the impact of integrated aquaculture agriculture on small scale farms in southern malawi sustainable agricultural intensification is an urgent challenge for sub saharan africa one potential solution is to rely on local farmers knowledge for improved management of diverse on farm resources and integration among various farm enterprises in this article we analyze the farm level impact of one recent example namely the integrated aquaculture agriculture iaa technologies that have been developed and disseminated in a participatory manner in malawi based on a 2004 survey of 315 respondents 166 adopters and 149 nonadopters we test the hypothesis that adoption of iaa is associated with improved farm productivity and more efficient use of resources estimating a technical inefficiency function shows that iaa farms were significantly more efficient compared to nonadopters iaa farms also had higher total factor productivity higher farm income per hectare and higher returns to family labor

does size matter reassessing the relationship between aquaculture and poverty in bangladesh abstract aquaculture has long been promoted by development institutions in bangladesh on the understanding that it can alleviate poverty most of this attention has focused on forms of the activity commonly referred to as small scale this article draws on concepts from the literature on agricultural growth and elaborates a typology of aquaculture based on relations of production which suggests that in bangladesh quasi capitalist forms of aquaculture may possess greater potential to reduce poverty and enhance food security than the quasi peasant modes of production generally assumed to do so the implications of this conclusion are explored

constrainedly fair job assignments under minimum wages a number of jobs are to be assigned to a greater number of workers while having to abide by the law of minimum wages firms must determine who should be assigned which job and at what salary in such situations fair envy free allocations usually fail to exist to cope with this situation this paper proposes a new concept of fairness called constrained fairness among the set of constrainedly fair allocations the so called constrainedly fair and minimal allocations are of particular interest the reason for this is that the salaries are not only compatible with the minimum wages they are also optimal from the standpoint of cost minimizing firms and the assignment of jobs is efficient from the viewpoint of workers a convergent dynamic procedure that identifies constrainedly fair and minimal allocations is proposed furthermore strategic properties of the mechanism are derived and two notions of efficiency are evaluated

the quality of employment in india s services sector exploring the heterogeneity for some observers the dramatic growth of the services sector in india reflects rapid strides made by educated professionals some others see it as the expansion of an employer of last resort given this heterogeneity the object of this article is to analyse the quality of employment being created in different sub sectors of services relative to the industrial sector where quality is defined to include wages job security and social protection analysing household survey data from india in 1993 94 and 2004 05 we find the following first sub sectors of services are generally either good or bad employers higher wages do not compensate for less job security or less job protection second the classification of most service sub sectors as good or bad employers in 2004 05 is the same as that in 1993 94 third employment expansion during the 10 year period under consideration is more in service sub sectors where quality of employment is low

globalization poverty and inequality what is the relationship what can be done forbes online of 27 february 20031 offers some information about the world s ten richest people much of the information would cause little surprise the list shows that big money comes from software innovation retailing scale economies the business of oil investment luck and inheritance what is however really striking more so as one ponders the matter is just how rich these ten people are 2 together they had in 2002 a net worth of us 217 billion ranging from bill gates in the lead with us 40 7 billion to john walton son of sam walton founder of wal mart at the rear with us 16 5 billion

power struggle dispute and alliance over local resources analyzing democratic decentralization of natural resources through the lenses of africa inland fisheries summary this paper is based on a global review of fisheries decentralization programs co management in sub saharan africa partly challenging the current narrative but in line with experience in other sectors e g forestry the review shows that the outcomes of these decentralizations have not been systematically positive in most cases fisheries co management failed to improve governance but simply altered the distribution of power and responsibility amongst the different stakeholders in this new political landscape poorly designed reforms have enabled a variety of usual and new local actors to advance their own agendas often at the detriment of the direct end users fisherfolk

sources of stagnation in sub saharan africa abstract this paper investigates the sources of economic stagnation in sub saharan africa during the 1970s several policy variables are considered as well as a set of environmental variables which include climate violence export prices and other exogenous factors the paper uses statistical analysis in an attempt to identify the relative importance of the policy variables and the environmental variables taken as groups it also seeks to identify particular policy variables which seem to have been most significant in determining growth outcomes the technique employed for investigation is reduced form econometric estimation in a preliminary analysis the impact of the international trade environment on average economic performance in africa during the period since independence is investigated the results suggest an extremely close relationship between movements in export prices and average performance throughout the 20 year period a second econometric exercise investigates the joint impacts of environmental and policy variables on growth in a cross section of african states since 1970 the spirit of the approach is exploratory and a relatively large number of variables are constructed and tested through multivariate analysis a primary finding is that the environmental variables seem to have had more impact on growth as a group than the policy variables this finding must be qualified however by the continuing lack of some important policy variables agricultural price data have not yet become available in sufficient quantity for cross section analysis nor have several important human resource variables and indices of the use of resources in the public domain among the policy variables which have been used for the analysis those identified with retrenchment during periods of declining commodity prices seem most significant primary among these are the real effective exchange rate and some measures of effectiveness in foreign exchange reallocation during periods when imports must contract severely in the final section of the paper the cross section results are used for a counterfactual analysis of the growth experiences of individual african states measures of growth opportunity cost are constructed which suggest the degree to which errors in management and uncontrollable circumstances have held states below their potential growth paths the results suggest that some success stories may owe much to good luck while some failures may well be due less to bad management than to adverse circumstances

fish as the bank in the water evidence from chronic poor communities in congo abstract small scale fisheries in developing countries are often perceived as being a low productivity and backward informal sector as a result they are rarely considered in poverty reduction programmes and rural development planning in this paper we investigate the dual role of fish as a food and cash crop through data collected in river fisheries in democratic republic of congo drc fishing in this very remote rural region of drc is operated both by men and women as part of a household multiple activity livelihood strategy the data shows that poor households rely heavily on fishing for their supply of protein rich food in particular through women s subsistence catches fishing also appears to be the main source of cash income for the majority of households including local farmers based on these findings and a review of the literature the paper argues that small scale fisheries can play a fundamental role in local economies especially in remote rural areas where they strengthen significantly the livelihoods of people through their role in both food security and cash income generation

gravity models of trade based money laundering several attempts have been made in the economics literature to measure money laundering however the adequacy of these models is difficult to assess as money laundering takes place secretly and hence goes unobserved an exception is trade based money laundering tbml a special form of trade abuse that has been discovered only recently tbml refers to criminal proceeds that are transferred around the world using fake invoices that under or overvalue imports and exports this article is a first attempt to test well known prototype models proposed by walker and unger to predict illicit money laundering flows and to apply traditional gravity models borrowed from international trade theory to do so we use a dataset of zdanowicz of tbml flows from the us to 199 countries our test rejects the specifications of the walker and unger prototype models at least for tbml the traditional gravity model that we present here can indeed explain tbml flows worldwide in a plausible manner an important determinant is licit trade the mass in which tbml is hidden furthermore our results suggest that criminals use tbml in order to escape the stricter anti moneylaundering regulations of financial markets

why do big firms pay higher wages evidence from an international database abstract bigger firms pay higher wages this note reports tests of the hypothesis that this big firm premium bfp occurs because workers in big firms are more skilled we use the international adult literacy survey which gives richer skill measures than those typically available in labor market surveys to measure the bfp in nine countries with and without controls for worker skill the results show that the bfp is not as universal as is often suggested but in countries where it exists controlling for skills does little to reduce the size of the bfp

is aquaculture pro poor empirical evidence of impacts on fish consumption in bangladesh summary aquaculture is widely held to contribute to poverty reduction and food security in the global south but robust evidence is limited using nationally representative data from bangladesh this study analyses changes in fish consumption from 2000 to 2010 rapid expansion of commercial aquaculture pegged down fish prices resulting in increased fish consumption by extreme poor and moderate poor consumers and those in rural areas these outcomes are closely linked to the pro poor nature of national economic growth during this period these findings contribute to a broadening of the debate on whether the growth of aquaculture in bangladesh has been pro poor

the impact of income diversification among fishing communities in western kenya abstract past studies have shown that fishing communities in developing countries are generally poor one potential strategy for reducing poverty among these communities is income diversification this study investigates the impact of income diversification on incomes of fishing communities living on the kenyan shores of lake victoria using four propensity score matching methods we find evidence that income diversification increases the incomes of fish workers the strongest impact appears to be among fishers fish enterprise employees and fish workers in the non export beach based on these results income diversification can be considered a poverty reduction strategy among fishing communities in western kenya

the strategy structure of some coalition formation games in coalitional games with side payments the core predicts which coalitions form and how benefits are shared the predictions however run into difficulties if the core is empty or if some coalitions benefit from not blocking truthfully these difficulties are analyzed in games in which an a priori given collection of coalitions can form as the collection of pairs of buyer seller in an assignment game the incentive properties of the core and of its selections are investigated in function of the collection furthermore the relationships with vickrey clarke groves mechanisms are drawn

online ad auctions i describe how search engines sell ad space using an auction i analyze advertiser behavior in this context using elementary price theory and derive a simple way to estimate the producer surplus generated by online search advertising it appears that the estimated value of online advertising tends to be between 2 and 2 3 times advertising expenditures jel d44 auctions d21 firm behavior

food standards are good for middle class farmers we estimate the causal effect of food standards on vietnamese pangasius farmers wellbeing measured by per capita consumption expenditure we estimate both the average effects and the local average treatment effects on poorer and richer farmers by instrumental variable quantile regression our results indicate that large returns can be accrued from food standards but only for the upper middle class farmers i e those between the 50 and 85 quantiles of the expenditure distribution overall our result points to an exclusionary impact of standards for the poorest farmers while the richest do not apply standards because the added gain is too small

improving developing country food security through aquaculture development lessons from asia abstract this paper provides a framework for examining aquaculture s linkages to food and nutritional security by elucidating key hypotheses concerning the role of aquaculture in household food and income systems in developing countries taking examples from developing asia where aquaculture showed a steady growth over the last decade the implications of aquaculture development are examined from the standpoint of its impact on employment income and consumption analysis revealed clear evidence of positive income and consumption effects of aquaculture on households however employment effects are still not significant the context of targeting small scale and subsistence oriented farmers as a means of improving food security in the developing countries has also been analyzed by identifying key socio economic and policy factors affecting aquaculture adoption and its impact on the poor the paper concludes that national policies for aquaculture development will need to concurrently address the food security and poverty questions more sharply than has been done at present by providing institutional and infrastructure support for access to resources such as land and water and to markets by poor households finally more empirical evidence should be collected on the varied opportunities aquaculture would provide to improve the income employment and food consumption levels within households

is globalization reducing poverty and inequality abstract over the past 20 years or so india china and the rest of east asia experienced fast economic growth and falls in the poverty rate latin america stagnated the former soviet union central and eastern europe and sub saharan africa regressed but what are the net trends the neoliberal argument says that world poverty and income inequality fell over the past two decades for the first time in more than a century and a half thanks to the rising density of economic integration across national borders the evidence therefore confirms that globalization in the context of the world economic regime in place since the end of bretton woods generates more mutual benefit than conflicting interests this paper questions the empirical basis of the neoliberal argument

bargaining in a network of buyers and sellers abstract we analyze bargaining between buyers and sellers who are connected by an exogenously given network players can make repeated alternating public offers that may be accepted by any of the responders linked to each specific proposer our purpose is to find the conditions of the network which drive the price distribution in equilibrium this paper uses graph theory tools to provide necessary and sufficient conditions regarding the architecture of networks for the subgame perfect equilibrium of the bargaining game to coincide with the walrasian outcome

elicitation of honest preferences for the assignment of individuals to positions the problem of eliciting honest preferences from individuals who must be assigned to a set of positions is considered individuals know that they will be charged for the positions to which they are assigned a set of prices that provide no incentive for the individual to misrepresent his preferences is suggested it is shown that these prices constitute an element of the optimal solution to the dual of a linear programming assignment problem both the optimal allocation and the prices to be charged can be derived by solving two linear programming problems once preferences have been elicited the procedure can usefully be viewed as a simulation of a competitive market under conditions where such a market cannot be expected to function well it results in an efficient allocation where all resources are valued at their opportunity costs and consumer surplus is maximized its outcome thus has the desirable properties of competitive market equilibria

an algorithm for identifying fair and optimal allocations the concept of a fair and optimal allocation was recently introduced by sun and yang sun n yang z 2003 a general strategy proof fair allocation mechanism economics letters 81 73 79 this note states some basic properties of fair and optimal allocations and provides a simple algorithm for identifying them c 2007 elsevier b v all fights reserved

evaluating the impact of individual fishing quotas ifqs on the technical efficiency and composition of the us gulf of mexico red snapper commercial fishing fleet this study examines the impact of individual fishing quotas ifqs on the technical efficiency te and composition of the gulf of mexico red snapper commercial fishing fleet employing a parametric stochastic distance frontier framework we find that ifqs improved the te of the vertical line and bottom longline fleets our results suggest that the observed te gains were mainly driven by the retirement of less efficient vessels and to a lesser extent by efficiency gains of the remaining vessels we also document changes in output and input distance elasticities and in returns to scale following the introduction of ifqs the paper also investigates the impact of regulations and weather on productivity and the effect of crowding on te policy implications stemming from these results are also discussed

propaedeutics of strategic theories of economic integration abstract we briefly discuss strategic considerations regarding economic integration of two countries we primarily explore strategic aspects of economic integration when three countries are involved the concluding section contains a short comment on the case of more than three countries

the digital provide information technology market performance and welfare in the south indian fisheries sector when information is limited or costly agents are unable to engage in optimal arbitrage excess price dispersion across markets can arise and goods may not be allocated efficiently in this setting information technologies may improve market performance and increase welfare between 1997 and 2001 mobile phone service was introduced throughout kerala a state in india with a large fishing industry using microlevel survey data we show that the adoption of mobile phones by fishermen and wholesalers was associated with a dramatic reduction in price dispersion the complete elimination of waste and near perfect adherence to the law of one price both consumer and producer welfare increased

snails southern hake and sustainability neoliberalism and natural resource exports in chile abstract this examination of the recent history of the fishing sector in chile shows that in this sector which has played an important role in chile s export success short term growth was achieved at the cost of long term sustainability with negative implications for those involved in the industry this case raises the more general issue of the importance of regulatory frameworks in the promotion of natural resource exports neoliberal policy frameworks which generally assume that self regulating markets produce better results than explicit efforts to modify market results have been increasingly adopted by developing countries analyses of the implications of these policy frameworks for the long term sustainability of growth based upon natural resource exports have not grown along with the popularity of the policies themselves this article is an effort to redress the imbalance

impact of cultured shrimp industry on wild shrimp fisheries analysis of price determination mechanisms and market dynamics cultured shrimp production has been growing dramatically on the world market over the last 15 years and some of the farm raised species are now considered as price indicators on the main market places one may therefore expect the price of theses cultured shrimp to have an impact on the price formation of other species and especially on wild shrimp with which they compete in this paper the authors address this question in the case of the wild shrimp penaeus subtilis exploited by the french guyana fishery south america and competing on the french market with the cultured thai shrimp back tiger a series of econometric tests issued from the co integration theory is performed between the price series of the two products these tests indicate that the two series are co integrated and that the black tiger market acts as a market leader for the french guyana shrimp product the authors then discuss the reasons of the current predominance of farm raised shrimp on wild caught product and in particular the french guyana shrimp and identify the constraints that the french market demand induces on both producers and importers in the light of this analysis a commercial strategy that would mitigate the impact of the thai shrimp on the french guyana product is suggested

segmented labour markets and the estimation of wage functions this paper uses a stratified random sample of private sector employees to estimate wage equations for both the male labour market as a whole and six segments of the labour market segement which are defined with respect to the industry and size characteristics of the employing establishmen highly conventional results are obtained when wage equations are estimated for the male labour market as a whole or within two segements comprising almost half the survey population however one can reject conclusively the hypothesis that the same estimating equation is appropriate for modelling wage determination in all segments and if a human capital hk model is within segements tested against more appropriate alternative hypotheses for wage determination using the davidson and mackinnon 1981 methodology for the testing of non nested hypotheses the conclusion is that one should reject the hk specification and not reject the alternative it is therefore argued that the disaggregation of labour market dat

maximal manipulation of envy free solutions in economies with indivisible goods and money abstract we consider the problem of the fair allocation of indivisible goods and money with non quasi linear preferences the purpose of the present study is to examine strategic manipulation under envy free solutions we show that under a certain domain richness condition each individual obtains the welfare level of his optimal envy free allocation by maximally manipulating the solutions this maximal manipulation theorem is helpful in analyzing the set of nash equilibrium allocations in the direct revelation games associated with a given envy free solution if an envy free solution satisfies a mild condition the set of nash equilibrium allocations in its associated direct revelation game coincides with that of envy free allocations

agroindustrialization through institutional innovation transaction costs cooperatives and milk market development in the east african highlands abstract some small holders are able to generate reliable and substantial income flows through small scale dairy production for the local market for others a set of unique transaction costs hinders participation cooperative selling institutions are potential catalysts for mitigating these costs stimulating entry into the market and promoting growth in rural communities trends in cooperative organization in east african dairy are evaluated empirical work focuses on alternative techniques for effecting participation among a representative sample of peri urban milk producers in the ethiopian highlands the variables considered are a modern production practice cross bred cow use a traditional production practice indigenous cow use three intellectual capital forming variables experience education and extension and the provision of infrastructure as measured by time to transport milk to market a tobit analysis of marketable surplus generates precise estimates of non participants distances to market and their reservation levels of the covariates measures of the inputs necessary to sustain and enhance the market policy implications focus on the availability of cross bred stock and the level of market infrastructure both of which have marked effects on participation the velocity of transactions in the local community and inevitably the social returns to agroindustrialization

governance of global value chains in response to food safety and certification standards the case of shrimp from vietnam summary we use global value chain gvc theory to understand governance of vietnam s shrimp farming industry we describe this gvc as buyer driven with important food safety standards imposed by governments of importing countries and new certification systems promoted by nongovernmental organizations ngos governance relations are clear between governments in importing countries and vietnam and between importers and ngos governance relations become more fragmented further down the chain where large numbers of small scale producers and traders operate this fragmentation may adversely affect access to the most lucrative markets and have the unanticipated effect of marginalizing small scale farmers and traders

bargaining dynamics in exchange networks abstract we consider a one sided assignment market or exchange network with transferable utility and the dynamics of bargaining in such a market our dynamical model is local involving iterative updates of offers based on estimated best alternative matches in the spirit of pairwise nash bargaining agents are not strategic in our model we establish that when a balanced outcome a generalization of the pairwise nash bargaining solution to networks exists our dynamics converges rapidly to such an outcome

fisheries food security and the poor abstract fish is an important component in the human diet but its production is not likely to keep up with demand in assessing the consequences of the decreasing fish supply for human food security it is important to distinguish between effects on the population as a whole and effects on the poor those most vulnerable to malnutrition middle and high income people consume much more fish than low income people however even though they consume less many low income people depend on fish as a major source of animal protein decreasing fish supplies will be felt in the form of higher prices and in the reduced availability of diverse forms of fish products given the fact that they also have access to many other kinds of foods for people with middle and high incomes the decline in fish supply may be felt as little more than an inconvenience for low income people with fish dependent diets however the reduction in fish supply may have serious consequences in terms of both economics and nutrition

rent sharing in an equilibrium model of matching and turnover this article characterizes labor markets in which the heterogeneity of workers and firms results in thin markets and rents neoclassical marginal analysis and matching are blended into a computable general equilibrium model of trade in efficiency units of labor although workers bargaining problems are interrelated a simple wage contract generates wage flexibility and efficient matching in the model s equilibrium equilibrium wages are predicted to vary with the diversity of firms the scarcity of skills and the costliness of search the model is applied to superstar markets union bargaining in sports interindustry wage differentials and the relationship between pay and profit

fair by design multidimensional envy free mechanisms abstract we address the common scenario where a group of agents wants to divide a set of items fairly and at the same time seeks to optimize a global goal suppose that each item is a task and we want to find an allocation that minimizes the completion time of the last task in an envy free manner where no agent prefers anyone else s allocated task bundle over its own this optimization goal is called makespan minimization and the agents are often treated as machines we give tight deterministic bounds for 1 two unrelated machines and 2 m 2 related machines a natural question to ask is whether envy free pricing techniques can improve the current known bounds for truthful mechanisms for the task scheduling problem studied in the seminal paper of nisan and ronen 2001 we find that for two unrelated machines envy free in expectation is a far weaker constraint i e less restrictive than truthful in expectation

the equilibrium vector of pairwise bargained agency contracts with diverse actors and principals owning a fixed resource abstract the equilibrium vector of agency contracts where actors on both sides of the market are heterogenous and principals own a fixed resource is characterized and analyzed here auction markets are replaced by simultaneous multiple pair wise bargaining between principals and agents it is shown that the traditional analysis focusing on a single contract may lead to serious errors in addition the present analysis yields results concerning the equilibrium matching of principals and agents resource allocation across contracts and intercontract organizational externalities the latter are shown to create system inefficiencies

the package assignment model we study assignment problems where individuals trade packages consisting of several rather than single objects although buyers reservations values are non additive efficient assignments can be formulated as a linear programming problem in which the pricing functions expressing duality may be non linear in the objects constituting the packages the interconnections among the linear programming formulation walrasian equilibrium and the core are established in the single seller auction version a necessary and sufficient condition is given for the vickrey payoff point to be implementable by a pricing equilibrium journal of economic literature classification numbers c62 d44 d51

global income inequality while several international organisations have argued that income gaps between countries have increased during the last decades the opposite conclusion is obtained if countries are weighted according to their population size and if price level adjusted income data are applied inequality measures that give higher weight to the poorest countries also support this conclusion due to falling incomes in a number of poor countries however the gap between the richest and poorest countries has widened and unambiguous conclusions about welfare are difficult to draw

the new economic model and marine fisheries development in latin america the new economic model nem has profoundly influenced fisheries development in latin america facilitating the emergence of new and increasingly influential interest groups within the industry it has also stimulated new forms of production and prompted new legislation to regulate fishing in the region s most important fishing countries these changes have coincided with latin america s increasing importance in world fisheries production and trade the nem has not however resolved the sector s fundamental problems such as overfishing overcapitalization and conflict and has arguably exacerbated them

time horizons lattice structures and welfare in multi period matching markets abstract we analyze a t period two sided one to one matching market without monetary transfers under natural restrictions on agents preferences which accommodate switching costs status quo bias and other forms of inter temporal complementarity dynamically stable matchings exist we propose a new ordering of the stable set ensuring that it forms a lattice we investigate the robustness of dynamically stable matchings with respect to the market s time horizon and frequency of rematching opportunities

sequential rules for house allocation with price restrictions this paper considers a housing market with price restrictions on such markets the existence of a unique minimum rationing equilibrium price vector has been established for each preference profile on a general preference domain that contains almost all preference profiles this vector can be used as a key ingredient in a direct and strategy proof allocation mechanism the main contribution of this paper is to provide two price sequences one with increasing prices and one with decreasing prices that both terminate to a minimal rationing equilibrium price vector in a finite number of steps these sequences are demonstrated to play key roles in an english auction and a dutch auction respectively for the considered housing market with price restrictions less

tariffs and growth in the late 19th century the paper estimates the correlation between tariffs and economic growth in the late 19th century in the context of three types of growth equation unconditional convergence equations conditional convergence equations and factor accumulation models it does so for a panel of ten countries between 1875 and 1914 tariffs were positively correlated with growth in these countries during this period economic theory is ambiguous as regards the relationship between trade policy and growth the growth literature of the past decade has produced an impressive array of models in which protection can either increase or reduce long run growth rates grossman and helpman 1991 rivera batiz and romer 1991 stokey 1991 young 1991 such theoretical ambiguity invites empirical research while new growth theory is ambiguous on the subject the new empirical growth literature has produced a consensus that free trade is positively associated with growth based on evidence from the late 20th century but see rodrlguez and rodrik 1999 for a sceptical review of the literature the clear

rethinking aquaculture for resource poor farmers perspectives from bangladesh expectations about the unfulfilled potential of aquaculture as a source of animal protein for the poor of bangladesh are currently running high evidence suggests that social and economic constraints to intensification are as yet poorly understood and may constitute an important barrier to improving resource utilisation both public sector agencies and ngos are currently engaged in a range of aquaculture initiatives this paper critically surveys a selection of ongoing aquaculture research and extension programmes it is suggested that current approaches are unlikely to benefit those with low incomes in bangladesh since there are problems with both the conceptualisation of the problem of aquaculture and the types of institutional arrangements being deployed to tackle it the paper ends with several recommendations about future priorities in terms of the nature and style of aquaculture research

targeting agricultural research and extension for food security and poverty alleviation a case study of fish farming in central cameroon over 5 years of participatory on farm research market access profitability farming systems productivity and economic sustainability were compared on 100 small scale farms in central cameroon integration technology based on the use of agricultural by products as fishpond inputs was the driver for intensification over all farms fishpond productivity increased from 498 kg to 1609 kg fish ha 2145 kg ha yr during the project period the number of active fish farmers increased from 15 to 192 including 55 farms which participated only through information exchange over all farms net returns from aquaculture increased by 5 times over pre project levels productivity intensity and profitability increased more significantly in periurban areas with good market access compared to rural areas among farmers with good market access average net income from the aquaculture enterprise rose from 118 up to 1485 research extension team ret support cost an average of 61 300 per year over 5 years rural farmers recaptured 23 of the relevant ret investment compared to 442 by periurban farmers likewise increase in production attributable to ret intervention was higher for periurban 253 compared to rural 11 3 fish farmers within 3 years of the end of extension support rural farmers had returned to pre project production levels whereas periurban farms had better maintained their productivity and profitability findings indicate that in areas with little or no access to markets the number of fishponds and fish farmers can be increased and yields improved increasing local food supplies but sustainability in the absence of extension subsidies is questionable to achieve either of the two principal goals for the sector food security and or poverty alleviation investments need to be made in improving the availability of quality technical assistance to targeted farmers and finding means of reducing social conflict arising from perceived inequalities in the accrual of the benefits of development

a simple selling and buying procedure abstract for the assignment game we analyze the following mechanism sellers simultaneously fix their prices first then buyers sequentially decide which object to buy also each buyer may report his or her indifferences along with the previous buyers indifferences to the following buyer the first phase determines the potential prices while the second phase determines the actual matching reporting truthfully the indifferences is always a dominant strategy for the buyers moreover when buyers state their true indifferences the subgame perfect equilibria outcomes of the mechanism correspond to the maximum equilibrium price vector together with optimal matchings journal of economic literature classification numbers c78 d78

fair trade or trade fair international food trade and cross border macronutrient flows abstract this study examines global food trade from a nutritional perspective paying particular attention to its implications for food security in low income countries by describing food trade in terms of the quantities of three essential macronutrients carbohydrates lipids and proteins embedded in food the analysis goes beyond a simple description of trade values quantities or caloric content as is common in the literature furthermore the study provides estimates of the implicit price of each macronutrient their evolution over time and their implications in terms of north south food trade the data show that over the 1996 2014 period the volume of macronutrients exchanged on international markets has more than doubled with carbohydrates accounting for over 60 of trade flows but proteins and lipids growing at a faster pace proteins were found to be the most expensive macronutrient followed by lipids and carbohydrates in general macronutrients embedded in animal and processed products are more expensive than those in vegetal and unprocessed food the results also suggest that the participation in international food trade has positive effects on low income countries aggregate food availability and food access two pillars of food security indeed low income countries register a net inflow of all macronutrients and take advantage of nutritional arbitrages available on international food markets due to macronutrients price differentials

a direct test of the efficient marriage market hypothesis this paper takes gary becker s theory of marriage seriously in his seminal paper becker 1973 proposes an invisible hand theorem for the marriage market he argues that the competition for spouse leads men and women to be matched in such a way that maximizes the sum total of marital output applications of the economic approach to marriage are now commonplace becker et al 1977 study the effect of imperfect information on divorce benham 1974 scully 1979 and wong 1986 estimate the effect of wife s education on husband s earnings grossbard shechtman 1993 and rao 1993 focus on the effect of sex ratio on implicit or explicit bride prices or dowries the literature however has virtually ignored becker s hypothesis that marriage markets maximize total marital output i e that marriage markets are efficient mistakes are no doubt made in marriage decisions the marriage market is not a text book example of perfect competition because of elaborate social norms substantial search costs and room for bargaining and opportunistic behavior nevertheless we intend to push becker s efficient marriage market model at face value and directly confront it with data the hypothesis that the marriage market maximizes marital output provides a framework that allows estimating a model of spouse selection which recovers some of the parameters of the production function for marital output using the estimated parameters we can use programming techniques to find the optimal male female pairing that maximizes the sum of marital output the degree to which the actual pairing of husbands and wives corresponds to the optimal pairing provides a goodness of fit test of the efficient marriage market hypothesis our method is applied to census data in hong kong a model of spouse selection and other matching models differs from a discrete choice model e g mcfadden 1984 in two important ways first the choice of a spouse is mutual not only does each man choose a woman that yields him the highest net utility but each woman also picks a man that gives her the highest net utility second in a discrete choice model several individuals can choose the same alternative in marriage markets this is prohibited under monogamy thus new methods have to be developed to analyze choice in marriage markets although marital output and the shadow price of husbands and wives are not observable the theory of optimal matching allows us to write down the likelihood function for the observed choice of marital partners it turns out that this model of spouse selection reduces to a version of the tobit model under the assumption that error terms are independently and identically normal in multinomial logit models the interpretation of parameters is cumbersome especially when the number of alternatives is large in our model of spouse selection the estimated parameters are directly related to the production function of marital output the signs of these parameters can be used to address the issue of positive versus negative assortative mating the model can also be used to test marginal product pricing in the marriage market with the estimated production function from the model of spouse selection we can impute the marital output for all possible male female pairs using these imputed output figures the optimal pairing between men and women that maximizes the sum of marital output can be found using an algorithm that solves the assignment problem the degree to which this optimal pairing corresponds to the observed pairing then provides a natural way of assessing marriage market efficiency given the limited range of information contained in the census we find that our model of spouse selection fits the observed choices better than other models such as one based on ranking method following varian s 1990 proposal for goodness of fit tests for optimizing models we derive a measure of efficiency which is based on the distance between total imputed marital output under observed matching and that under optimal matching

too good to fire non assortative matching to play a dynamic game abstract we model stable non assortative labor market matchings we endogenize how transferable utility is a matched firm and worker play an infinite horizon game with one sided moral hazard becker s 1973 result that complementarity yields positively assortative matching fails because increasing match quality harms dynamic incentives a firm cannot credibly threaten to fire a worker who is productive even with low effort thus firms may prefer lower type workers who will exert more effort we offer a new interpretation of efficiency wages committing to a high wage improves effort incentives indirectly by increasing the firm s willingness to walk away we also show that the set of stable outcomes has a lattice structure

governance and trade in fresh vegetables the impact of uk supermarkets on the african horticulture industry production of fresh vegetables for export has grown rapidly in a number of countries in sub saharan africa over the last decade this trade brings producers and exporters based in africa together with importers and retailers in europe large retailers in europe play a decisive role in structuring the production and processing of fresh vegetables exported from africa the requirements they specify for cost quality delivery product variety innovation food safety and quality systems help top determine what types of producers and processors are able to gain access to the fresh vegetables chain and the activities they must carry out the control over the fresh vegetables trade exercised by uk supermarkets has clear consequences for inclusion and exclusion of producers and exporters of differing types and for the long term prospects for the fresh vegetables industry in the two major exporting countries studied kenya and zimbabwe

multilateral bargaining problems abstract in many situations in economics and political science there are gains from forming coalitions but conflict over which coalition to form and how to distribute the gains this paper presents an approach to such multilateral bargaining problems a solution to a multilateral bargaining problem specifies an agreement for each coalition that is consistent with the bargaining process in every coalition we establish the existence of such solutions show that they are determined by reservation prices and characterize these reservation prices as the payoffs of subgame perfect equilibrium outcomes of a non cooperative bargaining model journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c72 c78

neo liberalism and its impact on overfishing and overcapitalisation in the marine fisheries of chile mexico and peru abstract the linkages between neo liberalism and the fisheries sector in three of latin america s principal fishing nations are examined the paper shows how macroeconomic policies have not only re inforced the sector s traditional export orientation but also permitted increased private participation in harvesting and processing production and export growth was facilitated by the absence of an effective regulatory framework as the belief that fish stocks were plenteous following the designation of 200 mile economic exclusion zones in the 1970s encouraged governments to permit open access fisheries regimes the belated recognition that there were indeed limits to growth spawned a series of fisheries laws in the early 1990s which have sought to re regulate the sector to date these efforts have been largely unsuccessful and the principal regional fisheries are presently both overcapitalised and dangerously overfished

greener than thou the political economy of fish ecolabeling and its local manifestations in south africa summary developing country governments and industries have been reluctant to support ecolabels fearing their potentially protectionist effects this reluctance has been countered by international organizations such as fao and ecolabel initiatives with assurances of transparency non discrimination and technical assistance the analysis of the marine stewardship council msc label shows that developing country fisheries and small scale ones in particular have been marginalized furthermore the msc certification of the hake industry in south africa illustrates that ecolabeling is sought in the context of competitive pressures and specific political economies not simply on the basis of value free science and systemic management this article concludes that developing country producers need dedicated systems of standards and verification procedures not only special flexibilities

institutions and the resource curse countries rich in natural resources constitute both growth losers and growth winners we claim that the main reason for these diverging experiences is differences in the quality of institutions more natural resources push aggregate income down when institutions are grabber friendly while more resources raise income when institutions are producer friendly we test this theory building on sachs and warner s influential works on the resource curse our main hypothesis that institutions are decisive for the resource curse is confirmed our results contrast the claims of sachs and warner that institutions do not play a role

local institutional responses to global market pressures the sea cucumber trade in yucatan mexico summary the expansion of global seafood trade creates opportunities as well as risks for small scale fisheries ssfs livelihoods markets provide economic opportunity but without effective governance high demand can drive resource degradation in the context of small scale sea cucumber fisheries in yucatan mexico this study documents local governance responses to new markets and identifies factors driving those responses we conducted a comparative case study of two ssf communities collecting participant observation and interview data during 16 months of fieldwork our study found that local rules in use did not match government regulations and that the emergence of local rules was shaped by relations of production in each study site specifically patron client relationships promoted an open access regime that expanded local fishing fleets while fishing cooperatives attempted to restrict access to local fishing grounds through collective action and multi level linkages with government we propose that the different material incentives arising from the way that patron client relationships and cooperatives organize labor capital and profits help explain these divergent governance responses we hypothesize that this finding is generalizable beyond the study context especially given that patron client relationships and cooperatives are common throughout the world s ssfs this finding builds on previous research that indicates local institutions can mediate the effects of market pressures showing that the emergence of local rules depends on how resource users are organized not just in relation to resource governance but vis a vis the markets themselves therefore effective policies for ssfs facing market pressures require a greater emphasis on regulating local level trade and governing the commercial aspects of fishing livelihoods these lessons are relevant to the estimated 540 million individuals whose livelihoods ssfs support who may increasingly engage in the global seafood trade

eliciting preferences to assign positions and compensation abstract we describe strategy proof rules for economies where an agent is assigned a position e g a job plus some of a divisible good for the 2 agent 2 position case we derive a robust characterization for the multi agent position case many arbitrary such rules exist so we consider additional requirements by also requiring coalitional strategy proofness or nonbossiness the range of a solution is restricted to the point that such rules are not more complex than those for the shapley scarf housing model no divisible good third we show that essentially only constant solutions are immune to manipulations involving bribes finally we demonstrate a conflict between efficiency and strategy proofness the results extend to models without externalities in which agents share positions journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d70

shipping the good fish out an empirical study on the eu seafood imports under the eu s generalized system of preferences abstractthe impact of the eu european union generalized system of preference gsp on the relative eu s demand for seafood quality was evaluated in the study we first explored the theoretical alchian allen result of change in ad valorem tariffs in an n good world and then tested this result in the empirical study the theoretical analysis suggests that whether a reduced ad valorem tariff in an n good case raises the relative demand for high value goods depends not only on the substitutability between high value and low value goods but also on the substitutability between these similar goods with their weak substitutes in the empirical sections we first estimated the elasticities of the substitutions and then used these elasticities to evaluate the quality composition of the eu s seafood imports from the beneficiary countries the empirical results in general confirm the occurrence of shipping the good fish out due to the reduced tariff rates under the eu s gsp arrangements

fighting the tide alternative trade organizations in the era of global free trade abstract this paper explores the proliferation of fair trade organizations their products services and client groups in order to establish the impact of this movement although small in volume alternative trade represents a unique response to the relentless pursuit of free trade through the gatt wto process the economic underpinnings of both fair trade and subsidy programs in general such as the eu s stabilization of exchange system are evaluated ultimately alternative trade can provide significant assistance to targeted groups within developing countries including gains in production and export proficiency on the negative side fair trade is likely to prolong the dependence of developing countries on products with poor future prospects

examining inequality who really benefits from global growth summary this paper analyzes global consumption distribution from 1993 to 2001 it demonstrates that half of the increase in global consumption in the 1990s benefited the developed world populations the other main beneficiary was china s population the number of chinese in extreme poverty fell and a new global middle class emerged elsewhere the per capita consumption of the poor rose at half the global average rate much less than one to one growth growth did help the poor but it was much better for the rich the analysis suggests that relying on growth to reduce poverty is rather inefficient more direct state interventions seem more effective these insights are poorly illustrated by global indices such as gini coefficients but are strikingly demonstrated by density curves the wider use of which could better inform debate in this area

when fishery rhymes with poverty a first step beyond the old paradigm on poverty in small scale fisheries abstract in this paper we first look retrospectively at the perceptions embraced by academics international agencies and practitioners of the relation between fisheries and poverty in developing countries and we try to identify the underlying paradigms which have structured these perceptions the review reveals how the debate has focused on the economic low income and biological overexploitation aspects of the problem we then revisit these perceptions in the light of the recent conclusions drawn from other sectors and in particular from the new consensus on poverty proposed by the international community incorporation of the recent research on poverty helps to show how socio institutional mechanisms governing people s access to fisheries resources rather than the resources themselves play such a critical role in vulnerability to poverty finally a typology identifying four different categories of intrasectoral exclusion mechanisms is developed and illustrated through empirical studies derived from african and asian fisheries

a competitive partnership formation process a group of heterogeneous agents may form partnerships in pairs all single agents as well as all partnerships generate values if two agents choose to cooperate they need to specify how to split their joint value among one another in equilibrium which may or may not exist no agents have incentives to break up any existing partnerships or form new partnerships this paper proposes a dynamic competitive adjustment process that always either finds an equilibrium or exclusively disproves the existence of any equilibrium in finitely many steps when an equilibrium exists partnership and revenue distribution will be automatically and endogenously determined by the process moreover several fundamental properties of the equilibrium solution and the model are derived

contribution of fisheries and aquaculture to food security and poverty reduction assessing the current evidence following a precise evaluation protocol that was applied to a pool of 202 articles published between 2003 and 2014 this paper evaluates the existing evidence of how and to what extent capture fisheries and aquaculture contribute to improving nutrition food security and economic growth in developing and emergent countries in doing so we evaluate the quality and scientific rigor of that evidence identify the key conclusions that emerge from the literature and assess whether these conclusions are consistent across the sources the results of the assessment show that while some specific topics are consistently and rigorously documented thus substantiating some of the claims found in the literature other areas of research still lack the level of disaggregated data or an appropriate methodology to reach consistency and robust conclusions more specifically the analysis reveals that while fish contributes undeniably to nutrition and food security the links between fisheries aquaculture and poverty alleviation are complex and still unclear in particular national and household level studies on fisheries contributions to poverty alleviation lack good conceptual models and produce inconsistent results for aquaculture national and household studies tend to focus on export value chains and use diverse approaches they suggest some degree of poverty alleviation and possibly other positive outcomes for adopters but these outcomes also depend on the small scale farming contexts and on whether adoption was emergent or due to development assistance interventions impacts of fish trade on food security and poverty alleviation are ambiguous and confounded by a focus on international trade and a lack of consistent methods the influences of major drivers decentralization climate change demographic transition are still insufficiently documented and therefore poorly understood finally the evaluation reveals that evidence based research and policy narratives are often disconnected with some of the strongest and long lasting policy narratives lacking any strong and rigorous evidence based validation building on these different results this paper identifies six key gaps facing policy makers development practitioners and researchers

reversal of asymmetries of allocation mechanisms under manipulation abstract consider a two person economy in which resources are allocated so as to maximize agent 1 s utility subject to the condition that agent 2 remains at least as well off as he was initially we show that agent 1 who is explicitly favored by the mechanism gains nothing by manipulation while agent 2 can reverse the asymmetry of the mechanism in his favor we give two other examples of mechanisms for which an analogous reversal of asymmetries takes place

common and conflicting interests in two sided matching markets abstract this paper reviews and synthesizes some of what is now known about what i will call two sided matching markets a number of such models which arise naturally in the study of certain labor markets have been shown to have surprising implications about the common and conflicting interests of the agents and about the incentives they face

consistent bargaining conjectures in marriage and matching abstract in this model of bargaining in marriage markets we assume that each couple bargains in a systematic way over the distribution of the utility of their marriage and that each market participant has accurate conjectures about the utility he or she could obtain through a similar bargaining process with every other potential partner this paper formulates the bargaining model characterizes consistent conjectures and characterizes the matchings which are stable with respect to these conjectures

the strategy structure of two sided matching markets we study two sided markets in which agents are buyers and sellers or firms and workers or men and women the agents are to form partnerships which provide them with satisfaction and at the same time make monetary transfers e g salaries or dowries the core of this market game is shown to have a particularly nice structure so that precise answers can be given to questions concerning comparative statics and manipulability the idea of using walrasian equilibrium as a mechanism for making allocations with desirable properties of fairness and efficiency has been studied extensively the scheme involves having agents specify their supply and demand functions the competitive equilibria are then calculated and allocations are made accordingly in general this procedure may run into two difficulties first nonuniqueness if there are several equilibria there may be no fair way to decide which one should be implemented and second manipulability if there is only one equilibrium an informed agent may be able to influence it by suitably falsifying his demand data however as we will show here using the walrasian mechanism does work remarkably well for a certain class of important markets these are the matching markets of our title and they include markets for single items like houses where it is assumed that traders do not wish to acquire more than one item they also include labor markets in which it is desired to match workers with jobs at suitable salaries academic markets in which students are to be assigned to educational institutions marriage markets where men and women are matched through negotiating of dowries it turns out that in these markets both the problems of nonuniqueness and manipulability can be resolved in a

industrial policy reform in six large newly industrializing countries the resource curse thesis abstract all six large newly industrializing countries nics in this study favored an autarkic industrial policy aip in the 1950s aip required however the rapid build up of heavy and chemical industry hci which caused foreign exchange shortages if the hci matured slowly this is because the import and subsidy demands of the growing protected hci sector became too burdensome for the competitive primary sector whose rents shrank in relative importance as the economic structure evolved the two least well endowed nics abandoned aip early in favor of a competitive industrial policy cip which relied on labor intensive exports to earn foreign exchange and resulted in rapid economic growth in contrast the resource bonus of the four best endowed nics sustained aip longer but the longer aip lasted the harder it became to reform and the slow maturing hci sector adversely affected economic growth in this way the resource bonus became a curse rather than a blessing

multi item vickrey english dutch auctions abstract assuming that bidders wish to acquire at most one item this paper defines a polynomial time multi item auction that locates the vcg prices in a finite number of iterations for any given starting prices this auction is called the vickrey english dutch auction and it contains the vickrey english auction sankaran j k 1994 on a dynamic auction mechanism for a bilateral assignment problem math soc sci 28 143 150 and the vickrey dutch auction mishra d parkes d 2009 multi item vickrey dutch auctions games econ behav 66 326 347 as special cases by means of numerical experiments it is showed that when the auctioneer knows the bidders value distributions the vickrey english dutch auction is weakly faster than the vickrey english auction and the vickrey dutch auction in 89 percent and 99 percent respectively of the investigated problems a greedy version of the vickrey english dutch auction is demonstrated to perform even better in the simulation studies

groups collective decisions and markets abstract we consider a general equilibrium model where multi member households make efficient collective consumption decisions and operate in a competitive market environment individuals have the option to leave the household and make it on their own or join another household we study the effect of these outside options on household formation household stability and equilibrium existence

experimental games on networks underpinnings of behavior and equilibrium selection in this paper we describe a series of laboratory experiments that implement specific examples of a general network structure specifically actions are either strategic substitutes or strategic complements and participants have either complete or incomplete information about the structure of a random network since economic environments typically have a considerable degree of complementarity or substitutability this framework applies to a wide variety of settings we examine behavior and equilibrium selection the degree of equilibrium play is striking in particular with incomplete information behavior closely resembles the theoretical equilibrium whenever this is unique when there are multiple equilibria general features of networks such as connectivity clustering and the degree of the players help to predict informed behavior in the lab people appear to be strongly attracted to maximizing aggregate payoffs social efficiency but there are forces that moderate this attraction 1 people seem content with in the aggregate capturing only the lion s share of the efficient profits in exchange for reduced exposure to loss and 2 uncertainty about the network structure makes it considerably more difficult to coordinate on a demanding but efficient equilibrium that is typically implemented with complete information

give a man a fishpond modeling the impacts of aquaculture in the rural economy abstract the rapid growth of fish farming over the past three decades has generated heated debate over the role of aquaculture in rural development and poverty reduction central to these debates is the question of whether and how aquaculture impacts local incomes and employment yet little empirical evidence exists on the issue to address this question we propose a local economy wide impact evaluation lewie model which nests fish farm models within a general equilibrium model of their local economy the model is calibrated using primary data collected from 1102 households in myanmar s main aquaculture zone representative of 60 of the country s aquaculture farms using this model we examine the impact of aquaculture on the incomes and labor market outcomes of fish farming households but also crop farms and non farm households in the cluster simulating one acre increases in pond plot surface we find that 1 aquaculture generates much higher incomes per acre than agriculture 2 aquaculture generates larger income spillovers than agriculture for non farm households by way of retail and labor markets 3 small commercial fish farms generate greater spillovers than large fish farms these results bolster the notion that fish farming and in particular small scale commercial aquaculture may have a significant role to play in rural development and poverty reduction

inter industry and occupational wage differentials in italy the vast literture on wage determination in the post war era extensively documents the existence of large and persistent wage differentials among industries and workers of comparable skills this paper addresses the issue of wage dispersion in the context of the italian economy the stability over time of industry relative wages confirme previous results obtained for the other countries a wide class of earings equations is estimated using microdata for the italian manufacturing industry the results provide little evidence in support of the view that wage dispersion can be explained by either unmeasured workers charcteristics or by compensating wage differentials conversely the estimated pattern of industry occupation wage differentials is consistent with the existence of rent sharing mechanisms and fairness considerations

a decentralized model of information pricing in networks we propose a recursive method of pricing an information good in a network of holders and demanders of this good the prices are determined via a unique equilibrium outcome in a sequence of bilateral bargaining games that are played by connected agents if the information is a homogenous non depreciating good without network effects we derive explicit formulae which elucidate the role of the link pattern among the players particularly we find out that the equilibrium price is intimately related to the existence of cycles in the network it is zero if a cycle covers the trading pair and it is proportional to the direct and indirect utility that the good generates otherwise

trade matters in the fight against poverty narratives perceptions and lack of evidence in the case of fish trade in africa two opposing views exist in the literature on the potential role that international fish trade plays in economic development while some claim that fish trade has a pro poor effect others denounce the negative effect of fish export on local populations food security and doubt its contributions to the macro economy in this paper we explore this debate in sub saharan africa our analysis did not find any evidence of direct negative impact of fish trade on food security neither did it find evidence that international fish trade generates positive pro poor outcomes this paper discusses the possible reasons for this apparent lack of development impact and highlights the unsupported assumptions underlying the current discourse about international fish trade we suggest that given lack of evidence for the development benefits of fish trade between africa and developed countries fisheries policy could consider support for regional africa to africa trade that meets the growing african demand for lower value fish means of overcoming barriers to intra african trade in fish are discussed

not by growth alone the role of the distribution of income in regional diversity in poverty reduction this study examines the role of the distribution of income in determining the responsiveness of poverty to income growth and changes in income inequality using panel data of 58 developing countries for the period 1980 1998 we show that the large cross regional variation in the capacity of income growth to reduce poverty i e the income elasticity is largely explained by differences in the initial distribution of income and present region and time specific estimates of the income and gini elasticities of poverty we find that the income elasticity of poverty in the mid 1990s equals 1 31 on average and ranges from 0 71 for sub saharan africa to 2 27 for the middle east and north africa and that the gini elasticity of poverty equals 0 80 on average and ranges from 0 01 in south asia to 1 73 in latin america furthermore we show that while differing income growth rates account for most of the regional diversity in poverty trends the additional impact of differences across regions in rates of inequality change and income and inequality elasticities of poverty is almost always significant and far too large to be ignored most notably so in eastern europe and central asia

returns to investment in education a global update the author updates compilations of rate of return estimates to investment in education published since 1985 and discusses methodological issues surrounding those estimates some key patterns among the three main levels of education primary education continues to exhibit the highest social profitability in all world regions private returns are considerably higher than social returns because of the public subsidization of education the degree of public subsidy increases with the level of education which is regressive social and private returns at all levels generally decline by the level of a country s per capita income overall the returns to female education are higher than those to male education but at individual levels of education the pattern is more mixed the returns to the academic secondary school track are higher than the vocational track since unit cost of vocational education is much higher and the returns for those who work in the private competitive sector of the economy are higher than in the public noncompetitive sector and the returns in the self employment unregulated sector of the economy are higher than in the dependent employment sector controversies in the literature are discussed in the light of the new evidence the undisputable and universal positive correlation between education and earnings can be interpreted in many ways the causation issue on whether education really affects earnings can be answered only with experimental data generated by randomly exposing different people to various amounts of education given the fact that moral and pragmatic considerations prevent the generation of such pure data researchers have to make do with indirect inferences or natural experiments some have been attempted the author looks at the research on overeducation or surplus schooling the conclusions reinforce earlier patterns they confirm that primary education continues to be the number one investment priority in developing countries they also show that educating females is marginally more profitable than educating males that the academic secondary school curriculum is a better investment than the technical vocational tract and that the returns to education obey the same rules as investment in conventional capital that is they decline as investment is expanded