duration of mfg the shorter the adoption lag and much more so if combined with extension service delivery farmer groups function as an important mechanism for improving farm productivity through reduced technical inefficiency in input use we discuss policy implications under which farmer groups are a useful channel to reduce adoption lag and the means through which improved farm performance can be achieved

spatial association and heterogeneity issues in land price models urban planners frequently use regression analysis for the empirical estimation of land price models which are used to investigate the spatial structure of a city or to calculate the implicit price of environmental characteristics a concern with this kind of analysis is that often spatially associated or heterogeneous data are used which leads to estimation pitfalls most notably spatial autocorrelation and model structural instability over space in this paper we introduce a modelling methodology that combines a spatial autoregression with a switching regression to incorporate effectively both association and heterogeneity as part of the analysis in addition using sendai city in north eastern japan as a case study we use local statistics of spatial association to assist us in the exploration and definition of heterogeneous regimes finally we show how some measures commonly used to counter spatial effects fail at times thus highlighting the importance of a spatial modelling methodology such as th

cooperative pricing and scale efficiency the case of korean rice processing complexes unlike most investor owned enterprises cooperatives often have freedom to choose among a variety of firm objectives using 2002 2008 plantand province level data we ask in the present article which of several alternative maximands a korean cooperative rice processing firm pursues in contrast to earlier studies farmer member supply functions are incorporated into the cooperative s optimization framework we show that only large cooperative firms have operated at efficient scale while small and medium sized ones have been scale inefficient because the latter operate where scale returns are increasing mergers of small and medium sized cooperatives likely would be cost reducing and member return enhancing

a selectivity model of household food marketing behavior in sub saharan africa the agricultural household s discrete decision of whether to participate in coarse grain markets is separated here from the continuous decision of how much to sell or buy conditional on participation failure to participate in markets results from high fixed transactions costs a selectivity model endogenously switches households into alternative market participation states correcting for bias caused by the exclusion of unobservable variables affecting both discrete and continuous decisions improved market information increases the probability of participation by sellers while access to cereals processing technology increases quantities transacted by both sellers and buyers conditional on participation

financial instability reserves and central bank swap lines in the panic of 2008 in this paper we connect the events of the last twelve months the panic of 2008 as it has been called to the demand for international reserves in previous work we have shown that international reserve demand can be rationalized by a central bank s desire to backstop the broad money supply to avert the possibility of an internal external double drain a bank run combined with capital flight thus simply looking at trade or short term debt as motivations for reserve holdings is insufficient one must also consider the size of the banking system m2 here we show that a country s reserve holdings just before the current crisis relative to their predicted holdings based on these financial motives can significantly predict exchange rate movements of both emerging and advanced countries in 2008 countries with large war chests did not depreciate and some appreciated meanwhile those who held insufficient reserves based on our metric were likely to depreciate current account balances and short term debt levels are not statistically significant predictors of depreciation once reserve levels are taken into account our model s typically high predicted reserve levels provide important context for the unprecedented u s dollar swap lines recently provided to many countries by the federal reserve this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

estimating the distortionary effects of ethnic quotas in singapore using housing transactions abstract desegregation is a key policy issue in many countries i investigate a residential desegregation program in singapore the ethnic housing quotas i show that choice restrictions imposed on apartment blocks above the quota limits constrained could have distortionary effects causing price and quantity differences for constrained versus unconstrained blocks i test these predictions by hand matching more than 500 000 names in the phonebook to ethnicities to calculate ethnic proportions at the apartment block level i can then investigate differences for constrained and unconstrained blocks close to the quota limits and test for sorting around the limits i find that price differences are between 3 and 5 quantity effects are economically significant translating to longer time on market durations selection cannot fully explain these results my results point to challenges in achieving desegregation using quantity restrictions

a two season agricultural household model of output and price uncertainty abstract this paper presents a two season model of a household s production consumption labor supply and storage decisions in an environment of output and price risk the analytical results in this study are markedly different from those of models prevalent in the mainstream of the agricultural household literature the empirical analysis that uses panel data from a village in india provides support for the theoretical results and underscores the seasonal dimension of the farmers choice problems the results also show that ignoring risk or risk averse preferences may introduce substantial downward bias in optimal response estimates

the consequences of child soldiering abstract little is known about the impacts of military service on human capital and labor market outcomes due to an absence of data as well as sample selection recruits are self selected screened and selectively survive we examine the case of uganda where rebel recruitment methods provide exogenous variation in conscription economic and educational impacts are widespread and persistent schooling falls by nearly a year skilled employment halves and earnings drop by a third military service seems to be a poor substitute for schooling psychological distress is evident among those exposed to severe war violence and is not limited to ex combatants

grassroots organizations and ngos in rural development opportunities with diminishing states and expanding markets abstract this article undertakes to deal systematically with nongovernment organizations ngos and grassroots organizations gros usually treated as a residual category ten levels for development decision making and action are identified in the tradition of central place theory three of these are considered local or grassroots because of their collective action possibilities then three sectors are delineated instead of the usual two ngos are part of the collective action sector which differs from the public and private sectors in theoretically consistent ways a careful distinction is made between institutions and organizations usually conflated in the literature examples of accelerated rural development through grassroots organizations and ngos are discussed form asia africa and latin america

on market integration and liberalisation method and application to ethiopia the article suggests further improvements in the methodology to analyse market integration it provides corrections to and methodological extensions of recent work in this journal it also presents a way of applying market integration techniques to the analysis of shocks such as market liberalisation and war the method is applied to the effects of liberalisation and the end of the civil war on food markets in ethiopia the conclusion is that liberalisation had important effects on the long run and short run integration of food markets