can fao s measure of chronic undernourishment be strengthened abstract in its sixth world food survey released at the 1996 world food summit the food and agriculture organization of the united nations fao reported that 841 million people in developing countries are chronically undernourished this number and its country and regional level disaggregations have proved tremendously useful to countless development aid agencies and researchers in the context of a recent wave of new nationally representative household food consumption and expenditure surveys this paper examines the estimation methodology underlying the food insecurity measure which relies on national aggregate measures of food availability and distribution the paper finds that the measure largely reflects national food availabilities and does not adequately capture people s ability to gain access to food the ultimate key to food security the implications for the indicator s use by policy makers in geographical targeting and tracking changes in food insecurity over time are drawn out the paper concludes by arguing that the time has come to review the potential for employing the new household survey data along with new methods to strengthen the empirical foundations of fao s measure

consistent and robust delimitation of price zones under uncertainty with an application to central western europe abstract new and alternative delimitations of price zones for central western europe cwe might constitute a mid term solution to cope with the increasing congestion in the electricity transmission grids the significantly growing infeed from renewable energy sources puts more and more pressure on the grid and emphasizes the need for improved congestion management thus a new delimitation of price zones is frequently considered in current discussions and research the present paper applies a novel hierarchical cluster algorithm that clusters locational marginal prices and weights nodes depending on their demand and supply situation to identify possible new price zone configurations pzcs the algorithm is applied in a scenario analysis of six scenarios reflecting main drivers that influence the future development of european electricity markets in line with the trilemma of energy policy targets robustness of the new configuration is an important criterion for price zone configurations according to the european guideline on capacity allocation and congestion management cacm therefore a robust price zone configuration is computed taking into account all the six individual scenarios results show that shape size and price variations of price zones on the one hand strongly depend on the individual scenario on the other hand the identified robust configuration is shown to outperform other configurations particularly also the current price zone configuration in cwe

a food demand system based on demand for characteristics if there is curvature in the slutsky matrix what do the curves look like and why abstract a food demand system is proposed based on demand for energy variety and tastes of foods by specifying utility as an explicit function of these characteristics the entire matrix of demand elasticities can be derived for n foods and one non food from prior specification of just four elasticities while avoiding any assumption of separability between foods this framework can explain why poorest groups often are most price responsive but also can account for highest price responsiveness by middle income groups the system is applied to published food consumption data for urban and rural populations in pakistan elasticities are compared with those obtained in a published pakistan study applying an almost ideal demand system aids

targeting the poor using roc curves abstract this paper compares the performance of targeting indicators to identify the poor if the roc curve of one indicator lies above that of another the first indicator dominates the second for all social welfare functions based on the two types of errors involved in targeting the method is applied to bangladesh fifteen indicators are used including location land ownership education occupation demographics age family structure and housing the analysis is applied at the national urban and rural levels with two poverty lines education dominates land ownership in urban areas the ranking is reversed in most cases in rural areas

renewable energy integration in zonal markets in this paper we investigate the impact of zonal network management in the operation of power systems with significant levels of renewable energy integration our study is inspired by the current state of the european energy market and we focus on a case study of the central western european cwe system first we present a hierarchy of models that account for unit commitment the separation of energy and reserves and the simplified representation of transmission constraints in a zonal market in order to examine the impact of these factors on efficiency in a regime of large scale renewable energy integration second we simulate operations of the cwe system under the zonal market design using a detailed instance that consists of 656 thermal generators 679 nodes and 1073 lines with multiarea renewable energy production and 15 minute time resolution zonal market operations are compared against deterministic and stochastic unit commitment using high performance computing in order to tackle the scale of the resulting models we find that market design can have an influence on cost efficiency which far exceeds the benefits of stochastic unit commitment relative to deterministic unit commitment we conduct a detailed analysis of the numerical results in order to explain the relative performance of the different models

gender domestic labor time and wage inequality this paper explores the relationship between domestic labor and wage labor by estimating the relative influence of hours spent in domestic labor e g housework and child care on women s and men s wages it is hypothesized that involvement in domestic activities negatively affects wages and is likely to be an important factor in explaining women s lower wages relative to men findings from ols regression analyses of white currently employed currently married women and men indicate that domestic labor time significantly decreases both sexes wages in order to assess whether this relationship differs by class the sex specific earnings equations also are estimated within the working class and the non working class the negative effect of domestic labor time on both sexes income persists in the within class analyses working class men are more vulnerable to the detrimental influence of domestic production unexpectedly housework and child care time decreases non workingclass women s wages more so than working class women s wages it is noted that these findings should be interpreted with caution due to the cross sectional nature of the data which precludes an unequivocal assessment of potential nonrecursivity in the linkages among key variables in the model overall the findings imply that a more equitable distribution of work in the home is necessary before labor market inequalities between the sexes can be ameliorated

two price zones for the german electricity market market implications and distributional effects abstract we discuss the implications of two price zones i e one northern and one southern bidding area on the german electricity market in the northern zone continuous increases in capacity with low variable costs cause large regional supply surpluses in the market dispatch while in the southern zone conventional capacity decreases as the spatial imbalance of supply and load is increasing the current single bidding area more often results in technically infeasible market results requiring curative congestion management measures there is an ongoing discussion about the potential effects of introducing bidding zones in germany this paper applies an electricity sector model with network representation to analyze the system implications and the distributional effects of two bidding zones in the german electricity system in 2012 and 2015 results show a modest decrease in cross zonal re dispatch levels particularly in 2015 however overall network congestion and re dispatch levels increase in 2015 and also remain on a high level for two bidding zones results are very sensitive to more than two bidding zones and additional line investments illustrating the challenge to define stable price zones in a dynamic setting with two bidding areas prices in the model results increase in the southern zone and decrease in the northern zone the average price deviation grows from 0 4eur mwh in 2012 to 1 7eur mwh in 2015 with absolute values being significantly higher in hours when price differences occur stakeholders within zones are exposed to the price deviations to a different extent distributional effects are surprisingly small compared to the wholesale price or different network charges

the impact of changes in common property resource management on intrahousehold allocation abstract in developing countries common property resources cprs can be an important source of income for certain individuals within households this paper demonstrates that if changes in the management of cprs impose fixed costs on them or cause a decline in the prices of goods produced from it the intrahousehold allocation of resources may alter in a manner detrimental to those individuals the paper also shows that the assumption of a unitary household model causes the detrimental effects of certain cpr policy interventions to be overlooked although the model is narrowly conceived the results can be generalised to examples where households have members who specialise in different economic activities outside the home

poverty and household size the widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy the scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view we find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0 6 this turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales by contrast some measures of child nutritional status indicate an elasticity of unity consideration of the weight attached to child versus adult welfare may help resolve the non robustness of demographic profiles of poverty excerpt

gender differentials in farm productivity implications for household efficiency and agricultural policy abstract within many african households agricultural production is simultaneously carried out on many plots controlled by different members of the household detailed plot level agronomic data from burkina faso provides striking evidence of substantial inefficiencies in the allocation of factors of production across the plots controlled by different members of the household production function estimates imply that the value of household output could be increased by 10 15 by reallocating currently used factors of production across plots this finding contradicts standard models of agricultural households a richer model of behaviour which recognizes that the individuals who comprise a household compete as well as co operate has important implications for the structure of agricultural production and for the design of agricultural policy

are urban poverty and undernutrition growing some newly assembled evidence abstract the population of the developing world is becoming more urban are poverty and undernutrition beginning to relocate to urban areas as well we use survey data on poverty from eight countries and on child undernutrition from 14 countries to address this question using data from the past 15 20 years we find that in a majority of countries the absolute number of poor and undernourished individuals living in urban areas has increased as has the share of overall poverty and undernourishment coming from urban areas given these trends and the current stock of knowledge as to the levels determinants and solutions to urban poverty and undernutrition we argue for more research on these issues

a cross national comparison of the gender gap in income this article examines national labor market samples from two dualist countries the united states and canada and two corporatist countries norway and sweden labor market location is less powerful in predicting income in norway and sweden where they have more inclusive employment policies in sweden though the labor market variables are more important in explaining the income gap family effects marital status and number of children are weak everywhere but especially in scandinavia nevertheless because it is encouraged by policies designed to integrate employment and family part time paid work has a major effect on the gender gap in income in norway and sweden women however pay more of a penalty than men for part time employment in north america

measuring food insecurity the frequency and severity of coping strategies abstract defining and interpreting food security and measuring it in reliable valid and cost effective ways have proven to be stubborn problems facing researchers and programs intended to monitor food security risks this paper briefly reviews the conceptual and methodological literature on food insecurity measurment describes a particular method for distinguishing and measuring short term food insecurity at the household level and discusses ways of generalizing the method the method developed enumerates the frequency and severity of strategies relied on by urban households when faced with a short term insufficiency of food this method goes beyond more commonly used measures of caloric consumption to incorporate vulnerability elements of food insecurity as well as the deliberate actions of household decision makers when faced with food insufficiency

the impact of conditional cash transfers on marriage and divorce abstracta growing number of less developed countries have introduced conditional cash transfer programs in which funds are targeted to women economic models of the family suggest that these transfer programs may lead to marital turnover among program beneficiaries data from the experimental evaluation of the progresa program in mexico is used to provide new evidence on the short run impacts of targeted transfers on couples union dissolution and individuals new union formation decisions we find that although the overall share of women in union does not change as a result of the program marital turnover increases intact families eligible for the transfers experienced a modest 0 32 percentage points increase in separation rates with most of the effect concentrated among young and relatively educated women households in contrast young single women with low educational attainment levels experienced a substantial increase in new union formation rates the marital transition patterns are consistent

renewable electric energy integration quantifying the value of design of markets for international transmission capacity abstract integrating large quantities of variable renewable electricity generation remains a political and operational challenge one of the main obstacles in europe to installing at least 200 gws of power from variable renewable sources is how to deal with the insufficient network capacity and the congestion that will result from new flow patterns we model the current methodology for controlling congestion at international borders and compare its results under varying penetrations of wind power with models that simulate an integrated european network using nodal localised marginal pricing the nodal pricing simulations illustrate that congestion and price patterns vary considerably between wind scenarios and within countries and that a nodal price regime could make better use of existing network capacity introducing substantial operational cost savings and reducing marginal power prices in the majority of european countries

the impact of intraday markets on the market value of flexibility decomposing effects on profile and the imbalance costs abstract an increasing share of variable renewable energy sources vres basically affects the electricity price formation in two ways 1 the so called merit order effect tends to lower the base price level and challenges conventional plants to remain profitable 2 due to the variable nature of renewable energy infeed the short term demand for flexibility increases and changes the volatility of electricity prices the more variable prices offer opportunities for controllable electricity producers ceps who provide up and down ramping flexibility to increase their revenues in contrast the vres with high degrees of simultaneity tend to pay for this flexibility in the electricity spot market to reduce their imbalance exposure the intraday market idm for electricity has gained importance for the market value of different technologies lately and continues to expand due to the increasing efforts to balance within day deviation from day ahead schedules this article presents a combination and extension of two existing models to capture the peculiarities of the intraday price formation and to analyze the impact of the idm on the market value of vres and ceps doing so the paper suggests an adjustment of the classical market value factor metric and to go beyond classical day ahead market dam information the article shows that market value factors mvfs can be stabilized if the idm delivers market based price signals for the costs of flexibility that are sufficient to activate flexibilities prior to the usually more expensive imbalance mechanism ibm yet the mvfs from single vre technologies will worsen if their market share is high enough to outweigh forecast errors from other technologies and if they become a permanent price maker in the idm and the ibm

tacking stock of the eu power target model and steering its future course abstract the european union took more than 20 years to start defining a common market design for its internal electricity market a european power target model and a further 10 years to fully implement it meanwhile the reference generation set of that model has shifted from ccgt burning gas to res plants transforming intermittent natural resources could the existing eu target model continue to work well for the short term operation and long term investment if not can the existing eu institutions easily produce an res resilient new power target model

institutional challenges caused by the integration of renewable energy sources in the european electricity sector the integration of large amounts of variable renewable energy poses fundamental challenges to the operation and governance of the energy system in this article we address the main institutional challenges that are caused by the integration of variable renewable energy sources like solar and wind energy in the european power system we first address how the variable and unpredictable nature of wind and solar energy increases the demand for flexible resources and we discuss potential sources of flexibility next we elaborate on how the need for more flexibility challenges the prevailing market design of todays liberalized power systems furthermore we discuss the key areas where there is a need for a more integrated approach to research and policy making the need for a more integrated approach is motivated by exposing a number of critical interdependencies between technical and institutional sub systems

targeting the poor in mexico an evaluation of the selection of households into progresa abstract in this paper we conduct an evaluation of the targeting method used by health education and nutrition program progresa of mexico to identify beneficiary households we address two key questions a how well does progresa s targeting perform and b how does the program perform in terms of its impact on poverty alleviation relative to other feasible methods and transfer schemes the first question is accomplished by comparing progresa s method to an alternative selection method based on household consumption which is our preferred measure of welfare we employ the concepts of undercoverage and leakage and find that progresa selection method is more effective in identifying the extremely poor localities or households but less so when it comes to distinguishing among localities or households in the middle of the scale to address the second question we compare the potential impact of progresa on poverty alleviation against uniform transfers that involve no targeting at all targeting based on consumption and geographic targeting i e targeting at the locality level rather than at the household level we find that progresa s method of targeting households outperforms uniform coverage and targeting at the locality level in terms of reducing the poverty gap and severity of poverty indices even after taking into account the economic costs of targeting but the closeness of progresa s performance to what could be achieved by geographic targeting alone raises some serious questions about the costs and benefits associated with the practice of household targeting within poor localities

economic segmentation worker power and income inequality how economic segmentation generates income inequality constitutes a central question for theories of economic and social organization and of socioeconomic achievement previous research emphasizes two sources of the structural variation in income 1 employers with large amounts of resources for a variety of reasons may find it in their interests to pay workers higher wages and 2 some workers are able to acquire power against their employers as well as against other workers and can therefore extract higher earnings in this paper we investigate several issues involved in the links among economic segmentation worker power and income inequality we argue that the structure of economic segmentation is multidimensional and reflects such distinct concepts as concentration economic scale state intervention in the market capital intensity and organization size worker power also is derived from diverse sources such as union membership occupational skill and licensing class position and tenure wi

market splitting in germany new evidence from a three stage numerical model of europe abstract with the sharp increase in redispatch measures seen during recent years the importance of an efficient congestion management has increased particularly in germany as the current market design with a single bidding area ignores the physical constraints of the transmission grid there is an ongoing discussion about introducing price zones against this background we develop a three stage approach to model redispatch and market splitting for germany while considering interactions with interconnected countries we identify an increasing spatial imbalance between generation and load and delays in grid extension as being the main drivers for the increase of modeled redispatch volumes from 2012 to 2020 we show that market splitting reduces imminent congestion although results are sensitive to the zonal delimitation and corresponding net transfer capacities the overall welfare effect is negligible but price differences between the bidding areas investigated i e one northern and southern price zone result in considerable distributional effects while consumers in northern germany would benefit producer rents and in particular the value of wind energy would decrease the opposite is true for southern germany we conclude that market splitting constitutes a solution to reduce redispatch measures as long as transmission grid expansion is further delayed

early childhood nutrition and academic achievement a longitudinal analysis abstract many policymakers propose early childhood nutrition programs as a way to increase students academic achievement this paper investigates the nutrition learning nexus using a unique longitudinal data set that follows a large sample of filipino children from birth until the end of their primary education we find that better nourished children perform significantly better in school partly because they enter school earlier and thus have more time to learn but mostly because of greater learning productivity per year of schooling our cost benefit analysis suggests that a dollar invested in an early childhood nutrition program in a developing country could potentially return at least three dollars worth of gains in academic achievement and perhaps much more

does household labour impact market wages this study investigates the hypothesis that women s greater home responsibilities contribute directly to their lower wages because household labour time reduces their market effort ols regressions show a significant negative effect of household labour hours on market wages for white married women but not for other groups of women single black or men regressions correcting for endogeneity of household hours in the wage equation or heterogeneity among women indicate there is no significant effect of household labour hours on wages for any demographic group these results suggest that the evidence in support of the hypothesis is not compelling

the renewable energy policy paradox abstract one major avenue for policymakers to meet climate targets is by decarbonizing the power sector one component of which is raising the share of renewable energy sources renewables in electricity generation however promoting renewables in liberalized power markets creates a paradox in that successful penetration of renewables could fall victim to its own success with the current market architecture future deployment of renewable energy will necessarily be more costly and less scalable moreover transition towards a full 100 renewable electricity sector is unattainable paradoxically in order for renewable technologies to continue growing their market share they need to co exist with fossil fuel technologies ignoring these findings can slow adoption and increase the costs of deploying new renewable technologies this paper spots the incompatibility between electricity liberalization and renewable policy regardless of the country location or renewable technologies the paradox holds as long as market clear prices with short term marginal costs and renewable technology s marginal cost is close to zero and not dispatchable

buffering volatility a study on the limits of germany s energy revolution squaring hourly demand and wind solar production data for germany and a number of neighbouring countries with the results of the eu s estorage project this paper studies the limits of germany s energy revolution in view of the volatility of wind and solar power in addition to pumped storage it considers double structure buffering demand management norwegian hydro dam buffering and international diversification via grid expansion if germany operated in autarchy and tried to handle the volatility of wind solar production without using stores while replacing all nuclear and fossil fuel in power production on average 61 and at the margin 94 of wind solar production would have to be wasted given the current level of other renewables to avoid any waste the wind solar market share in an autarchic solution must not be expanded to more than 30 by using norway s hydro plants the share could be expanded to 36 if norway were to build all the pumped storage plants the estorage study deems feasible germany s wind solar market share could be expanded by another 24 percentage points to about 60 which corresponds to 48 of the combined german and norwegian markets additionally expanding the market to switzerland austria and denmark and building the maximal number of pumped stores would increase the combined wind solar market share for all five countries to nearly 50 c 2017 the author s published by elsevier b v

endogenous price zones and investment incentives in electricity markets an application of multilevel optimization with graph partitioning in the course of the energy transition load and supply centers are growing apart in electricity markets worldwide rendering regional price signals even more important to provide adequate locational investment incentives this paper focuses on electricity markets that operate under a zonal pricing market design for a fixed number of zones we endogenously derive the optimal configuration of price zones and available transfer capacities on a network in order to optimally govern investment and production decisions in the long run in a multilevel mixed integer nonlinear model that contains a graph partitioning problem on the first level we determine welfare maximizing price zones and available transfer capacities for a given electricity market and analyze their impact on market outcomes using a generalized benders decomposition approach developed in grimm et al 2019 and a problem tailored scenario clustering for reducing the input data size we are able to solve the model to global optimality even for large instances we apply the approach to the german electricity market as an example to examine the impact of optimal zoning on key performance indicators such as welfare generation mix and locations or electricity prices it turns out that even for a small number of price zones an optimal configuration of zones induces a welfare level that almost approaches the first best

labor supply and targeting in poverty alleviation programs the introduction of variable labor supply raises some fundamental issues in analyzing the targeting of poverty alleviation programs in developing countries it forces a reconsideration of the standard objective function which is based on income or expenditure and so makes no allowance for the effort made in earning that income the authors show that alternative views on the appropriate valuation of effort have very different implications for commodity based targeting rules they also establish a benchmark for marginal effective tax rates inclusive of benefit withdrawal in income tested schemes and show that indicator targeting rules may also have to be modified significantly when labor supply responses are recognized

whose education matters in the determination of household income evidence from a developing country the plan of this article is as follows section ii discusses the data used and presents a few descriptive statistics on headship in ghana and labor activities of ghanaian households section iii presents three simple paradigms about whose education matters in regression models of household income this section also describes the composition of household income and proposes the appropriate explanatory variables for estimation section iv describes the estimation methodology consistent estimates for the farm and off farm income functions are obtained by using j l powells censored least absolute deviations estimators standard errors are obtained by using a bootstrap methodology that mimics the two stage sample design section v contains a summary of the estimation results most notably the results suggest that the allocative effect is the largest effect for total income while the productivity effect appears to dominate when considering farming and nonfarming activities separately all specifications of household income and its components reject the use of the minimum level of household schooling as well as the schooling level of the head of the household section vi provides some concluding comments excerpt

does housework lower wages evidence for britain this paper uses the british household panel survey to present the first estimates of the housework wage relationship in britain controlling for permanent unobserved heterogeneity we find that housework has a negative impact on the wages of men and women both married and single who work full time among women working part time only single women suffer a housework penalty the housework penalty is uniform across occupations within full time jobs but some part time jobs appear to be more compatible with housework than others we find tentative evidence that the housework penalty is larger when there are children present

employment schedules among dual earner spouses and the division of household labor by gender i extend the research on how employment schedules affect family life and which factors determine a husband s share in household labor i present a new specification of the concept of available time among dual earner couples the amount of overlap in hours in spouses employment schedules and whether a spouse works day evening night or rotating shifts i show that variations in employment schedules are significant determinants of a husband s share in traditionally female household tasks also important are certain aspects of spouses resources gender role ideology and stage in the life course interpretations of these findings take into account whether it is the husband s and or wife s hours performing household tasks that are affected by these variables since husband s share depends on both the data come from the 1986 1987 national survey of families and households and my findings support the view that modest increases in husbands participation in household labor may result from the growing diversity in employment schedules among american workers

identifying barriers to large scale integration of variable renewable electricity into the electricity market a literature review of market design abstract for reaching the 2 c climate target the robust growth of electricity generation from variable renewable energy sources vre in the power sector is expected to continue accommodation of the power system to the variable uncertain and locational dependent outputs of vre causes integration costs integrating vre into a well functioning electricity market can minimize integration costs and drive investments in vre and complementary flexible resources however the electricity market in the european union eu as currently designed seems incapable to deliver this end this paper aims to provide a comprehensive literature review of barriers to the large scale market integration of vre in the eu electricity market design based on the set up of the eu electricity market a framework was developed to incorporate the most pertinent market integration barriers and resulting market inefficiencies this paper concludes that an overhaul is needed for the current eu electricity market to address all barriers identified firstly a discrete auction intraday market a marginal pricing balancing market a two price imbalance settlement and a nodal pricing locational marginal pricing mechanism seem more promising in limiting integration costs secondly to support business cases of vre and complementary flexible resources in the electricity market a level playing field should be established and the price cap should be lifted up to the value of lost load voll meanwhile to fit vre s market participation a higher time resolution of trading products and later gate closure time in different submarkets would be required lastly feed in support schemes currently widely used for vre investments might be inconsistent with market integration as they increase integration costs and lock vre investments in a subsidy dependent pathway to avoid such lock in further investigation of alternative capacity based support schemes is recommended

revitalising the wind power induced merit order effect to reduce wholesale and retail electricity prices in australia this paper investigates the effect of increasing the number of wind turbine generators on wholesale spot prices in the australian national electricity market s nem given the existing transmission grid from 2014 to 2025 we use a sensitivity analysis to evaluate the effect of five different levels of wind power penetration on prices ranging from scenario a no wind to scenario e that includes existing and planned wind power sufficient to meet australia s original 2020 41twh large scale renewable energy target lret we find divergence in prices between states and similar prices for nodes within states this supports the garnaut climate change review assessment on the prevalence of gold plating the intrastate transmission network and underinvesting in interstate connectivity we find that increasing wind power penetration decreases wholesale spot prices but that retail prices have increased in deregulated south australia and queensland similarly in victoria we argue that there is a pressing need to split the large generator retail companies into separate retail and generator companies and to reassess regulatory rules more generally interconnector congestion limits the potential for wind power to further reduce wholesale prices across the nem so the need for a high capacity transmission backbone in the nem is becoming clearer and will become pressing when australia moves beyond its current 2020 lret

male female differences in hourly wages the role of human capital working conditions and housework this study uses a new data set from a 1986 survey of workers to examine simultaneously the wage effects of human capital household responsibilities working conditions and on the job training the analysis suggests that household responsibilities had a negative effect on women s earnings but the unexplained difference between the earnings of men and women is not greatly reduced by inclusion in the explanatory model of information on either housework or working conditions the presence of children appears to have had a positive effect on the wages of both men and women t wenty years of research on gender differences in earnings have failed to explain the entire wage gap as a consequence of measured differences between male and female workers some researchers view the unexplained residual as evidence of discrimination against female workers others take the position that the entire wage gap is potentially explicable by differences in labor supply according to the latter view an unexplained wage gap remains because the data sets in use do not contain adequate information on all productivity related characteristics this view implies that the unexplained wage gap will be reduced by more comprehensive infor

cross border investment expenditure spillovers in european gas infrastructure we investigate the implications of an integrated vis a vis a national perspective regarding investment in natural gas infrastructure in particular we analyze cross border spillovers related to the investment expenditure of five western european countries we develop a practical approach to estimate such cross border investment expenditure spillovers using a multi regional input output model we find that international spillovers are generally larger for employment compensation compared to capital compensation and that the spillovers are unevenly distributed among the countries and the types of labor both high skilled and medium skilled labor is impacted most in the country where the investments take place whereas low skilled labor is mostly generated outside the eu we argue that an integrated european gas infrastructure investment policy is to be recommended

is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect evidence from a school feeding programme are public transfers targeted toward children neutralised by the household as the theory of altruism implies or is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect whereby such transfers stick to the child this paper studies the impact of a school feeding programme on child caloric intake in the philippines using a quasi experimental methodology the empirical results confirm an intrahousehold flypaper effect indeed they indicate virtually no intrahousehold reallocation of calories in response to the feeding programme in poorer households however children s gains from the programme appear to be taxed more heavily

some urban facts of life implications for research and policy abstract this review of recent literature explores the challenges to urban food and nutrition security in the rapidly urbanizing developing world the premise of the manuscript is that the causes of malnutrition and food insecurity in urban and rural areas are different due primarily to a number of phenomena that are unique to or exacerbated by urban living these areas include a a greater dependence on cash income b weaker informal safety nets c greater labor force participation of women and its consequences for child care d lifestyle changes particularly diet and exercise patterns e greater availability of public services but questionable access by the poor f greater exposure to environmental contamination and g governance by a new possibly nonexistent set of property rights the main focus is on identifying what is different about urban areas so as to better frame the program and policy responses

hybrid pricing in a coupled european power market with more wind power abstract in the european electricity market the promotion of wind power leads to more network congestion zonal pricing market coupling which does not take the physical characteristics of transmission into account is the most commonly used method to relieve network congestion in europe however zonal pricing fails to provide adequate locational price signals regarding scarcity of energy and thus creates a large amount of unscheduled cross border flows originating from wind generated power in this paper we investigate the effects of applying a hybrid congestion management model i e a nodal pricing model for one country embedded in a zonal pricing system for the rest of the market we find that compared to full nodal pricing hybrid pricing fails to fully utilize all the resources in the network and some wrong price signals might be given however hybrid pricing still outperforms zonal pricing the results from the study cases show that within the area applying nodal pricing better price signals are given the need for re dispatching is reduced more congestion rent is collected domestically and the unit cost of power is reduced

linkages between pro poor growth social programmes and labour market the recent brazilian experience summary this paper analyzes the relationship between growth patterns poverty and inequality in brazil during its globalization process focusing on the role played by the labor market and social programs methodologically the paper makes two contributions to the literature one is the proposal of a new measure of pro poor growth which links growth rates in mean income and in income inequality the other contribution is a decomposition methodology that explores linkages between three dimensions growth patterns labor market performances and social policies the proposed methodologies are then applied to the brazilian national household survey covering the period 1995 2004

uncertain bidding zone configurations the role of expectations for transmission and generation capacity expansion abstract ongoing policy discussions on the reconfiguration of bidding zones in european electricity markets induce uncertainty about the future market design this paper deals with the question of how this uncertainty affects market participants and their long run investment decisions in generation and transmission capacity generalizing the literature on pro active network expansion planning we propose a stochastic multilevel model which incorporates generation capacity investment network expansion and market operation taking into account uncertainty about the future bidding zone configuration using a stylized two node network we disentangle different effects that uncertainty has on market outcomes if there is a possibility that future bidding zone configurations provide improved regional price signals welfare gains materialize even if the change does not actually take place as a consequence welfare gains of an actual change of the bidding zone configuration are substantially lower due to those anticipatory effects additionally we show substantial distributional effects in terms of both expected gains and risks between producers and consumers and between different generation technologies

germany s nuclear power plant closures and the integration of electricity markets in europe this paper examines the potential implications of national policies that lead to a sudden increase of wind power in the electricity mix for interconnected european electricity markets more specifically it examines market integration before and after the closures of eight nuclear power plants that occurred within a period of a few months in germany during 2011 the short and long run interrelationships of daily electricity spot prices from november 2009 to october 2012 in apx endex belpex epex de epex fr nordpool omel and swissix and wind power in the german system are analysed two mgarch multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity models with dynamic correlations are used to assess spot market behaviour in the short run and a fractional cointegration analysis is conducted to investigate changes in the long run behaviour of electricity spot prices results show positive time varying correlations between spot prices in markets with substantial shared interconnector capacity a negative association between wind power penetration in germany and electricity spot prices in the german and neighbouring markets and for most markets a decreasing speed in mean reversion

market based price differentials in zonal and lmp market designs the california iso is redesigning procedures for scheduling dispatch and congestion management which are critical to reliable nondiscriminatory transmission service the redesign implements security constrained unit commitment and locational marginal pricing to reflect actual costs of delivering energy using an accurate network model to price both congestion and losses caiso simulations of the market redesign are a unique opportunity to compare a estimated lmps if the redesign were in place during recent historical periods with b actual conditions as logged in operating records the study uses market schedules and bids in an alternating current optimal power flow simulation resulting lmps are similar within current congestion zones but price differences occur during high loads reflecting actual changes in system conditions the frequency and magnitude of lmp differences are consistent with the current market suggesting that the increased market transparency will produce stable predictable prices case studies demonstrate that optimization using scuc and sced coupled with the state estimator allows more appropriate responses to system conditions improved utilization of transmission capacity reduction in congestion costs and enhanced system reliability

working women in an urban setting traders vendors and food security in accra abstract data collected from a 1997 household survey carried out in accra ghana are used to look at the crucial role that women play as income earners and securing access to food in urban areas one third of the households surveyed are headed by women for all households women s labor force participation is high with 75 of all households having at least one working woman the high number of female headed households and the large percentage of working women in the sample provide a good backdrop for looking at how women earn and spend income differently than men in an urban area livelihood strategies for both men and women are predominantly labor based and dependent on social networks for all households in the sample food is still the single most important item in the total budget yet important and striking differences between men s and women s livelihoods and expenditure patterns exist compared to men women are less likely to be employed as wage earners and more likely to work as street food vendors or petty traders women earn lower incomes but tend to allocate more of their budget to basic goods for themselves and their children while men spend more on entertainment for themselves only despite lower incomes and additional demands on their time as housewives and mothers female headed households petty traders and street food vendors have the largest percentage of food secure households women may be achieving household food security but at what cost this paper explores differences in income expenditure and consumption patterns in an effort to answer this question and suggests ways that urban planners and policy makers can address special concerns to working women in urban areas

how to benefit from a common european electricity market design abstract the realization of an internal electricity market in europe is currently on the one hand progressing in particular thanks to the wide spread implementation of market coupling solutions for cross border congestion management on the other hand diverging national market designs pose a threat to the continuation of this process given the challenges to electricity market design in a multi regional context we analyze how different design aspects namely cross border congestion management and capacity mechanisms affect welfare and generation adequacy in europe in doing so we rely on an agent based simulation model for electricity wholesale markets which we apply within several numerical computational case studies for the region of central western europe 2012 2030 our results confirm the benefits of market coupling in terms of welfare as well as generation adequacy furthermore we find indications that coordinating market designs across regions supports these targets therefore we recommend that european energy policy forms a stable transparent regulatory framework with cross border market coupling as an integral component in this context energy policy targets should be clearly defined and operationalized which also needs to consider potential conflicts between them finally electricity market designs need to be coordinated among states to benefit most from a common european market

determinants of credit rationing a study of informal lenders and formal credit groups in madagascar abstract previous research on the determinants of credit rationing focused exclusively on the behavior of formal lenders who contract directly with an individual borrower based on survey data from madagascar this paper presents an analysis of credit rationing by informal lenders and by members of community based groups that allocate formal group loans among themselves the results show that group members are able to obtain and to use locally available information about the applicant s creditworthiness in much the same way as informal lenders do both types of lenders use the applicant s debt servicing obligations and income as the main criteria for credit rationing this paper therefore empirically confirms theoretical arguments that community based groups have an information advantage over distant formal bank agents