how resilient are labour markets to natural disasters the case of the 1998 bangladesh flood abstract natural disasters devastate economies as they impede capital accumulation the resilience of labour markets is crucial for the poor who rely on labour to reduce risk we evaluate how the 1998 flood of the century affected wages in bangladesh we find short term declines in agricultural and non agricultural wages agricultural workers who moved towards non agricultural employment to cope benefitted through a lower percentage reduction in short term wages endowed with human capital salaried workers were unable to mitigate income risk extending the eligibility of credit access or relief programmes may preserve local businesses and their employees in the years following a flood

estimating the economic impact of political party competition in the 1992 british election quences of government partisanship major problem facing researchers who study the consequences of government partisanship is that it is difficult to ascertain the potential economic impact of governments which because of election defeats never existed consider for instance a labour government in britain in 1992 a conservative government in 1997 or a dole administration in the united states none of these governments actually took office and for obvious reasons this impedes analysis of what effects they would have had on their respective national economies here i present a methodology designed to estimate the economic impact that an election losing party would have caused had it achieved office i focus in particular on the 1992 british polity and demonstrate that campaign period prices of london based publicly traded securities can be used to estimate what was expected to have happened in the british economy conditional on a 1992 labour victory the estimates show that a labour government in 1992 was expected by british investors to have ushered in significantly higher interest rates and depressed stock markets compared to those witnessed under the victorious conservative party these results imply that the labour conservative disparity in 1992 was substantial and that relative to the conservative party labour was truly left wing prices of market traded securities ostensibly nonpolitical variables can convey a great deal about political parties electoral competition and the consequences of government partisanship suppose for example that prices in london stock markets were unusually volatile during the 1992 british election campaign and that they jumped dramatically following polling day and the conservative victory according to the analytical ap

the household response to persistent natural disasters evidence from bangladesh we examine the short run economic impacts of recurrent flooding on bangladeshi households surveyed in 2000 2005 and 2010 in 2010 household income and expenditure survey hies households answered a set of questions on whether they were affected by flood and its likely impacts we identify two treatment affected groups by using the self reported data and historical rainfall data based flood risk index we estimate a difference indifference did model to quantify the impacts on income expenditure asset and labour market outcomes and further extend our analysis to different income and expenditure brackets overall we find robust evidence of negative impacts on agricultural income and expenditure intriguingly the extreme poor i e the bottom 15th quintile experience significant positive impacts on agricultural income in the self reported treatment case

environmental shocks and sustainability in microfinance evidence from the great famine of ireland i study the effects of a major environmental shock on microfinance lending by analyzing the irish loan funds during the great famine of ireland i find that funds in districts worse affected by bli

commodity price forecasting with large scale econometric models and the futures market this paper compares the accuracy of major commercial price forecasts for corn wheat soybeans soybean oil soybean meal cotton live cattle and hogs the price forecasting information in futures prices is evaluated by comparison the results among commercial forecasters are mixed but futures prices perform relatively better on average although not universally so these results have important implications for operational risk management

food preferences and nutrition in rural bangladesh t he dietary choice of households near subsistence levels of nutrient intake is one of obvious policy importance in many countries such as bangladesh national goals are set in terms of nutritional intake and there is heavy intervention in the markets for foods however little is known about the manner in which food preferences vary with food expenditure and nutrient intake the design of efficient programs to aid nutritionally deficient households in attaining minimal levels of nutrient intake requires information on all ownand cross price elasticities for both target and non target groups the net effect of a food price subsidy on the consumption of food nutrients cannot be predicted without knowledge of the complete elasticity matrix results presented below demonstrate that substitution effects can be so strong that the subsidization of certain foods quite often reduces nutrient consumption in this study demand equations for nine foods which allow for extremely flexible consumer price response are estimated from the individual budgets of 5 750 rural bangladeshi households estimation at the household level is preferred because it more readily permits the incorporation of household composition variables into the demand analysis such as household size occupation and employment status that are typically lost in aggregation there is also a greater range and variation in expenditure levels than found in grouped data this is of particular importance in the study of nutritional well being as it is the poorest households which are of special interest moreover the household sample provides sufficient degrees of freedom to estimate a simple varying parameter model which requires the estimation of 270 parameters previous econometric analysis of income class specific dietary choice has been limited and not altogether satisfactory pinstrup anderson de londono and hoover 1976 estimated complete sets of price elasticities for different income strata using frisch s scheme in order to study the impact of changes in relative prices on nutrient consumption their results are suspect because of the assumption of want independence necessary for this methodology to be valid alderman and timmer 1980 who were also concerned with studying the relationship between food price policy and nutrient intake by income classes econometrically estimated separate price coefficients for each income group by including slope dummy variables in their demand equations for rice and cassava in indonesia the inclusion of these dummy variables revealed surprisingly large differences in compensated price response across income groups although their results support the notion that poorer households respond differently to prices than the rich the limitations of their data constrained them to consider only two foods and to specify changes in price response which are discontinuous with respect to income i the formulation and estimation of the food demand equations is discussed in section ii below section iii presents the results of the estimation and discusses the nutritional implications of movements in relative food prices and other exogenous variables section iv summarizes our findings

microfinance and poverty evidence using panel data from bangladesh micro finance supports mainly informal activities that often have low market demand it may be thus hypothesized that the aggregate poverty impact of micro finance in an economy with low economic growth is modest or nonexistent the observed borrower level poverty impact is then a result of income redistribution or short run income generation the author addresses these questions using household level panel data from bangladesh the findings confirm that micro finance benefits the poorest and has sustained impact in reducing poverty among program participants it also has positive spillover impact reducing poverty at the village level but the effect is more pronounced in reducing extreme rather than moderate poverty

weathering the storms credit receipt and child labor in the aftermath of the great floods 1998 in bangladesh summary in this paper we use data from a unique survey conducted in the aftermath of the 1998 floods in bangladesh to examine how the household shock child labor relationship is affected by credit receipts of households adopting the ratio of assets lost due to the floods as a likely exogenous shock proxy we find that child labor increases with the magnitude of the shock but only if households do not receive credit this suggests that following shocks child labor may be a response to non availability of credit the policy implication suggests a distinct and alternative channel in combating the economic incentives behind child labor access to credit diminishes the immediate financial burden on constrained households reducing their need for child labor

do natural disasters affect the poor disproportionately price change and welfare impact in the aftermath of typhoon milenyo in the rural philippines summary this paper illustrates the sharp contrast in welfare impacts between the rich and the poor caused by typhoon milenyo in a philippine village we find that fish prices dropped sharply due to the damage caused to fish pens near the village leading to positive net welfare gains among the wealthy in contrast the poor do not consume much fish and thus did not gain from the sharp decline in prices finally consumption reallocation played an important role as an ex post risk coping measure albeit only among the wealthy who are relatively well protected against typhoons

global markets and national politics collision course or virtuous circle increasing exposure to trade foreign direct investment and liquid capital mobility have not prompted a pervasive policy race to the neoliberal bottom among the oecd countries one reason is that there are strong political incentives for governments to cushion the dislocations and risk generated by openness moreover countries with large and expanding public economies when balanced with increased revenues even from capital taxes have not suffered from capital flight or higher interest rates this is because the modern welfare state comprising income transfer programs and publicly provided social services generates economically important collective goods that are undersupplied by markets and that actors are interested in productivity value these range from the accumulation of human and physical capital to social stability under conditions of high market uncertainty to popular support for the market economy itself as a result arguments about the demise of national autonomy in the global economy are considerably overdrawn

are estimates of calorie income fxelasticities too high a recalibration of the plausible range abstract the wide range of calorie income elasticities in the literature results in large part from the particular calorie and income variables used for estimation elasticities across four estimation techniques and four calorie income variable pairs for a sample of philippine farm households ranged from 0 03 to 0 59 estimates associated with calorie availability are biased upwards first because random errors in measuring food purchases are transmitted by construction both to calorie availability and total expenditures and second because the residual difference between family calorie intake and household calorie availability will often increase with income the calorie intake total expenditure variable pair gives the preferred elasticity estimate in the 0 08 0 14 range

microfinance its impact outreach and sustainability summary this symposium brings together recent empirical contributions with respect to a number of related and highly relevant issues on the economics of microfinance in particular the contributions provide answers to the following two main questions 1 does microfinance have an impact on the social and economic situation of the poor in developing nations and 2 are microfinance institutions sustainable in the long term and is there a trade off between sustainability and outreach

does resilience capacity reduce the negative impact of shocks on household food security evidence from the 2014 floods in northern bangladesh abstract using data collected before and after the catastrophic flooding that took place in northern bangladesh in 2014 this paper contributes to the growing evidence on the factors enhancing households resilience to shocks or their resilience capacities the analysis takes into account all three dimensions of resilience capacity absorptive adaptive and transformative as well as a broad range of specific capacities supporting them in addition to disaster preparedness and mitigation it finds suggestive evidence that the following capacities reduced the negative impact of the flooding on household food security social capital human capital exposure to information asset holdings livelihood diversity safety nets access to markets and services women s empowerment governance and psycho social capabilities such as aspirations and confidence to adapt the paper highlights the importance of taking a comprehensive approach to understanding the determinants of resilience in future research one that accounts for the full range of potential capacities it also points to the value of taking a cross sectoral multi intervention approach to on the ground resilience programing in bangladesh and other developing country areas that are increasingly vulnerable to climate shocks

rising food prices food price volatility and social unrest can food prices cause social unrest throughout history riots have frequently broken out ostensibly as a consequence of high food prices using monthly data at the international level this article studies the impact of food prices food price levels as well as food price volatility on social unrest because food prices and social unrest are jointly determined data on natural disasters are used to identify the causal relationship flowing from food price levels to social unrest results indicate that for the period 1990 2011 food price increases have led to increases in social unrest whereas food price volatility has not been associated with increases in social unrest these results are robust to alternative definitions of social unrest to using real or nominal prices to using commodity specific price indices instead of aggregated price indices to alternative definitions of the instrumental variable to alternative definitions of volatility and to controlling for non food related social unrest

optimal storage by crop producers when post harvest marketing strategies are restricted by disallowing speculative purchases sales out of storage becomes an irreversible decision and the dynamic marketing problem becomes analogous to the optimal exercise of a financial option the optimal marketing strategy is to hold at low prices and to sell at high prices with a cutoff price function marking the boundary between low and high prices a method for estimating the cut off price function is developed and applied to illinois soybean prices the decision rule is demonstrated to result in substantial gains from storage copyright 2002 oxford university press

community based risk management arrangements a review summary risk and its consequences pose a formidable threat to poverty reduction efforts this article reviews a plethora of community based risk management arrangements across the developing world these types of arrangements are garnering greater interest in light of the growing recognition of the relative prominence of household or individual specific idiosyncratic risk as well as the increasing shift towards community based development funding the article discusses potential advantages such as targeting cost and informational and disadvantages such as exclusion and inability to manage correlated risk of these arrangements and their implications for the design of community based social protection programs and policies

style and performance of agricultural market advisory services this article develops measures of marketing style for advisory programs in corn and soybeans and estimates the relationship between style characteristics and pricing performance style is measured by the intensity of futures and options use degree of activeness in marketing and seasonality of sales the data set consists of advisory programs tracked by the agmas project at the university of illinois between 1995 and 2004 results indicate that active programs making large bets on price movements obtain a higher average price than more conservative programs this is consistent with active advisors possessing superior information and or analytical skills rather than being overconfident however estimates of the relationship between pricing performance and activeness are sensitive to the inclusion of a single high performing program

effect of flood on agricultural wages in bangladesh an empirical analysis summary this paper analyzes the effects of riverine floods on agricultural wages in bangladesh drawing upon the district wise monthly data over 1979 2000 we model wages as a dynamic process we find that floods have positive implications for wages in the long run in flood months however agricultural wages decline in the inundated districts we obtain difference in difference estimates to show that the magnitude of impact of flood depends on the relative flood proneness of a district and the relative severity of flood conditions our results indicate that favorable demand and supply conditions in the agricultural labor market can mitigate the impact of disasters on wages in bangladesh

speak clearly and carry a big stock of dollar reserves sovereign risk ideology and presidential elections in argentina brazil mexico and venezuela partisan theories of political economy expect that bondholders will panic with the election of a left wing presidential candidate the latter seems to be what happened in brazil in the 2002 presidential elections however quantitative analysis of perceptions of sovereign credit risk in argentine brazilian mexican and venezuelan presidential elections from 1994 until 2007 shows no real evidence of a link between partisanship and perceptions of risk even if the left right divide is further broken down into left center left center right right instead international and domestic economic fundamentals have a stronger influence on risk evaluations qualitative analysis of the individual presidential elections shows the importance of policy uncertainty in explaining why certain electoral periods seemed more critical than others and how bondholders select between multiple equilibria this research helps shift political analysis away from partisanship and more in the direction of policies and articulation

public policy markets and household coping strategies in bangladesh avoiding a food security crisis following the 1998 floods abstract at their peak the 1998 floods covered two thirds of bangladesh causing severe damage to the major rice crop and threatening the food security of tens of millions of households in this paper we first highlight the contribution of government policy interventions including trade liberalization in the early 1990s to stabilization of rice markets during and after the flood then using a panel data set covering 750 households in three rounds over a 13 month period we analyze impacts of the flood on household assets consumption and nutritional outcomes finally we present empirical estimates of the contribution of rice market stabilization and government transfers to household food consumption

does contingent repayment in microfinance help the poor during natural disasters abstract microfinances in bangladesh introduced a contingent repayment system beginning in 2002 which allowed rescheduling of savings and installments during natural disasters for affected members this paper is one of the first attempts to evaluate the system employing a unique dataset in using evidence from a flood in 2004 the author found that rescheduling plays the role of a safety net by decreasing the probability that people skip meals during negative shocks by 5 1 per cent this effect is even higher on the landless and females this study attempts to contribute to the issue regarding the poverty reduction effect of microfinances

will developing country nutrition improve with income a case study for rural south india aggregate estimates of food expenditure are consistent with such a possibility implying income expenditure elasticities close to one however the high degree of aggregation at which such estimates are made means that the considerable increase in price per nutrient as income increases is ignored and the nutrient elasticities are therefore overstated estimates for a rural south indian sample indicate that this bias is considerable and that the true nutrient elasticities with respect to income may be close to zero

coping with flood role of institutions in bangladesh the article examines the coping strategies that rural households adopted during the 1998 flood in bangladesh and assesses its impact on household welfare including coping and vulnerability both vulnerability and poverty have in general declined in bangladesh yet 60 of rural households adopted a coping of one type or another and about half of rural households were both vulnerable as well as found to adopt any coping mechanism during the 1998 flood household level panel data analysis confirms that the flood reduced both consumption and asset and forced many households to adopt some coping mechanisms to mitigate the adverse effects of flood consequently natural disaster such as flooding increases households vulnerability to poverty however post flood bumper crop production and operation of targeted programs such as microfinance helped compensate the losses of flood

effects of microcredit and other loans on female empowerment in bangladesh the borrower s gender influences intra household resource allocation this article examines microcredit s effectiveness in empowering women borrowers in rural bangladesh it does so by examining how gender specific borrowing activities influence household expenditures which are either specifically of interest to men or women and by examining the effects of all loans rather than only those provided by microcredit organizations the article uses a quasi experimental design to identify the effects of borrowing by men and women by using an original combination of panel data and instrumental variables on subsamples of the surveyed population it finds that the borrower s gender affects how households allocate their resources to different expenditure items and assets that are valued differently by men and women in all the findings suggest that providing greater credit access to women may improve their household bargaining positions

averting a food crisis private imports and public targeted distribution in bangladesh after the 1998 flood abstract the 1998 flood in bangladesh caused a shortfall of 2 2 million tonnes mill t in the rice production and threatened the food security of tens of millions of households despite the best efforts of donors and the government the public distribution of rice and wheat was only 188 000 t more than originally planned for july 1998 to april 1999 however a major food crisis was averted as private imports made possible by trade liberalisation in the early 1990s stabilised market prices and supplies the government s direct distribution programs though small compared to private imports nonetheless increased access to food by poor households household survey data indicate that immediate relief efforts were well targeted to flood affected households as were transfers from ngos vulnerable group feeding vgf a medium term program was not targeted well to households directly exposed to the flood though the program was relatively well targeted to poor households more broadly the bangladesh experience with the 1998 flood shows that in a liberalised trade regime where private imports respond to price signals food aid s contribution to the total availability of food may be minimal however foreign assistance in kind or in cash can provide resources for subsidised targeted distribution to food insecure households assistance not possible otherwise under tight government budget constraints

optimal storage and marketing over space and time borrowing from the theory of optimal resource extraction we develop the mechanism guiding efficient commodity storage and marketing over producing regions through the crop year optimal storage occurs at producing areas and time in storage varies directly with distance to market prices grow with interest rates in locations where storage is efficient but more slowly elsewhere which explains why market prices i e prices at the market grow more slowly than interest rates the model is empirically supported by examining storage in the corn belt rates of price growth at various points and quarterly grain marketings

intra household resource allocation under negative income shock a natural experiment summary using households from coastal districts in bangladesh as a case and applying the difference in difference estimation method this paper demonstrates a gender differentiated outcome of negative income shocks for education expenditures of households the cyclonic disaster that reduced crop income substantially increased the demand for labor as well as wages for rebuilding damaged farms this in turn increased the opportunity costs of boys schooling as reconstruction is a male friendly sector consequently parents withdrew their sons from school and engaged them in their households repair work and or in wage earning activities however girls schooling expenditure was unchanged in the affected farm and non farm households

the performance of rice markets in bangladesh during the 1974 famine recent discussions have further emphasised the role of speculation in foodgrains as a cause of famine hartmann and boyce i 979 sobhan i 980 rashid i 980 sen i98i greenough i982 by this reasoning famine is attributed to the expectation on the part of foodgrain stockholders of a substantial future price increase or future rationing there is a weakness in this explanation as arrow remarks in his review of sen i98i

natural disasters household welfare and resilience evidence from rural vietnam summary the study uses commune fixed effects regressions to estimate the effect of natural disasters on welfare and poverty of rural households in vietnam and subsequently examines household and community characteristics that can strengthen resilience of households to natural disasters we find that all the three disaster types considered in this study including storms floods and droughts have negative effects on household income and expenditure households in communes with higher mean expenditure and more equal expenditure distribution are more resilient to natural disasters access to micro credit internal remittances and social allowances can help households strengthen the resilience to natural disasters

another day another dollar enterprise resilience under terrorism in developing countries this study extends the literature on entrepreneurship in developing countries by offering a two stage explanation for the paradoxical observation that enterprise activities often flourish under extreme adversity our findings complement the base of pyramid and peace through commerce attention to the growing role of business in international development by fleshing out the functions of enterprise resilience under terrorism we first explain how terrorism conditions outbreak escalation and reduction may create psychological incentives for enterprise resilience then we show that controlling for ex ante terrorism conditions enterprise resilience yields more favorable economic payoffs at higher levels of terrorism especially for informal entrepreneurs

the demand for food and calories we investigate nutrition and expenditure in rural maharashtra in india we estimate that the elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to total expenditure is 0 3 0 5 a range that is in accord with conventional wisdom the elasticity declines only slowly with levels of living and is far from the value of zero suggested by a recent revisionist literature in these indian data the calories necessary for a day s activity cost less than 5 percent of the daily wage which makes it implausible that income is constrained by nutrition rather than the other way around

price hike of staple food nutritional impact and consumption adjustment evidence from the 2005 2010 rice price increase in rural bangladesh this paper studies the nutritional impact of the rice price increase between 2005 and 2010 on households in rural bangladesh and their resulting adjustment in consumption of rice non rice food and

trade liberalization and national food security rice trade between bangladesh and india abstract following a poor harvest in late 1997 and a massive flood in 1998 private sector traders in bangladesh imported several million metric tons of rice from india this paper presents evidence that this trade made possible by separate trade liberalizations in india and bangladesh in the early 1990s augmented domestic supplies and stabilized prices in bangladesh at import parity levels letters of credit data indicating the participation of hundreds of importers and a close correlation of price movements across the two countries suggest that the trade was competitive a risk of co incident crop shortfalls in the two countries remains though these have occurred rarely in the past two decades bangladesh imports from alternative sources would also enhance food availability if another production shortfall occurs but these imports face higher transport costs and would involve far fewer importing firms given the economies of scale of shipments by sea the positive contribution of trade liberalization to short run food security in bangladesh in recent years does not minimize the importance of increased agricultural productivity and rural economic growth to provide rural poor households with sufficient incomes to acquire food nonetheless the bangladesh experience shows that trade liberalization offers potential benefits for national food security by enabling a rapid increase of food supplies following domestic production shortfalls

cash marketing styles and performance persistence much agricultural economics research has been dedicated to determining the best time for producers to sell their commodities unlike this past research we look at how producers actually sell commodities the extent to which producers display an active or mechanical marketing style is measured using individual farmer sales the activeness of a producer s marketing strategy is measured by how much the timing of their strategy varies from year to year results show no relationship between activeness and net prices received furthermore the results show no evidence of performance persistence by individual producers

food aid domestic policy and food security contrasting experiences from south asia and sub saharan africa abstract food aid both for short term emergency relief and as program food aid that helps address medium term food deficits is often a major component of food security strategies in developing countries this study reviews the experience with food aid of four major recipients of food aid india bangladesh ethiopia and zambia regarding food production trade markets consumption and safety nets as well as the policy responses to food emergencies the widely varying experiences of the study countries suggest that food aid that supports building of production and market enhancing infrastructure is timed to avoid adverse price effects on producers and is targeted to food insecure households can play a positive role in enhancing food security however food aid is not the only or in many cases the most efficient means of addressing food insecurity in many cases private markets can more effectively address shortfalls in food availability and cash transfers may be a viable alternative to food transfers in kind

seasonal hunger and its mitigation in north west bangladesh seasonal hunger may result from seasonality of agriculture when households fail to smooth income and consumption using household survey data from the northwest region of bangladesh this paper examines alternative measures of seasonal hunger and provides some evidence to support policies and programs needed to mitigate seasonal hunger the results suggest that a large majority of food vulnerable households are the perpetual poor as opposed to a small percentage of households who are subject to food deprivation only during the lean period findings suggest that government safety net programs and microcredit provide a cushion for the poor to stave off seasonal hunger