biofuel investment in tanzania omissions in implementation abstract increasing demand for biofuels as a component of climate change mitigation energy security and a fossil fuel alternative attracts investors to developing countries like tanzania ample unused land is critical for first generation biofuels production and an important feature to attract foreign direct investments that can contribute towards agricultural modernization and poverty reduction initiatives despite the economic justifications the existing institutional and infrastructural capacities dictate the impacts of biofuels market penetrations furthermore exogenous factors like global recessionary pressure depressed oil prices below the level at which biofuel production were profitable in 2007 making tanzania s competitiveness and potential benefits questionable this paper investigates the extent that first generation jatropha based biofuels industry development in tanzania observed during fieldwork in kisarawe and bahi may fulfill policy objectives this paper argues that without strong regulatory frameworks for land investment management and rural development biofuel industrialization could further exacerbate poverty and food insecurity in tanzania the paper concludes with policy recommendations for first generation biofuel development while keeping in mind implications of second generation production since the topic is broad and multifaceted a multidisciplinary approach is used that includes political institutional and agricultural economics to analyze and conceptualize biofuel industry development and food security

translating legal rights into tenure security lessons from the new commercial pressures on land in ghana abstractsince the confluence of the food and oil price crises of the mid 2000s ghana has become a prime destination for large scale farmland investments while this trend could make valuable contributions to an ailing agricultural sector the alienation of rural land for commercial ends could conversely have far reaching implications for customary land rights through an analysis of the legislation protecting customary land rights and governing such the alienation of those rights and by contrasting this with practice this article highlights some of the fundamental challenges in translating legal rights into tenure security in contemporary ghana it shows that despite the legal recognition of customary land rights in practice customary land users are ultimately responsible for contesting infringements upon these rights with traditional authorities able to capture substantial rents from the alienation process and government institutions offering scant oversight as a result of fragmented responsibilities

is there a role for biofuels in promoting energy self sufficiency and security a cge analysis of biofuel policy in thailand given the rising price of crude oil some developing countries including thailand are looking towards developing their domestic renewable energy resources in particular biofuels however there are concerns about the possible adverse effects such a policy strategy would have on key variables such as sectoral output land allocation and the effects of prices particularly food prices this study develops a computable general equilibrium cge model of the thailand economy that features enhancements of the energy sector and uses it to analyze the government s recent renewable energy development plan this plan aims to increase domestic energy use from renewable sources to replace fossil fuel imports the study simulated specific policies contained in the plan among other things we found that promoting biofuel use causes a rapid increase in the price of biofuel and biofuel feedstock in the short run whereas these prices only increase slightly in the long run due to more elastic supplies the prices of food and other products marginally increase implying that food security is not undermined by the policy on the basis of the findings the study recommends a review of some of the targets because they were found to be rather high and a phasing in of others

reputation and experimentation in repeated games with two long run players this paper considers reputation effects in a repeated game between two long run players one of whom is relatively patient and may be committed to a fixed strategy which punishes the opponent for increasingly long periods whenever inappropriate actions are taken by following this commitment strategy the more patient player can induce a sufficiently patient opponent to experiment to see whether the commitment strategy is also being followed off the equilibrium path this can guarantee the more patient player in any nash equilibrium a payoff close to the highest feasible payoff consistent with the individual rationality of the other player for an arbitrary degree of patience of the less patient player a weaker result is established the more patient player is guaranteed an average equilibrium payoff close to the static stackelberg payoff this latter result generalizes that of schmidt 1993 who established the same result for the restricted class of games of conflicting interests

bargaining and reputation an experiment on bargaining in the presence of behavioural types we conduct a series of laboratory experiments to understand what role commitment and reputation play in bargaining the experiments implement the abreu and gul 2000 bargaining model that demonstrates how introducing behavioral types which are obstinate in their demands creates incentives for all players to build reputations for being hard bargainers the data are qualitatively consistent with the theory as subjects mimic induced types furthermore we find evidence for the presence of complementary types whose initial demands acquiesce to induced behavioural demands however there are quantitative deviations from the theory subjects make aggressive demands too often and participate in longer conflicts before reaching agreements overall the results suggest that the abreu and gul 2000 model can be used to gain insights to bargaining behavior particularly in environments where the process underlying obstinate play is well established

migrants and housing investments theory and evidence from nigeria the dominance of housing may reflect limitations in the menu of investment choices available to migrants in the country of origin in many developing countries individuals face relatively few savings opportunities where productive assets such as land farm assets are associated with high risks and or low rates of return housing investments offer unique advantages in that they are durable highly visible and associated with low risk and monitoring requirements however there are some important drawbacks associated with housing investments in particular where resale and rental markets for housing are not well developed migrants housing assets may be relatively illiquid and irreversible in the next section i provide some background on general patterns of investment behavior among migrants here the evidence on housing investments is discussed for a rich set of migrant sending and receiving countries in section iii i develop the conceptual framework for understanding migrants housing investment decisions section iv provides a description of the data sources section v outlines the empirical strategy in section vi i discuss the empirical findings section vii presents conclusions excerpt

towards a sustainable electrification in ghana a review of renewable energy deployment policies abstract ghana has been facing perennial power rationing over the years due to fuel supply challenges the country s energy system is likely to suffer additional strain from rising energy demand fueled by population growth rapid urbanization and economic development fortunately there are enormous renewable energy resources which can provide sustainable electrification as backbone to socioeconomic development while curbing global warming ghana s energy strategy targets 100 access to electricity and 10 share of sustainable power in national generation mix by 2020 despite the existence of numerous policies and a renewable energy act current contribution of non conventional renewable energy to electricity generation is less than 1 the right mix of policies to address the unique domestic conditions and achieve its specific development goals remains insufficient this study reviews the regulatory framework financing incentives and other provisions of ghana s renewable energy act it critically examines the policy s strengths weaknesses opportunities and treats based on comparative analysis and lessons drawn from failed and successful implementation of similar policies around the world the study also assesses the impact of policy on project development it was found that the performance of ghana s renewable energy policy on grid connected electricity has been poor compared to its target the fundamental reasons for this unsatisfactory performance may be attributed to partial implementation of policies lack of market driven support schemes lack of pricing policy framework weak grid network limited access to funds and inconsistencies in renewable energy development strategies this study proposes the following countermeasures i ghana should comprehensively harmonize renewable energy regulatory and fiscal policies with domestic electricity pricing regime ii market driven support schemes should be prioritized for cost effectiveness and minimum governmental influence these reforms can help eliminate some of the major barriers to sustainable electrification in ghana while the lessons provide a learning curve for other african countries

bargaining with two sided incomplete information an infinite horizon model with alternating offers this paper examines an infinite horizon bargaining model incorporating five features two sided incomplete information with potentially information revealing strategies an infinite horizon uncertainty concerning the potential gains from trade an illumination of interesting qualitative bargaining issues and plausible free from arbitrarily specified out of equilibrium conjectures equilibria these features motivated in the paper have powerful implications a nash equilibrium exists and is generically both unique and sequential comparative static implications of variations in the game s specifications are developed we find that natural indications of bargaining strength emerge from the model and establish the intuitive result that an increase in a player s relative bargaining strength makes that player more likely to capture the gains from bargaining

beyond taxation discourse around energy policy in japan energy policy literature tends to emphasise the impact of taxation on energy preference however the present case concerning extremely low acceptance of diesel cars in japan could not be explained by taxation as a possible factor the paper sheds light upon discourse around the energy policy the policy aimed to characterise diesel technology as emitting particulate matter and nitrogen oxide nox the paper contributes to extending the existing understanding of the role of public policy by embracing the linguistic interactions complemented by visualisation

continuous time repeated games in this paper the authors develop a model of strategic behavior in continuous time games of complete information which includes conventional repeated games in discrete time as a special case the model developed here admits a very large class of strategies that allows one to extend the repeated game model to continuous time the set of equilibria in this game may be large in many cases equal to the feasible individually rational set of payoff s the authors also study the restriction of renegotiation proofness in this framework and apply these results to a cournot duopoly example copyright 1993 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

tomatoes land and hearsay property and history in asante in the time of structural adjustment abstract after a decade of advocating market based solutions to poverty and underdevelopment in sub saharan africa policy analysts have begun to reexamine the actual and potential role of african states and institutions in promoting sustainable development while stressing the importance of flexibility in policies and institutions much of this debate rests on ahistorical approaches to understanding african institutions which portray them as inflexible and fragile beleaguered by economic and political change rather than contributing to it after reviewing some of the assumptions which inform recent debates this essay argues for a more processual approach which takes account of the negotiability and ambiguity of many institutional arrangements drawing on a case study of recent changes in land rights and agricultural practices in a rural community in ghana

bargaining and reputation the paper develops a reputation based theory of bargaining the idea is to investigate and highlight the influence of bargaining postures on bargaining outcomes a complete information bargaining model a la rubinstein is amended to accommodate irrational types who are obstinate and indeed for tractability assumed to be completely inflexible in their offers and demands a strong independence of procedures result is derived after initial postures have been adopted the bargaining outcome is independent of the fine details of the bargaining protocol so long as both players have the opportunity to make offers frequently the latter analysis yields a unique continuous time limit with a war of attrition structure in the continuous time game equilibrium is unique and entails delay consequently inefficiency the equilibrium outcome reflects the combined influence of the rates of time preference of the players and the ex ante probabilities of different irrational types as the probability of irrationality goes to zero delay and inefficiency disappear furthermore if there is a rich set of types for both agents the limit equilibrium payoffs are inversely proportional to their rates of time preference

reputational bargaining with minimal knowledge of rationality two players announce bargaining postures to which they may become committed and then bargain over the division of a surplus the share of the surplus that a player can guarantee herself under first order knowledge of rationality is determined as a function of her probability of becoming committed as is the bargaining posture that she must announce in order to guarantee herself this much this maxmin share of the surplus is large relative to the probability of becoming committed e g it equals 30 if the commitment probability is 1 in 10 and equals 13 if the commitment probability is 1 in 1000 and the corresponding bargaining posture simply demands this share plus compensation for any delay in reaching agreement

no compromise uncertain costs in reputational bargaining abstract i show how uncertainty about agents future costs of delay can lead to substantial bargaining delays when agents have reputational concerns reputational concerns arise because with positive probability agents are behavioral types committed to demanding a fixed share of the surplus in equilibrium rational agents may demand almost the entire surplus and then wait with the deadlock only broken by the arrival of news about future costs even as the probability of behavioral types vanishes although both agents would benefit from a compromise reached immediately they do not propose such agreements because doing so would increase an opponent s option value of waiting

uncertainty about uncertainty and delay in bargaining we study a one sided offers bargaining game in which the buyer has private information about the value of the object and the seller has private information about his beliefs about the buyer s valuation we show that this uncertainty about uncertainties dramatically changes the set of outcomes in particular second order beliefs can lead to a delay in reaching agreement even when the seller makes frequent offers we show that not all types of second order beliefs lead to a delay when the buyer assigns positive probability to the seller knowing the buyer s value then delay not only can occur but it must occur for a class of equilibria however in all other cases delay will never occur

optimal policy with credibility concerns abstract this paper considers a reputation model of optimal taxation in which the public is unsure about the government type a long lived government can be trustworthy meaning that it commits to its announced tax rate or opportunistic meaning that it retains the ability to change its tax rate after announcing it unlike in most prior studies the committed strategy in this model is optimally chosen by the trustworthy type we show that this change has significant consequences for the equilibrium dynamics the optimal committed strategy is found to vary with the time preferences of the two government types the initial reputation of the government and the elasticity of household production this formulation explains differences in policy responses across governments in the face of similar credibility problems

bargaining without a common prior an immediate agreement theorem in sequential bargaining models without outside options each player s bargaining power is ultimately determined by which player will make an offer and when this paper analyzes a sequential bargaining model in which players may hold different beliefs about which player will make an offer and when excessive optimism about making offers in the future can cause delays in agreement the main result states that despite this if players will remain sufficiently optimistic for a sufficiently long future then in equilibrium they will agree immediately this result is also extended to other canonical models of optimism

bargaining with imperfect commitment abstract we study the effect of imperfect commitment in noncooperative two person bargaining games by establishing the reputation for being stubborn a player sometimes commits to her initial demand becoming unable to change her demands or to accept an inferior offer from her opponent when the probability of being stubborn is small the set of equilibria is shown to be small and agreement may be reached immediately despite the possibility of stubbornness a player has greater bargaining power when she is more patient and or is more likely to be stubborn journal of economic literature classification number c78

ghana s bioenergy policy is 20 biofuel integration achievable by 2030 abstract in dealing with the climate change externality of the fossil fuel dominated transport sector bio fuels are widely seen as a solution through its bioenergy policy ghana seeks to improve oil supply security save foreign exchange create jobs and reduce emissions from the transport sector by integrating 20 biofuels into the transport fuel mix by 2030 this paper systematically analyses the transport fuel demand in ghana to determine the biofuel supply target in 2020 and 2030 and evaluates the resource input requirements for integration of biofuels into the transport fuel mix it provides a detailed picture of bio fuel prospects in ghana in the 2030 horizon the research concludes that though significant yield improvement is required to meet the target the target is achievable

the framing of unconventional natural gas resources in the foreign energy policy discourse of the russian federation the advent of unconventional resources of natural gas has altered the order on global as well as continental gas markets with rising liquidity the position of established dominant suppliers is eroding we focus on the initial response of russia the leading supplier of natural gas to europe to the new situation building the research on unit level constructivism and discourse analysis we use frame analysis to reveal what image of unconventional resources was constructed in russian foreign energy policy discourse fepd in the period between 2009 and 2011 when the unconventional revolution did not yet have any sharp contours we conclude that in russian fepd the unconventionals are considered as a distinctive and inferior source of energy compared to conventional natural gas emphasis is put on their economic irrationality and environmental hazards the bottom line of the discourse is the idea that there is a choice between conventional and unconventional sources with this choice being framed as one between good and bad or right and wrong

tough negotiations bilateral bargaining with durable commitments abstract we offer a tractable model of tough negotiations and delayed agreement the setting is an infinite horizon bilateral bargaining game in which negotiators can make strategic commitments to durable offers commitments decay stochastically but uncommitted negotiators can make new commitments the game s unique markov perfect equilibrium outcome takes the form of a war of attrition negotiators initially commit to incompatible offers but agreement occurs once a negotiator s commitment decays if commitments decay more quickly the terms of the agreement become more equal in expectation more patient committed and less risk averse negotiators obtain a larger fraction of the surplus

the profits of power land rights and agricultural investment in ghana we examine the impact of ambiguous and contested land rights on investment and productivity in agriculture in akwapim ghana we show that individuals who hold powerful positions in a local political hierarchy have more secure tenure rights and that as a consequence they invest more in land fertility and have substantially higher output the intensity of investments on different plots cultivated by a given individual corresponds to that individual s security of tenure over those specific plots and in turn to the individual s position in the political hierarchy relevant to those specific plots

alternating offer bargaining with two sided incomplete information i study alternating offer bargaining games with two sided incomplete information about the players discount rates for both perfect bayesian equilibrium and a rationalizability style notion i characterize the set of expected payoffs which may arise in the game i also construct bounds on agreements that may be made the set of expected payoffs is easy to compute and incorporate into applied models my main result is a full characterization of the set of perfect bayesian equilibrium payoffs for games in which the distribution over the players discount rates is of wide support yet is in a weak sense close to a point mass distribution i prove a lopsided convergence result each player cannot gain from a slight chance that she is a strong type but the player can suffer greatly if there is a slight chance that she is a weak type

biofuel development in ghana policies of expansion and drivers of failure in the jatropha sector abstract biofuel development was mainly promoted in several parts of africa as an energy security or rural development strategy jatropha was the biofuel feedstock that received the most interest across africa from investors however jatropha expansion gave rise to a number of contested issues which produced conflicts winners and losers access to land was at the heart of several of these conflicts though some success stories of individual jatropha projects have been documented the overwhelming majority of these projects in africa have either collapsed or faced significant difficulties understanding the reasons behind the failure of the jatropha sector is an important gap in the academic literature while the lessons learnt from failed projects could inform future policies and practices this literature review synthesizes the key drivers of failure of the jatropha sector in ghana as identified in the literature and complemented through site visits and expert interviews it identifies a number of reasons behind the failure of individual jatropha projects such as poor business planning institutional barriers limited community participation unfair compensation practices obstacles posed by civil society and unconstructive involvement of chiefs the findings indicate the systemic nature of these problems as they often worked synergistically to catalyse the collapse of many jatropha projects in ghana re vitalising the biofuel and especially the jatropha industry is virtually impossible given the current challenges this would require a renewed political interest in ghana particularly to deal with the deficits of the land administration institutions

rationalizable strategic behavior and the problem of perfection this paper explores the fundamental problem of what can be inferred about the outcome of a noncooperative game from the rationality of the players and from the information they possess the answer is summarized in a solution concept called rationalizability strategy profiles that are rationalizable are not always nash equilibria conversely the information in an extensive form game often allows certain unreasonable nash equilibria to be excluded from the set of rationalizable profiles a stronger form of rationalizability is appropriate if players are known to be not merely rational but also cautious what constitutes rational behavior in a noncooperative strategic situation this paper explores the issue in the context of a wide class of finite noncooperative games in extensive form the traditional answer relies heavily upon the idea of nash equilibrium nash 17 the position developed here however is that as a criterion for judging a profile of strategies to be reasonable choices for players in a game the nash equilibrium property is neither necessary nor sufficient some nash equilibria are intuitively unreasonable and not all reasonable strategy profiles are nash equilibria the fact that a nash equilibrium can be intuitively unattractive is well known the equilibrium may be imperfect introduced into the literature by selten 20 the idea of imperfect equilibria has prompted game theorists to search for a narrower definition of equilibrium while this research some of which will be discussed here has been extremely instructive it remains inconclusive theorists often agree about what should happen in particular games but to capture this intuition in a general solution concept has proved to be very difficult if this paper is successful it should make some progress in that direction the other side of the coin has received less scrutiny can all non nash profiles really be excluded on logical grounds i believe not the standard justifications for considering only nash profiles are circular in nature or make gratuitous assumptions about players decision criteria or beliefs the following discussion of these points is extremely brief due to space constraints more detailed arguments may be found in pearce 18

on reputation refinements with heterogeneous beliefs consider a repeated game with incomplete information in which a patient long run player whose type is unknown faces a sequence of short run opponents as in fudenberg and levine 1989 the standard reputation result is that the patient long run player can obtain an average long payoff almost equal to the stackelberg payoff of the stage game by consistently playing as a stackelberg leader in the analysis one generally takes as fundamental an assumption that the players have common prior beliefs on the states of the world and that behavior is consistent with the concept of bayesian nash equilibrium however these related suppositions have been called into question as unrealistic and too stringent cf gul 1991 in many games of incomplete information a player s prior probabilities on types or states of the world are best regarded as purely subjective psychological parameters unknown to the modeler and to this player s opponents therefore it is important to understand whether the standard reputation results among others are implied by weaker assumptions on the knowledge and behavior of the players in fact as watson 1993 demonstrates the reputation result does not require equilibrium it is implied by a weak notion of rationalizability with some restrictions on the beliefs of the players here we qualify watson s 1993 study and extend the line of inquiry of watson 1993 and battigalli 1994 concerning settings in which reputations are effective as watson shows two main conditions on the beliefs of the players along with weak rationalizability imply the reputation result first there must be a strictly positive and uniform lower bound on the subjective probability that players assign to the stackelberg type second the conditional beliefs of the short run players must not be too dispersed watson 1993 does not explicitly indicate on what the updated beliefs of the short run players are conditioned we make this explicit and show that it is necessary to assume that the conditional beliefs of the short run players satisfy a stochastic independence property cf battigalli 1996 we also comment on the dispensability of equilibrium regarding the reputation result in games with two long run players

the rise of large farms in land abundant countries do they have a future increased levels and volatility of food prices has led to a surge of interest in large scale agriculture and land acquisition this creates challenges for policy makers aiming to establish a policy environment conducive to an agrarian structure to contribute to broad based development in the long term based on a historical review of episodes of growth of large farms and their impact this paper identifies factors underlying the dominance of owner operated farm structures and ways in which these may change with development the amount of land that could potentially be available for expansion and the level of productivity in exploiting available land resources are used to establish a country level typology the authors highlight that an assessment of the advantages of large operations together with information on endowments can provide input into strategy formulation at the country level a review of recent cases of land acquisition reinforces the importance of the policy framework in determining outcomes it suggests that transparency and contract enforcement recognition of local land rights and ways in which they can be exercised attention to employment effects and technical viability and mechanisms to re allocate land from unsuccessful ventures to more productive entrepreneurs are key areas warranting the attention of policy makers

facilitating the financing of bioenergy projects in sub saharan africa abstract the purpose of this paper is to identify and develop potential solutions on how to facilitate the financing of bioenergy projects in sub saharan africa we focus on four main areas that have been identified from empirical research in achieving this objective these are i financing ii markets iii trade and iv policy the sources utilised consist of primary and secondary data compilation and analysis of particular relevance are the results of a market survey undertaken on funding opportunities where the perspectives of both project developers as well as project financiers are taken into account results indicate that the four areas cannot be treated autonomously as they not only overlap but impact each other there are a number of difficulties for biofuel ventures not least the nature of the projects themselves but also around the financing and political landscape of these enterprises common solutions which cross cut the four areas are the need to raise awareness and the skillsets in areas including financing opportunities markets policy technical aspects among a range of stakeholders involved in biofuel ventures there is also a necessity to create a supporting framework for the emerging carbon trading related activities in africa

a bargaining model based on the commitment tactic abstract this paper studies a one shot simultaneous move bargaining game each bargainer makes a partial commitment a share of the unit size cake that she would like to get which can later be revoked at some cost to the player the payoffs are defined in part by the nash bargaining solution where the feasible utility set is affected by the players partial commitments under certain assumptions on the two cost of revoking functions we establish that the model has a unique nash equilibrium it is shown that a player s equilibrium share of the cake is strictly increasing in her marginal cost of revoking a partial commitment an application of our model selects a unique equilibrium in nash s demand game journal of economic literature classification number c78

energy security for india biofuels energy efficiency and food productivity abstract the emergence of biofuel as a renewable energy source offers opportunities for significant climate change mitigation and greater energy independence to many countries at the same time biofuel represents the possibility of substitution between energy and food for developing countries like india which imports over 75 of its crude oil fossil fuels pose two risks global warming pollution and long term risk that oil prices will undermine real living standards this paper examines india s options for managing energy price risk in three ways biofuel development energy efficiency promotion and food productivity improvements our salient results suggest that biodiesel shows promise as a transport fuel substitute that can be produced in ways that fully utilize marginal agricultural resources and hence promote rural livelihoods first generation bioethanol by contrast appears to have a limited ability to offset the impacts of oil price hikes combining the biodiesel expansion policy with energy efficiency improvements and food productivity increases proved to be a more effective strategy to enhance both energy and food security help mitigate climate change and cushion the economy against oil price shocks

biofuels in sub sahara africa drivers impacts and priority policy areas there has been a growing interest in jatropha and sugarcane based biofuels across sub sahara africa biofuel expansion in the region reflects policy concerns related to energy security poverty alleviation and economic development however biofuels have also been linked to numerous environmental and socioeconomic impacts such as ghg emissions water availability pollution deforestation biodiversity loss poverty alleviation energy security loss of access to land and food security to name just a few yet there is a an insufficient understanding of these impacts and their synergies in sub sahara africa and b a lack of policies that could regulate the biofuel sector and ensure its viability while at the same time preventing its negative impact the aim of this literature review is to synthesize the current knowledge about biofuel impacts in africa and to identify priority policy areas that should be targeted for enhancing biofuel sustainability in the continent the findings of this review indicate that biofuel impacts can be positive or negative depending on several factors such as the feedstock the environmental socio economic context of biofuel production and the policy instruments in place during biofuel production use and trade in most cases there are significant trade offs but at least part of the negative impacts can be mitigated through careful planning the incomplete and piecemeal understanding of these trade offs combined with agronomic institutional and market failures are currently the most important barriers for the viability and sustainability of biofuel investments in the continent

eu and russian discourse on energy relations the paper explores the dominant interpretations of the eu russian energy relations by identifying three dominant concepts around which these interpretations revolve 1 integration 2 liberalization and 3 diversification building on a detailed discourse analysis of 97 textual units produced by eu leaders and institutions and 104 documents and speeches by russian policy makers the paper argues that these three discourses differ widely in their assessment of the two partners mutual ties both in terms of the relationship s symmetry and the perceived benefits for each partner the paper comes up with two basic arguments first in spite of the shared usage of the three basic notions by both sides the interpretations of each of the discourses are widely different in the eu and in russia which causes continuous frictions and misunderstandings second and surprisingly the discourse of integration is dominant both in the eu and russia which shows that the claims about the alleged securitization of eu russian energy relations are clearly exaggerated

waiting to persuade i analyze a sequential bargaining model in which players are optimistic about their bargaining power measured as the probability of making offers but learn as they play the game i show that there exists a uniquely predetermined settlement date such that in equilibrium the players always reach an agreement at that date but never reach one before it given any discount rate if the learning is sufficiently slow the players agree immediately i show that for any speed of learning the agreement is delayed arbitrarily long provided that the players are sufficiently patient therefore although excessive optimism alone cannot cause delay it can cause long delays if the players are expected to learn

bargaining reputation and competition this paper addresses the question of whether playing the tough bargainer is a useful strategy for rational negotiators in competitive environments the unique equilibrium outcome of a continuous time multilateral bargaining game between a single seller and two buyers i e a three player war of attrition game show that it does not benefit the buyers the long side of the market if the probability of obstinacy is constant and independent of the initial demands this result is robust in the sense that the buyers heterogeneity about their flexibility does not weaken the intensity of the competition when the seller decides which buyer to negotiate first he not only chooses his bargaining partner but also picks his outside option the seller can strengthen his bargaining position against both buyers by picking the unattractive buyer who is greedier or tougher than the other buyer first and by leaving the attractive buyer aside because he starts the sequel with a strong outside option

enabling private sector investment in microgrid based rural electrification in developing countries a review access to electricity is widely recognized as an important factor for economic and social development low rates of access particularly in remote rural areas in regions such as sub saharan africa south asia and southeast asia have led developing nations and international organizations to set ambitious goals to expand the reach of electricity decentralized solutions such as microgrids have been proposed as cost effective solutions to reaching communities located far from central grid infrastructure lack of capital from public and donor sources has severely impeded achieving access goals leading to calls for greater private sector participation in electrification activities however due to the high level of risk associated with decentralized electrification projects in low income areas marginal expected returns on investment and a lack of clear and effective public policy the private sector has not shown significant interest in participating in such projects the purpose of this paper is to review barriers to private sector participation in decentralized electrification projects and to identify solutions that have been implemented and proposed to overcome these barriers the barriers discussed include unsecure revenue streams inability to finance projects and long term project risks such as grid encroachment the range of interventions and business models reviewed include methods to secure reliable demand subsidy models risk guarantees and different revenue models this paper does not include an analysis of the effectiveness of the different interventions described future research should evaluate the relative costs and benefits of these interventions in order to provide robust policy guidance to decision makers in developing countries

commitment and conflict in bilateral bargaining building on crawford 1982 we study a model of bilateral bargaining in which negotiators can make binding commitments at a low positive cost c our primary solution concept is iterated strict dominance if commitment attempts never fail there are three solutions in two solutions all the surplus goes to one player in the third solution there is a high probility of con ict if commitment attempts succeed with probability q 1 the unique solution entails con ict with probability q 2 when c 0 analogous results hold if the requirement of iterated strict dominance is replaced by iterated weak dominance

the prime criteria for private sector participation in renewable energy investment in the middle east case study iran abstract to have sustainable electricity generation from renewable energy resources economically competitive more privatization is needed in this sector true understanding based on transparent information is one of the salient necessities for the private sector to invest in the energy business in this article the researchers are to recognize the targeted factors considered by the private sector in order to improve their participation in the electricity generation markets from renewable sources in the middle east the results illustrate that the most important factors are governmental policies consumption markets and engineering efficiency these recognized factors then are classified from different aspects such as techno engineering business and relevant policies and the environment

predation reputation and entry deterrence abstract economists often argue that predatory practices are irrational since there exist cheaper or more certain means to gain or maintain a monopoly our gametheoretic equilibrium analysis suggests that if a firm is threatened by several potential entrants then predation may be rational against early entrants even if it is costly when viewed in isolation because it yields a reputation which deters other entrants asymmetric information plays a crucial role in our analysis since it provides the rationale for entrants to base their expectations of the firm s future behavior on its past actions the analysis also suggests methods to treat general reputational phenomena

the need for improved financial reporting of a developing country energy utility abstract some consideration has been given to regulatory and institutional reforms to facilitate sustainable development in electricity usage in papua new guinea but little attention has been paid to bringing about full compliance of financial reporting expectations of the country s main energy utility examining documentary evidence of the audit reports of the auditor general s office of papua new guinea this study considers the financial reporting compliance of png power for the period 2007 2013 and the means by which compliant reporting may be improved the results of the study reveal that the financial statements of png power are late and receive disclaimers of opinion from the auditor general s office which suggest that png power s stakeholders are not receiving accurate and reliable financial information to make informed decisions about sustainable development of electricity usage and planning in papua new guinea the study reveals that it would take little resources to improve png power s reporting which in turn could enhance national energy policy decision making and energy utility accountability

multi actor governance of sustainable biofuels in developing countries the case of mozambique this paper describes and analyses the multi actor governance process that made mozambique the first african nation state to develop a national policy framework for sustainable biofuels the paper draws on findings from action research conducted in mozambique between december 2008 and july 2012 we analyse interactions between the changing governance context the course of the multi actor governance process and the choices in relation to governance framework characteristics and content for four successive stages of governance framework development this provides the basis for reflection on the competences required for effective multi actor sustainability governance and a discussion about the role of the nation state in sustainability governance of global economies such as biofuels the governance framework for sustainable biofuels has contributed to a more transparent and secure investment climate for biofuels in mozambique key factors for success were 1 the presence of different types of competences during the various stages of the governance framework development 2 closing the gap between licences to sell and licences to produce across different governance levels and 3 balancing between the short and long term objectives for biofuel production in mozambique and requirements of global biofuel markets developing country nation states can provide an essential contribution to these success factors for global governance of sustainable biofuels

bargaining reputation and equilibrium selection in repeated games with contracts consider a two person intertemporal bargaining problem in which players choose actions and offers each period and collect payoffs as a function of that period s actions while bargaining proceeds this can alternatively be viewed as an infinitely repeated game wherein players can offer one another enforceable contracts that govern play for the rest of the game theory is silent with regard to how the surplus is likely to be split because a folk theorem applies perturbing such a game with a rich set of behavioral types for each player yields a specific asymptotic prediction for how the surplus will be divided as the perturbation probabilities approach zero behavioral types may follow nonstationary strategies and respond to the opponent s play in equilibrium rational players initially choose a behavioral type to imitate and a war of attrition ensues how much should a player try to get and how should she behave while waiting for the resolution of bargaining in both respects she should build her strategy around the advice given by the nash bargaining with threats nbwt theory developed for two stage games in any perfect bayesian equilibrium she can guarantee herself virtually her nbwt payoff by imitating a behavioral type with the following simple strategy in every period ask for and accept nothing less than that player s nbwt share and while waiting for the other side to concede take the action nash recommends as a threat in his two stage game the results suggest that there are forces at work in some dynamic games that favor certain payoffs over all others this is in stark contrast to the classic folk theorems to the further folk theorems established for repeated games with two sided reputational perturbations and to the permissive results obtained in the literature on bargaining with payoffs as you go

bargaining under two sided incomplete information the unrestricted offers case chatterjee and samuelson chatterjee k l samuelson 1987 bargaining with two sided incomplete information an infinite horizon model with alternating offers rev econ stud 54 175 192 recently examined a noncooperative game theoretic bargaining model with two sided incomplete information and an infinite horizon results were obtained from the model with the help of restrictions on agents strategies this paper examines the model without these restrictions by doing so we will gain some insight into whether these results are robust in the sense that they do not depend upon the special structure of the model and hence might provide useful theoretical foundations for applied work we find that the basic results generalize as with the restricted model we find an equilibrium in which bargaining will proceed for a finite but endogeneously determined number of stages a terminal condition on the equilibrium sequence of agents beliefs determines the properties of the equilibrium and allows compar

on the role of outside options in bargaining with obstinate parties the presence of obstinate types in bargaining has been shown to alter dramatically the bargaining equilibrium strategies and outcomes this paper shows that outside options may cancel out the effect of obstinacy in bargaining when parties have access to stationary outside options we show that when opting out is preferable to accepting the inflexible demand of the other party there is a unique perfect bayesian equilibrium in which each party reveals himself as rational as soon as possible a similar conclusion holds when outside options may only be available at a later date or when only one party has access to an outside option

a qualitative factor analysis of renewable energy and sustainable energy for all se4all in the asia pacific this study assesses the factors responsible for the success and failure of renewable energy access programs in bangladesh china laos mongolia nepal sri lanka india indonesia malaysia and papua new guinea based on 441 research interviews over the course of four years site visits to 90 renewable energy facilities and focus groups with almost 800 community members in 10 countries this study develops a series of overarching qualitative factors that correlate with programs that met their targets sometimes ahead of schedule and produced measurable benefits exceeding costs the inverse of these factors is associated with programs that did not meet their targets were behind schedule and or produced measurable costs exceeding benefits it concludes by offering 10 lessons for energy analysts and development practitioners concerning appropriate technology income generation financing political leadership capacity building programmatic flexibility marketing and awareness stakeholder engagement community ownership and technical standardization

a reputation refinement without equilibrium the economic literature concerning agents reputations has grown steadily since the seminal work of kreps milgrom roberts and wilson 2 early work focused on how incomplete information leads to equilibria that are vastly different but more intuitive than those possible in the complete information game recently however game theorists have been studying how incomplete information might refine the set of equilibria 3 one important class of games is that in which a single long run agent plays a simultaneous move stage game with a sequence of opponents each of whom plays only once yet observes all previous play fudenberg and levine 1989 study the reputation of the long run player in this type of game they argue that the most reasonable equilibrium is the one which the long run player most prefers their intuition is sustained when one perturbs the game with the stackelberg strategy fudenberg and levine show that in the perturbed game the equilibrium payoffs of the long run player are bounded below by a number that converges to the stackelberg payoff

building for the future investment land reform and the contingencies of ownership in contemporary ghana summary case studies of individual investments in tree crops and houses illustrate recent changes in social and economic differentiation among families and communities in asante region ghana and their implications for recent debates over state led land reform versus community led land reform seeking efficiency neoliberal land reforms transfer land from state to private ownership as well as tenure reforms designed to strengthen owners rights by treating communities as owners reforms benefit the poor as well as the well to do in ghana and other west african countries privatization may also work in the opposite direction reinforcing inequalities within communities and encouraging claims to land based on origin and indigeneity

contradictory land use plans and policies in laos tenure security and the threat of exclusion summary contradicting policies and overlapping property arrangements are common in many countries opening doors for diverse interpretations by different actors this requires better knowledge on how competing interests and actors interact and what determines the practical competition outcomes as demand for land intensifies and international actors get increasingly involved in regulating natural resources land use planning in laos provides a case in point as it aims at strengthening tenure security intensifying agriculture and sparing forest areas while other policies simultaneously promote agricultural development and agri business investment that reconfigure land use and land access through national provincial district village and household interviews we examine how different land and forest related policies interact and whether ongoing land use planning processes and land rights formalization increase tenure security we show how government policies supported by international donors and introduced to strengthen tenure rights for the rural population actually reduce villagers legally permitted agricultural areas even if district level land use regulations do not currently exclude local communities from their land land use plans lay the groundwork for potentially excluding villagers from large land areas we find that plural contradictory regulations and policies combined with existing power inequalities result in a filter mechanism that reduces the practical impact of legal instruments and safeguards aimed at strengthening the least powerful actors rights our results add to other authors arguments that political and legal changes are mediated by power relations cultural norms and economic incentives by highlighting that the duel edged rights sword may actually end up paving the way for greater state control over future benefits derived from community areas classified as forest lands this is especially relevant when preparing redd which we show is likely to weaken rather than strengthen tenure security for rural populations

reputation and equilibrium selection in games with a patient player a single long run player plays a simultaneous move stage game against a sequence of opponents who play only once but observe all previous play let the stackelberg strategy be the pure strategy to which the long run player would most like to commit himself if there is positive prior probability that the long run player will always play the stackelberg strategy then his payoff in any nash equilibrium exceeds a bound that converges to the stackelberg payoff as his discount factor approaches one when the stage game is not simultaneous move this result must be modified to account for the possibility that distinct strategies of the long run player are observationally equivalent

stationarity rationalizability and bargaining strategies for the seller and the buyer which are weakly stationary we demonstrate that any initial offer from the seller induced by a strategy rationalized by a weakly stationary acceptance rule for the buyer must entail the coase property our result does not presume the selection of a particular equilibrium and follows directly from the weak stationarity assumption of the buyer s acceptance rule and the rational behaviour of the players

deadline effects and inefficient delay in bargaining with endogenous commitment abstract bilateral sequential negotiators delay agreements until a deadline if a player that rejects an offer is subsequently committed not to accept any poorer proposal and if the common discount factor is close enough to one journal of economic literature classification numbers c7 c78 j52

creating property rights land banks in ghana insecure property rights over land have multiple ramifications for agriculture and the organization of rural economic activity besley and ghatak 2009 the risk that land will be expropriated deters investment insecure property rights reduce the ability of borrowers to pledge land as collateral and thus tighten credit constraints ill defined property right over land can inhibit land transactions rentals or sales and potential gains from trade are lost scarce resources like labor may be devoted to protecting one s insecure rights over plots field 2007 in ghana land rights are typically gained by virtue of membership in a corporate group e g extended family but a robust market is emerging for land purchases and rentals particularly in urban and periurban areas informal land markets in ghana are beset with a number of problems including land conflicts protracted litigation and adjudication failures documentation bottlenecks and uncertainty land legislation in ghana is perceived as incoherent conflicting and often outdated an unwieldy public land sector dominates the documentation of land rights revenue collection and distribution land conflicts are becoming more frequent judicial processes are overburdened authority is overcentralized and corrupt conflict over multiple claims to particular plots occasionally becomes violent goldstein and udry 2008 document the large investment disincentive effects of insecure tenure in agriculture in ghana almost 80 of ghana s land is held by customary landowners mainly families clans and traditional authorities kasanga and kotey 2001 these owners often do not record transactions indeed many are clothed in secrecy as land transactions gradually move away from their familial corporate base to short term rental for commercial purposes multiple simultaneous transactions on the same plot have be

can the nigerian biofuel policy and incentives 2007 transform nigeria into a biofuel economy abstract nigeria s economy is largely dependent on petroleum yet the country is suffering from fuel supply shortages in response to the transportation fuel supply difficulties in nigeria the country released the nigerian biofuel policy and incentives in 2007 to create favorable investment climate for the entrance of nigeria into the biofuel sector the paper assessed the progress made thus far by nigeria 4 years after the nigerian biofuel was released in an attempt to answer the question whether the policy is adequate to transform nigeria into a biofuel economy the study found that little progress has been made which includes commencement of the construction of 20 bioethanol factories installation of biofuel handling facilities at two depots mosimi and atlas cove and selection of retail outlets for biofuel conventional fuel mix the site construction of the announced biofuel projects is now slow and other progress is marginal we therefore conclude that the nigerian biofuel policy is unlikely to transform nigeria into a biofuel economy unless the government revert and refocus on biofuel and include additional financial incentives such as grants and subsidy to complement the tax waivers income import duty vat loans and insurance cover contained in the policy

biofuels development in sub saharan africa are the policies conducive this paper analyses national regional and international biofuels policies and strategies to assess whether these policies promote or undermine the development of biofuels sector in africa despite having a huge comparative advantage in land labour and good climatic conditions favourable for the growing of energy crops few countries in sub saharan africa have included biofuels strategies in their energy or national development policies further results show that while developed countries commit huge financial resources for research technology development and the provision of tax incentives to both producers and consumers there is little government support for promoting biofuels in africa although the consequences of biofuels on food supply remain uncertain the mandatory blending of biofuels with fossil fuels by industrialized countries will create demand for land in africa for the growing of energy crops for biofuels this paper urgently calls upon national governments in sub saharan africa to develop appropriate strategies and regulatory frameworks to harness the potential economic opportunities from biofuels sector development while protecting the environment and rural communities from the adverse effects of land alienation from the mainstream agriculture towards the growing of energy crops for biofuels at the expense of traditional food crops

contemporary processes of large scale land acquisition in sub saharan africa legal deficiency or elite capture of the rule of law summary growth of emerging economies policy commitments to biofuels and volatility in commodity prices have contributed to a marked increase in the pace and scale of foreign direct investment in land based enterprises in the global south this paper explores the relationship between policy and practice associated with customary rights protections in the context of large scale land acquisitions through a document review and case study analyses from ghana mozambique tanzania and zambia findings point to the difficulty of safeguarding customary rights even in countries providing best practice legal protections and point to the fundamental role of human agency in shaping outcomes

the geographic and sectoral patterns of large scale farmland investments in sub saharan africa following the food and energy price crises of the mid 2000s sub saharan africa has become one of the largest recipients for large scale farmland investments while much has been written on the phenomenon scant reliable empirical evidence is available as to the precise geographic and sectoral patterns and underlying drivers employing strict data quality requirements this paper addresses these knowledge gaps by analyzing 563 farmland projects that have been established between 2005 and 2013 in sub saharan africa findings show that the investment intensity and associated risks are not geographically uniform moreover the study highlights a number of popular misconceptions regarding investor origin and their sectoral interests and motives

indeterminacy of reputation effects in repeated games with contracts abstract we study whether allowing players to sign binding contracts governing future play leads to reputation effects in repeated games with long run players we proceed by extending the analysis of abreu and pearce 2007 by allowing for the possibility that different behavioral types may not be immediately distinguishable from each other given any prior over behavioral types we construct a modified prior with the same total weight on behavioral types and a larger support under which almost all efficient feasible and individually rational payoffs are attainable in perfect bayesian equilibrium thus whether reputation effects emerge in repeated games with contracts depends on details of the prior distribution over behavioral types other than its support

reputational bargaining and deadlines i highlight how reputational concerns provide a natural explanation for deadline effects the high frequency of deals prior to a deadline in bargaining rational agents imitate the demands of obstinate behavioral types and engage in brinkmanship in the face of uncertainty about the deadline s arrival i also identify how surplus is divided when the prior probability of behavioral types is vanishingly small if behavioral types are committed to fixed demands outcomes converge to the nash bargaining solution regardless of agents respective impatience if behavioral types can adopt more complex demand strategies outcomes converge to the solution of an alternating offers game without behavioral types for the deadline environment

the diagnosis of an electricity crisis and alternative energy development in pakistan abstract the electricity sector in pakistan is currently facing the formidable challenges of an insufficient installed capacity a suboptimal infrastructure circular debt and revenue shortage all of these problems hamper socioeconomic activities this paper diagnoses the overall condition of the electricity sector as well as the potential and recent progress in the implementation of alternative energy projects in the context of the targets set in the national energy security plan nesp the assessment reveals the unsatisfactory overall progress of the implementation of the nesp in general and alternative energy in particular we assess that if the short term measures contained in the nesp have been adequately executed were enough to bridge the existing electricity supply demand gap and the country might not be facing an ongoing electricity crisis further we investigated the specific alternative energy policy issues that hinder this sector s development in pakistan we conclude that fuel diversification by means of the maximum utilisation of alternative energy resources would help in solving the crisis and would also furnish the long term energy needs of the country finally we recommend a comprehensive strategy for revamping the electricity sector and developing the alternative energy resources needed to tackle the ongoing electricity crisis in pakistan

the jatropha biofuels sector in tanzania 2005 9 evolution towards sustainability abstract biofuel production has recently attracted much attention some anticipate substantial social and environmental benefits while at the same time expecting sound profitability for investors others are doubtful envisaging large trade offs between the pursuit of social environmental and economic objectives particularly in poor countries in the tropics the paper explores these issues in tanzania which has been an african forerunner in the cultivation of a bio oil shrub called jatropha curcas l we trace how isolated jatropha biofuel experiments developed since early 2005 towards a sectoral production and innovation system and we investigate to what extent that system has been capable of developing and maintaining sustainable practices and producing sustainable outcomes the application of evolutionary innovation theory allows us to view the developments in the sector as a result of evolutionary variation and selection on the one hand and revolutionary contestation between different coalitions of stakeholders on the other both these processes constitute significant engines of change while variation and selection are driven predominantly by localised technical and agronomic learning the conflict driven dynamics are highly globalised and occur primarily as a result of reflexive learning about problematic sustainability impacts the sector is found to have moved some way towards a full sectoral innovation and production system but it is impossible to predict whether a viable sector with a strong triple bottom line orientation will ultimate emerge since many issues surrounding the social environmental and financial sustainability still remain unresolved especially relating to local and global governance