analyzing nutritional impacts of policies an empirical study for malawi summary widespread malnutrition in developing countries calls for appropriate strategies presupposing good knowledge about nutritional impacts of policies little previous work has been carried out in this direction especially with respect to micronutrients we use representative household data from malawi and develop a demand systems approach to estimate income and price elasticities of food demand and nutrient consumption these estimates are applied for policy simulations given multiple nutritional deficiencies income related policies are better suited than price policies to improve nutrition while consumer price subsidies for maize improve calorie and mineral consumption they can worsen vitamin consumption in urban areas

does household composition matter the impact of the grain for green program on rural livelihoods in china article i nfo this research introduces family composition into the sustainable livelihoods framework for policy analysis we apply this approach to a case study on the grain for green program in western china using recent survey data from zhouzhi county we show that the impact of the policy on rural livelihoods varies across household compositions the environmental program neither targets asset poor households nor does it necessarily shift the on farm labor to non farm sectors which would improve household incomes after controlling for the effect of assets households with children but without the elderly tend to have lower migration rates and lower incomes after participation in the program policy strategies should consider household heterogeneity particularly household composition in rural china

rice production response in cambodia this study estimates rice production response using the cambodia socioeconomic surveys conducted in 2004 and 2007 the results indicate that agricultural productivity is far below its potential and can be increased substantially by using modern technology and inputs such as fertilizer and irrigation our findings also suggest that the cambodian government needs to design its investment strategy to improve rural infrastructure including irrigation transportation and electricity in order to increase its agricultural production and productivity and boost farmers income

quasi and simulated likelihood approaches to censored demand systems food consumption by food stamp recipients in the united states a quasi maximum likelihood estimator is proposed and applied to a censored translog demand system for foods using a sample of food stamp recipients in the united states the procedure produces remarkably close parameter and elasticity estimates to those of the simulated maximum likelihood procedure a two step procedure is also considered but it produces different elasticities demands are found to be price elastic for pork and fish but price inelastic for all other food products gross complementarity and net substitutability are obvious but these cross price effects are much less pronounced than own price and total food expenditure effects copyright 2003 oxford university press

modelling the joint determination of household labour supplies and commodity demands in addition to choosing the allocation of total expenditure between commodities households may also be able to make decisions over the allocation of their time between market work and leisure in both theoretical and empirical work it has often been the case that these decisions have been analysed separately in this paper we stress the theoretical attractions of considering the joint determination of the allocation of time between work and leisure and the allocation of total expenditure between commodities in a utility maximising framework using a sample of individual households we attempt to evaluate the empirical importance of the joint determination model over the separate determination of labour supplies and commodity demands our approach follows that of abbott and ashenfelter i976 phlips i978 barnett i979 deaton and muellbauer i980 and atkinson and stern i980 here we pay particular attention to the following four important aspects of household decision making over commodity demand and labour supply the first concerns the commonly assumed restriction on the household s preferences of weak separability between goods and leisure this assumption allows the estimation of commodity demand systems and engel curves that exclude wage rate variables in cross section household budget data with large variation in wage rates across the sample the invalidity of this assumption would involve a serious mis specification any correlation between the excluded wage variable and the included price income and demographic variables would lead to biased parameter estimates and hence biased estimated elasticities similarly this assumption allows the estimation of labour supply curves that exclude relative price variables and its invalidity could produce biased labour supply elasticities a second aspect of household decision making which we wish to highlight arises from the suspicion commonly alluded to in labour economics texts that primary male workers may not be free to choose their hours of work thus we estimate a matched pair of rationed and unrationed systems following the work of neary and roberts i 980 and deaton and muellbauer i 979 the separability restriction is not unrelated to this point since without it we will see that the rationed hours of work enter demand systems in a complex fashion in effect

information to guide policy responses to higher global food prices the data and analyses required abstract national decision makers must understand the degree to which their country and population groups within it are exposed to the negative effects of higher global food prices or could exploit new economic opportunities offered by higher prices this paper provides a conceptual overview of the range of data and analyses that will permit leaders and analysts serving them to assess the broad implications of higher global food prices for a country and its population groups what we find is that there are a relatively small number of types of policy responses that governments might take in the face of a food price rise consequently relatively well defined sets of data need to be compiled and types of analyses used by government to generate the information needed to broadly guide efforts to prevent food price increases from becoming crises and to derive any possible benefits international joint action can be employed profitably both to collect this data and to build national capacity to conduct the analyses needed to guide policy formulation and general program design in the face of the risks and the opportunities of higher food prices and to evaluate the effectiveness of those policy responses

weak separability and the estimation of elasticities in multistage demand systems the necessary conditions for multistage budgeting to be at least approximately justified are reviewed and the plausibility of these assumptions i e weak separability and low variability of price indices with utility level are discussed using no further assumptions simple relationships between expenditure and price elasticities in different budgeting levels are derived these results are applied to a three stage model for swedish food consumption and it is shown that the assumptions are not inappropriate restricting the analysis to the last stage of a multistage budgeting process is also shown to lead to considerable errors which could well have policy consequences

conditional and unconditional food demand elasticities in a dynamic multistage demand system this paper estimates conditional and unconditional demand elasticities in a three stage analysis of consumer demand for food and non food items in greece a dynamic version of the aids model is specified and estimated and full system misspecification tests applied correction formulas for price and expenditure elasticities are used to calculate unconditional elasticities from conditional demand sub systems all food items rank as price inelastic deviations between the calculated conditional and unconditional price and expenditure elasticities are found to be significant demonstrating the importance of correcting conditional elasticities before they can be used for policy purposes or welfare analyses

marketed surpluses of agricultural households in sierra leone an agricultural household model is used with household level data from sierra leone to estimate elasticities of marketed surplus for several outputs and for labor with respect to price and nonprice variables positive own price elasticities are found with magnitudes considerably above own price output elasticities changes in household characteristics and production technology also affect marketed surpluses but not always in anticipated directions elasticities are reported for households when grouped by their total expenditure not just for the sample mean the differences are important showing that low expenditure households respond as much as high expenditure households

comparing stochastic price regimes abstract marshallian consumer s surplus can often be defended as a useful approximation to hicksian compensating variation under price uncertainty however expected compensating variation is not a generally valid welfare measure and expected consumer s surplus cannot be justified as an approximation to a rigorous construct

measuring the costs of children an alternative approach abstract the cost of a child or the general equivalence scale as it is more commonly known is a concept of considerable importance in matters relating to public policy and welfare it has played a crucial part in numerous theoretical and empirical studies relating to poverty income distribution dietary needs income maintenance programs supplementary and child benefits and other forms of social security payments in a welfare state and in assessing the horizontal equity of income taxation in spite of a long tradition of estimating the scale from observed household budget data there remain severe problems in estimation and interpretation of the scales this paper proposes a new methodology for calculating the scale using a framework which is consistent with utility theory and which overcomes the identification problem without having to enforce the arbitrary prior assumptions of recent studies the proposed method allows easy calculation of not only the basic scale parameter but also how it varies with price and reference utility we illustrate the usefulness of the procedure by estimating on u k budget data at two different levels of aggregation and employing two sets of quite different functional forms the results are plausible compare favourably with one another and hence confirm the robustness and usefulness of the proposed procedure

common trends and common cycles the existence of a serial correlation common feature among the first differences of a set of i 1 variables implies the existence of a common cycle in the beveridge nelson stock watson decomposition of those variables a test for the existence of common cycles among cointegrated variables is developed the test is used to examine the validity of the common trend common cycle structure implied by flavin s excess sensitivity hypothesis and campbell and mankiw s mixture of rational expectations and rule of thumb hypothesis for consumption and income linear independence between the cointegration and the cofeature vectors is exploited to decompose consumption and income into their trend and cycle components copyright 1993 by john wiley sons ltd

the estimation of a rank 3 demand system with demographic demand shifters from quasi unit record data of household consumption abstract alternative versions of a preference consistent rank 3 complete demand system have been estimated from quasi unit record budget data of new zealand households of different demographic profiles also computed are the equivalence scales required by households of different composition to attain equivalent levels of utility and the expenditure elasticities

quality quantity and spatial variation of price this paper develops and implements a method for estimating price elasticities of demand using cross sectional household survey data geographically clustered households report unit values which when corrected for quality effects and for measurement error indicate the underlying spatial variation in prices and can be matched to variation in demand patterns a simple model of quality choice is proposed while the correction for measurement error exploits the clustered design of such surveys data from a 1979 household survey from the ivory coast are used to estimate price elasticities for beef meat fish cereals and starches copyright 1988 by american economic association

errors in the numerical assessment of the benefits of price stabilization this paper presents a simple computational procedure for determining a consumer s willingness to pay to have a price stabilization policy implemented numerical simulations are then provided which demonstrate that the commonly used expected surplus measures whether hicksian or marshallian can in fact seriously misstate the true benefits of price stabilization these simulations also illustrate the extent to which the results may be dependent upon the assumptions made implicitly or explicitly regarding the consumer s attitudes toward risk thereby underscoring the need to conduct sensitivity analyses to determine the robustness of cost benefit assessments with respect to these assumptions

sources of convergence in the late nineteenth century abstract this paper investigates convergence for a group of seven countries during the period 1870 1914 a standard empirical growth model which includes physical and human capital accumulation proves unsatisfactory in this setting an alternative neoclassical open economy factor accumulation model is proposed which admits capital and labor migration and may be extended to include a moving frontier the model explains the observed convergence pattern in the sample and suggests that factor accumulation patterns were the prime sources of labor productivity convergence from 1870 to 1914

on the economics of household composition 1988 on the economics of household composition applied economics vol 20 no 10 pp 1401 1418

assessing the impacts of stochastic trend in crop acreage supply response model this paper demonstrates the need to revisit the way a technical change has been incorporated in a crop acreage supply response model three different versions of technological change were introduced and compared no trend deterministic trend and stochastic trend the results confirm the need to treat a technology variable as a stochastic trend for better results in crop acreage supply response model specifications

entry versus success in the labor force young women s employment in sri lanka abstract in this paper we contribute to the understanding of women s labor force behavior in developing societies through a household level analysis of young single women in sri lanka we argue that in the context of saturated and imperfect labor markets of asian societies such as sri lanka it is important to 1 a differentiate between labor force participation and employment 2 b consider familial and cultural factors in addition to the standard determinants of labor supply and demand and 3 c examine the labor force activity of the current generation of single women in sri lanka where unemployment among young women is widespread our results strongly support the strategy of differentiating between labor force participation and employment that the determinants of these components of the employment process function in different ways is best illustrated by our findings regarding the effects of education higher education levels lead to greater labor force participation but highly educated women are also more likely to be unemployed than to be employed in addition our findings show that the labor market behavior of young women is shaped by familial expectations and resources in terms of the protected role of young daughters in the household cultural differences in the acceptability of young women working across ethnic groups the necessity for women to work across social classes and classbased advantages in access to information and channels that facilitate job acquisition

equivalence scales in a rank 3 demand system abstract in the context of a rank 3 demand system equivalence scales measuring the cost of demographic characteristics independently of the base utility level can be identified from cross section data without demographic separability restrictions although this can also be achieved with a rank 2 demand system that contains a nonlinear log expenditure term in its budget shares tests performed in a nested framework suggest that the rank 3 demand system approach is empirically superior the informative structure of the rank 3 demand system is used to estimate a detailed pattern of demographic costs including the cost of single parenthood and economies of scale within the family

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

stochastic trends and economic fluctuations are business cycles mainly the result of permanent shocks to productivity this paper uses a long run restriction implied by a large class of real business cycle models identifying permanent productivity shocks as shocks to the common stochastic trend in output consumption and investment to provide new evidence on this question econometric tests indicate that this common stochastic trend cointegration implication is consistent with postwar u s data however in systems with nominal variables the estimates of this common stochastic trend indicate that permanent productivity shocks typically explain less than half of the business cycle variability in output consumption and investment copyright 1991 by american economic association

labour supply and wages among nuclear and extended households the surinamese experiment this article explores labour market behaviour of members of extended and nuclear households in suriname previous analyses have found that co operative childcare opportunities within the extended household increase female labour force participation such coordination implies correlated participation decisions which invalidates standard assumptions made in estimating participation with probits and wages with regressions we employ a gmm estimation which allows correlation among household members we find that extended and nuclear household members are not significantly different in participation propensities but do differ significantly in wages we argue that greater home production opportunities in extended households dilute labour market effort and hours reducing earnings

maquiladoras and market mamas women s work and childcare in guatemala city and accra abstract this paper analyses work childcare and earnings of mothers in the slums of guatemala city and accra similar factors affect decisions to work and to use formal daycare but the importance of childcare varies with the role of the formal labour sector in guatemala where formal sector work is important higher prices for informal care increase formal daycare use however daycare prices and proximity to daycare centers do not significantly affect earnings in guatemala city and accra respectively providing formal daycare may be more important to mothers decision to work in cities where formal sector work dominates

estimating the short run poverty impacts of the 2010 11 surge in food prices global food prices have increased substantially since mid 2010 as have prices in many developing countries in this study we assess the poverty impact of the price changes between june and december 2010 in twenty eight low and middle income countries this is done by gathering detailed information on individual households food production and consumption levels for thirty eight agricultural and food commodities to assess the impacts on household welfare this study estimates that this sudden food price surge increased the number of poor people globally but with considerably different impacts in different countries the heterogeneity of these impacts is partly related to the wide variation in the transmission of global prices to local prices and partly to differences in households patterns of production and consumption on balance the adverse welfare impact on net buyers outweighs the benefits to net sellers resulting in an increase in the number of poor and in the depth of poverty we estimate that the average poverty change was 1 1 percentage points in low income countries and 0 7 percentage points in middle income countries with a net increase of 44 million people falling below the 1 25 per day extreme poverty line

exact consumer s surplus and deadweight loss consumer s surplus is a widely used tool in applied welfare economics both economic theorists and cost benefit analysis often use consumer s surplus despite its somewhat dubious reputation the basic idea is to evaluate the value to a consumer or his willingness to pay for a change in price of a good from say pricep to pricep because price changes affect consumer welfare an evaluation of this effect is often a key input to public policy decisions yet consumer s surplus is probably the most controversial of widely used economic concepts both paul samuelson and ian little conclude that the economics profession would be better off without it it is my feeling of the situation that substantial agreement exists on the correct quantities to be measured the amount the consumer would pay or would need to be paid to be just as well off after the price change as he was before the price change the quantities correspond to john hicks compensating variation measures an alternative measure which takes ex post price change utility as the basis of comparison is hicks equivalent variation the controversy arises in the measurement of these quantities the usual measurement procedure is to use the area to the left of the marshallian market demand curve between two price levels jules dupuit originated this measure of welfare change and alfred marshall and hicks derived appropriate conditions for its use the primary condition for the area to the left of the demand curve to correspond to the compensating variation is to have constant marginal utility of income marshall gave this condition and if it holds the same quantity will be derived as the area to the left of the compensated hicksian demand curve this area to the left of the compensated demand curve is exactly what the compensating variation and equivalent variation measure thus the constant marginal utility of income is a sufficient condition for marshallian consumer s surplus to be equal to hicks consumer s surplus in this case arnold harberger s plea to use the welfare triangle as one half times the product of the price change times the quantity change to measure deadweight loss corresponds to the correct theoretical amount of welfare change in a recent paper robert willig derives bounds for the percentage difference between the correct measure of either the compensating or equivalent variation and the marshallian measure derived form the market demand curve his bounds which depend on the income elasticity of demand for the single good in the region of price change being considered as well as the proportion of the consumer s income spent on the good demonstrate that the marshallian consumer s surplus is often a good approximation to hicks consumer s surplus the fact that the proportion of the consumer s income spent matters as well as the income elasticity was first pointed out by harold hotelling willig contends that the approximation error will be less than the errors involved in estimating the demand curve thus he hopes to remove the need for apology that applied economists often need to give to theorists who remark on the inappropriateness of using marshallian consumer s surplus to measure welfare change however in this paper i show that for the case primarily considered by willig of a single price change which is also the situation in which consumer s surplus is often used in applied work no approximation is necessary professor of economics massachusetts institute of technology and research associate national bureau of economic research i would like to thank peter diamond erwin diewert daniel mcfadden robert merton robert solow hal varian joel yellin and the referees for help and comments research support from the national science foundation is acknowledged the reason that we still have two rather than one of samuelson s six measures of consumer s surplus arises from an index number problem of the correct basis for the welfare comparison i will give both measures but plan to concentrate on the compensating variation

revealed community equivalence scales abstract this paper estimates the equivalence scale revealed by discretionary community allocations of welfare benefits to poor households i apply the proposed approach to a subsidized rice program in indonesia in which villages designated program beneficiaries and estimate the equivalence scale implicit in the beneficiaries they selected i find that the revealed community equivalence scale for this program lies much closer to per capita expenditure than traditional demand based equivalence scales particularly in the poorest communities this suggests that per capita expenditure may be closer to how poor communities actually compare households when allocating aid than previously thought

consumer behaviour theory and empirical evidence a survey this survey is designed to emphasize the relationship between empirical a nd theoretical considerations in the analysis of consumer behavior a lthough it focuses primarily on analysis at the individual or micro l evel it tries where possible to draw implications for the estimati on of aggregate relationships the importance of micro level analysis stems from the rapid expansion in available panel and survey data se ts this development has generated its own theoretical and empirical issues many of which are raised in this survey copyright 1988 by royal economic society

sources of international business fluctuations country specific shocks or worldwide shocks abstract this paper identifies sources of business fluctuations in a two country open economy model with the structural var method focusing on the relative importance of worldwide shocks and country specific shocks unlike previous studies which define country specific shocks as labor supply shocks this study explicitly identifies three kinds of permanent shocks worldwide shocks domestic country specific shocks and foreign country specific shocks with identifying restrictions derived from a theoretical model the main finding is that u s country specific shocks are the most important in explaining u s and foreign output fluctuations except in the short run

productivity shocks in a sectoral real business cycle model for west germany abstract if aggregate output is driven by integrated productivity shocks then sectoral output series should display few if any cointegrating relationships similarly serial correlation cofeature should be a rare occurrence these conjectures are confirmed in an analysis with west german data however productivity shocks identified and tested in an extended version of the long and plosser real business cycle model do not contain enough unit roots to account for those found in the output series hence productivity shocks can at best provide a partial explanation for aggregate output fluctuations

the effect of household structure on women s economic activity and fertility evidence from recent mothers in urban mexico this study examines the effect of the presence of a mother substitute in the household on urban womens participation in the labor force and fertility in mexico in 1982 data were obtained from the 1982 mexican national demographic survey on reproductive history educational status employment status and household structure for a subsample of 2746 urban women who were married 90 or in a consensual union 10 and had had a child within the prior 5 years theoretically women with higher value of market time lower household income and lower value of nonmarket time will more likely be working women women had 3 4 surviving children 83 used contraceptives and 15 were employed analysis involved use of reduced form equations to model the joint determination of labor force participation and fertility justification of this method is given husbands education was a proxy for income level cost of child rearing is figured as the mothers number of children 5 years and household structure mother substitute was an additional unemployed female aged 13 years an imputed wage for all women in the sample is used to measure the value of time in the labor force probit regression estimation methods revealed that mothers were more likely to be working when their wage offers were higher those with a caretaker in the household and with a less well educated husband are also more likely to work those more likely to be employed also had few children 6 12 years and more children 13 years in the fully reduced form of the equation determinants of the wage offer education age region were substituted for the instrumental variable the results were consistent an additional woman in the household was significantly positively related to the likelihood of women working in the reduced form fertility equation women who were younger better educated with more children and with better educated partners were less likely to have more than 1 child born within the last 5 years the implication from the negative coefficient of the household structure variable is that women with additional caretakers are less likely to have more than 1 young child the causes are explained mother substitutes increase the likelihood of working women and do not increase the likelihood of having more children particularly among nonemployed mothers which differs from us results future research should refine the measure of mother substitute and account for her presence in the household

the distributional impacts of indonesia s financial crisis on household welfare a rapid response methodology analyzing the distributional impacts of economic crises is an ever more pressing need if policymakers are to intervene to help those most adversely affected they need to identify those who have been hurt most and estimate the magnitude of the harm they have suffered they must also respond in a timely manner this article develops a simple methodology for measuring these effects and applies it to analyze the impact of the indonesian economic crisis on household welfare using only pre crisis household information it estimates the compensating variation for indonesian households following the 1997 asian currency crisis and then explores the results with flexible nonparametric methods it finds that virtually every household was severely affected although the urban poor fared the worst the ability of poor rural households to produce food mitigated the worst consequences of the high inflation the distributional consequences are the same whether or not households are permitted to substitute toward relatively cheaper goods households with young children may have suffered disproportionately large adverse effects

the effect of child care costs on married women s labor force participation the effect of child care costs on the probability that married women with children will participate in the labor market is examined child care costs are estimated using a generalized tobit specification corrected for selection estimates of a structural probit model of labor force participation provide evidence to support the prediction that increased child care costs lower the probability of participation it is also shown that the lower rate of labor force participation among mothers of preschoolers is entirely the result of the higher child care costs faced by these women and endogeneity of the number of young children in the participation equation copyright 1992 by mit press

unconditional elasticities in two stage demand systems an approximate solution two stage budgeting postulates that the consumer s utility maximization decision can be decomposed into two steps in the first stage total expenditure is allocated over broad groups of goods in the second stage group expenditures are allocated over elementary commodities in this article we assume that the current weighted true cost of living price indices defined for each broad group of elementary commodities vary only very slightly with sub utility levels hence it is possible to approximate the first stage of a two stage budgeting structure by a maximization problem involving a single price index and a single quantity index for each of the broad groups relationships between conditional and unconditional expenditure and price elasticities are derived within this context

cereal price shocks and volatility in sub saharan africa what really matters for farmers welfare the lack of information as well as some misperceptions about the distinction between the welfare consequences of higher versus more volatile cereal prices has limited the effectiveness of policy interventions during the recent food crises in many developing countries this article proposes an integrated empirical strategy to investigate and compare the different effects of these two phenomena and tests it using nationally representative household survey data from four sub saharan countries results show that the negative impacts of a cereal price increase substantially outweigh the effects of price volatility on household welfare across the entire income distribution the amplitude and the distribution of those effects depend heavily on specific factors such as the weight of food consumption over total expenditure the budget share devoted to cereals the substitution effect among food groups and the relative number of net sellers versus net buyers accessing the market we also show that volatility mainly harms the poorest quintile of the population

cnild labors child schooling and their interaction with adult labor using data from peru and pakistan this article tests two hypotheses there is a positive association between hours of child labor and poverty and there is a negative association between child schooling and poverty both of these hypotheses are confirmed by the pakistani data but not by the peruvian data the reduction in poverty rates due to income from children s labor is greater in pakistan than in peru the nature of interaction between adult and child labor markets varies with the gender of the child and the adult in peru rising men s wages significantly reduce the labor hours of girls whereas in pakistan there is a strong complementarity between women s and girls labor markets both data sets agree on the positive role that increasing adult education can play in improving child welfare

household equivalence scales and welfare comparisons abstract the ratio of cost functions of different households facing the same prices and attaining the same utility level is a true cost of demographic characteristics index this index is independent of a base level of income or utility ib if and only if it equals a ratio of household equivalence scales that are themselves ib applied cost index and equivalence scales specifications are usually ib this paper describes the general restrictions on cost functions and social welfare functions required for ib scales and for their use in welfare analysis

output dynamics of the g7 countries stochastic trends and cyclical movements using a time series framework the paper studies the interactions of the annual real per capita gdp data of the g7 countries evidence is found of six common nonstationary processes behind the international output dynamics in addition there is evidence for the existence of a common business cycle among these countries the trend and cycle components of each output series are obtained with a procedure that accounts for the presence of both the common nonstationary and cyclical factors it is found that the relative variability and the correlation of the trend and cycle components are not similar across the g7 countries

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

analysis of food demand in vietnam and short term impacts of market shocks on quantity and calorie consumption a complete demand system for vietnam was estimated using household survey data results showed that demand for rice with respect to prices and expenditure is relatively inelastic compared to other foods demand for food in general tends to be less elastic at higher levels of income and for urban households in the short term a market shock such as a 10 decrease in income or a 30 increase in rice prices forces households to spend a larger portion of their expenditure on rice at the expense of other foods low income households face a higher risk of undernourishment as their daily calorie intake is more negatively affected by the shocks than high income households the results suggest the importance of policies that provide necessary safety net programs for the poor

women s employment and child care choices in urban china during the economic transition abstractchina s transition from a centrally planned to a market economy has substantially eroded governmental support for child care raising the concern about how the change of child care provision may affect women s labor market participation this article examines the impact of child care availability and affordability on the employment and child care choices of urban chinese women with preschool children during the transition the analysis shows that the presence of day care in the community is positively associated with a mother s labor force participation and labor hour supply and that the rising costs of hired caregivers reduce the mother s labor hour supply the analysis also finds that both the costs of hired caregivers and family income have important effects on the use of out of home care services simulations indicate that the decline in day care presence would account for 46 of the decrease in mothers labor force participation during the public sector restructuring between 1997 and 2000

household equivalence scales theory versus policy researchers agree that household equivalence scales are intended to measure the variation in income needed to bring households of different composition to the same welfare level researchers do not agree however about how the term household welfare is to be defined this article traces the historical and philosophical development of three distinct definitions when the conceptual bases of several popular methods for the estimation of equivalence scales are explored it becomes clear that advances in theoretical rigor have not always worked to bring the literature closer to answering questions of policy concern

are smallholder farmers better or worse off from an increase in the international price of cereals citation nakelse t dalton t j hendricks n p hodjo m 2018 are smallholder farmers better or worse off from an increase in the international price of cereals food policy 79 213 223 https doi org 10 1016 j foodpol 2018 07 006

regional trade government policy and food security recent evidence from zambia given heavy dependence on rainfed maize production countries in east and southern africa must routinely cope with pronounced production and consumption volatility in their primary food staple typical policy responses include increased food aid flows government commercial imports and stock releases and tight controls on private sector trade this paper examines recent evidence from zambia using a simple economic model to assess the likely impact of maize production shocks on the domestic maize price and on staple food consumption under alternative policy regimes in addition to an array of public policy instruments the analysis evaluates the impact of two key private sector responses in moderating food consumption volatility private cross border maize trade and consumer substitution of an alternate food staple cassava for maize the analysis suggests that given a favorable policy environment private imports and increased cassava consumption together could fill roughly two thirds of the maize consumption shortfall facing vulnerable households during drought years

estimating food demand in paraguay from household survey data we estimate a food demand system in paraguay based on the 1997 national household survey considering 12 food categories to obtain demand elasticity estimates from household survey data accounting for quality effects measurement errors and censored observations price indexes are obtained from ordinary least squares predictions of changes in unitary values caused by spatial and temporal variations and the two step estimation procedure shonkwiler and yen 1999 is applied our approach yields reasonable estimates of combined quantity and quality responses with respect to price results suggest distinct consumption behavior in urban and rural areas particularly for chicken eggs dairy and fats and oils which are likely because of differences in the food distribution system and availability of nonmarket food sources

rice prices and income distribution in thailand a non parametric analysis rice is a staple crop in thailand significantly entering both household production and consumption this paper examines the effect of rice prices on the distribution of real income across households taking into account household characteristics and geographical location the data set is a large scale survey of 11 893 households simple nonparametric techniques for regression and density estimation are used these methods depend on few assumptions and generate flexible graphical results that are directly informative about the problem at hand the main results are that higher rice prices should benefit all rural households but the largest benefits accrue to rural households in the middle of the income distribution copyright 1989 by royal economic society

aggregate output dynamics in the twentieth century abstract this study shows that annual output data of the g7 countries in the twentieth century are better characterized as transitory deviations from a shifting growth trend than as integrated processes furthermore i find no two countries share common business cycles

rising food prices and undernourishment a cross country inquiry households welfare in developing countries has been hit by dramatic food prices increases which occurred between 2005 and 2008 in this paper we adopt a partial equilibrium approach to analyze the short time effects of a staple food price increase on nutritional attainments as a measure of welfare the analysis consists of first approximating complete food demand systems and then performing household level micro simulations instead of focusing on a single country profile we provide a more complete snapshot by comparing the evidence through a cross country assessment made possible by the use of nationally representative household surveys comparability is assured by the adoption of the same methodological choices in the treatment of the micro data we find that food price spikes not only reduce the mean consumption of dietary energy but also worsen the distribution of food calories further deteriorating the nutritional status of populations we also discovered that access to agricultural land plays a significant role in ensuring adequate nutritional attainments in rural areas and surprisingly even in urban areas

child labor child schooling and their interaction with adult labor empirical evidence for peru and pakistan using data from peru and pakistan this article tests two hypotheses there is a positive association between hours of child labor and poverty and there is a negative association between child schooling and poverty both of these hypotheses are confirmed by the pakistani data but not by the peruvian data the reduction in poverty rates due to income from children s labor is greater in pakistan than in peru the nature of interaction between adult and child labor markets varies with the gender of the child and the adult in peru rising men s wages significantly reduce the labor hours of girls whereas in pakistan there is a strong complementarity between women s and girls labor markets both data sets agree on the positive role that increasing adult education can play in improving child welfare

further investigation of the uncertain trend in us gdp the presence of deterministic or stochastic trend in us gdp has been a continuing debate in the literature of macroeconomics ben david and papell 1995 found evidence in favour of trend stationarity using the secular sample of maddison 1991 more recently murray and nelson 2000 correctly criticized this finding arguing that the maddision data are plagued with additive outliers ao which bias inference towards stationarity hence they propose to set the secular sample aside and conduct inference using a more homogeneous but shorter time span post wwii sample in this article we re visit the maddison data by employing a test that is robust against ao s our results suggest the us gdp can be modelled as trend stationary process

the impact of household structure on female autonomy in developing countries abstractjoint household structures in which several generations co reside in a single house are common across developing countries such households may confer benefits on all the family members through household public goods with the patriarch exercising greater control over resources therefore the household structure may affect the bargaining power of its members this paper estimates the effect of joint versus nuclear household structure in india on the autonomy of women and their labour force participation and the heterogeneity in the effects by income caste and region i use an instrumental variable approach and find that women living in nuclear households have greater decision making power

cost of characteristics indices and household equivalence scales abstract the ratio of cost functions of demographically different households is a true cost of demographic characteristics index this index is independent of a base level of income or utility ib if and only if it equals a ratio of household equivalence scales that are themselves ib this paper analyzes the restrictions on cost functions and commodity specific equivalence scales required for the existence of ib scales and indices since scales can be price dependent the restrictions on behavior are far less severe than for ordinary engel style household scales connections between ib scales and other techniques for incorporating demographic effects into demand systems are described

trade interdependence and the international business cycle a stochastic general equilibrium model of the world economy is developed to analyze the contribution of trade interdependence to international business cycles we test some of the implications of the model using data from ten major industrial countries and a variety of detrending techniques to calculate the cyclical component of output we find that the significance of trade in the transmission of economic disturbances across countries is not robust to the choice of the detrending method in general the role of trade interdependence is moderate and seem to have been stronger in the period before 1973

measurement of consumer gains from market stabilization for most cases of practical significance in which partial equilibrium analysis is appropriate there is little difference between exact measures of consumer gains from market stabilization and approximations such as expected change in marshallian or hicksian consumer surplus careful specification of the nature of stabilization is more crucial than the choice of welfare measure it is important to represent correctly the demand curvature and supply response and to determine whether general equilibrium responses can be ignored in any event an improved analytical approximation and a simple numerical method for calculating the exact measures make it unnecessary to rely on suspect measures

implications of higher global food prices for poverty in low income countries in many poor countries the recent increases in prices of staple foods raise the real incomes of those selling food many of whom are relatively poor while hurting net food consumers many of whom are also relatively poor the impacts on poverty will certainly be very diverse but the average impact on poverty depends upon the balance between these two effects and can only be determined by looking at real world data results using household data for ten observations on nine low income countries show that the short run impacts of higher staple food prices on poverty differ considerably by commodity and by country but that poverty increases are much more frequent and larger than poverty reductions the recent large increases in food prices appear likely to raise overall poverty in low income countries substantially

a comment on the welfare impacts of commodity price volatility evidence from rural ethiopia this comment discusses the robustness of the policy implications of bellemare barrett and just s paper the welfare impacts of commodity price volatility evidence from rural ethiopia 2013 bellemare barrett and just present a theoretical and empirical approach to the estimation of willingness to pay for food price stabilization that accounts for the covolatility of prices making a significant contribution to the literature however in the course of applying their model to data from rural ethiopia the authors make an empirical assumption in the treatment of zero valued income households that produces a distortion in the distribution of household budget shares this comment identifies the consequences of this assumption for the estimated relationship of poor and wealthy households willingness to pay for food commodity price stabilization and shows the results one would obtain under a different distribution preserving treatment of zero valued income the key finding is that the distributional benefit incidence of food price stabilization found in bellemare barrett and just 2013 is reversed when the budget share of marketable surplus is calculated over observed as opposed to mean household income where available

family structure and female labour supply in mexico city this paper investigates labour supply of the wives of the heads of households in mexico city with a focus on the impact of family structure a static neoclassical structural model is used we assume that each woman chooses her labour supply and corresponding income so that her utility is maximized conditional upon her husband s labour supply and earnings we use a direct translog specification and include family composition variables as taste shifters also taken into account are fixed costs of working nonlinear taxes unobserved preference variation prediction errors in wages of nonworkers and potential endogeneity of wages the models are estimated by smooth simulated maximum likelihood using data from mexico s urban employment survey drawn in 1992 we find income elasticities of labour supply of about 0 35 and wage elasticities of about 0 5 the latter is substantially overestimated if wage rate endogeneity is not taken into account the results are robust with respect to other specification choices we find that the impact of family structure variables on participation is different from that on hours worked so that their total effect is ambiguous

international evidence on the persistence of economic fluctuations abstract this paper presents new evidence on the persistence of fluctuations in real gnp we estimate two measures of persistence nonparametrically using post war quarterly data from canada france germany italy japan the united kingdom and the united states we compare these estimates with monte carlo results from various ar 2 processes for six out of seven countries the point estimates indicate that a 1 shock to output should change the long run unvariate forecast of output by well over 1 low order arma models yield similar conclusions finally we examine the persistence in relative outputs of different countries

sources and propagation of international output cycles common shocks or transmission abstract this paper studies the generation and transmission of international cycles in a multi country model with production and consumption interdependencies two sources of disturbance are considered and three channels of propagation are compared technology disturbances which are mildly correlated across countries are more successful than government expenditure disturbances in reproducing actual data the presence of a common component to the shocks and of production interdependencies appear to be crucial in quantitatively matching the properties of the data

budget share demographic translation and the aggregate almost ideal demand system abstract this paper introduces budget share demographic translation in the almost ideal demand system aids and explores its implications for aggregation over consuming units it os shown that under certain conditions the joint distribution of expenditure and demographic characteristics plays an explicit role in the aggregate aids empirical evidence based on italian data is provided and the implied expenditure pattern for a number of combinations of expenditures and household characteristics derived from the estimated aggregate aids the empirical results suggest that the usual rejection of the homogeneity restriction in aggregate demand systems might have to do with the improper treatment of the aggregation issue

quadratic engel curves and consumer demand this paper presents a model of consumer demand that is consistent with the observed expenditure patterns of individual consumers in a long time series of expenditure surveys and is also able to provide a detailed welfare analysis of shifts in relative prices a nonparametric analysis of consumer expenditure patterns suggests that engel curves require quadratic terms in the logarithm of expenditure while popular models of demand such as the translog or the almost ideal demand systems do allow flexible price responses within a theoretically coherent structure they have expenditure share engel curves that are linear in the logarithm of total expenditure we derive the complete class of integrable quadratic logarithmic expenditure share systems a specification from this class is estimated on a large pooled data set of u k households models that fail to account for engel curvature are found ro generate important distortions in the patterns of welfare losses associated with a tax increase

household childcare choices and women s work behavior in russia the author models mothers participation in the labor force their working hours and household demand for childcare in russia the model estimates the effects of the price of childcare mothers wages and household income on household behavior and well being the theoretical model yields several predictions to test these reduced form equations of the discrete and continuous household choices are estimated jointly using the method of semi parametric full information maximum likelihood this method controls for the correlation of error terms across outcomes and the correlation of error terms that can result when panel data are used the results of this analysis indicate that the extent to which mothers participate in the labor force and for how many hours depends on the costs of childcare and on what level of hourly wage is available to them and to other members of the household the author s simulations show that family allowances intended to reduce poverty do not significantly affect the household choice of childcare arrangements replacing family allowances with childcare subsidies might have a strong positive effect on women s participation in the labor force and thus could be effective in reducing poverty