women leaders and social performance evidence from financial cooperatives in senegal how do women leaders such as board members and top managers influence the social performance of organizations this paper addresses the question by exploiting a unique database from a senegalese network of 36 financial cooperatives we scrutinize the loan granting decisions made jointly by the locally elected board and the top manager assigned by the central union of the network our findings are threefold first female dominated boards favor social orientation second female managers tend to align their strategy with local boards preferences third the central union tends to assign male managers to female dominated boards probably to curb the boards social orientation

economic mobility and poverty dynamics in developing countries this study provides an introduction to this special issue of the journal of development studies on economic mobility and poverty dynamics in developing countries in addition to providing a conceptual framework it outlines how the contributions fit into the extant literature a series of regularities emerge across these studies the poor consist of those who are always poor poor at all dates and those who move in and out of poverty with the latter group tending to be strikingly large such movements in and out of poverty are apparent when looking at poverty in either absolute or relative terms changes in returns to endowments can be a potent source of increased incomes finally seemingly transitory shocks can have long term consequences the study concludes by drawing out the policy implications of these regularities

known unknowns power shifts uncertainty and war large and rapid power shifts resulting from exogenous economic growth are considered sufficient to cause preventive wars yet most large and rapid shifts result from endogenous military investments we show that when the investment decision is perfectly transparent peace prevails large and rapid power shifts are deterred through the threat of a preventive war when investments remain undetected however states may be tempted to introduce power shifts as a fait accompli knowing this their adversaries may strike preventively even without conclusive evidence of militarization in fact the more effective preventive wars are the more likely they will be launched against states that are not militarizing our argument emphasizes the role of imperfect information as a cause of war it also explains why powerful states may attack weaker targets even with ambiguous evidence of their militarization we illustrate our theory through an account of the 2003 us led invasion of iraq

a dynamic theory of nuclear proliferation and preventive war we develop a formal model of bargaining between two states where one can invest in a program to develop nuclear weapons and the other imperfectly observes its efforts and progress over time in the absence of a nonproliferation deal the observing state watches the former s program waiting until proliferation seems imminent to attack chance elements when the program will make progress and when the other state will discover this determine outcomes surprise proliferation crises over the suspected progress of a nuclear program and possibly mistaken preventive wars arise endogenously from these chance elements consistent with the model s predictions and contrary to previous studies the empirical evidence shows that the progress of a nuclear program and intelligence estimates of it explain the character and outcomes of most interactions between a proliferant and a potential preventive attacker counterintuitively policies intended to reduce proliferation by delaying nuclear programs or improving monitoring capabilities may instead encourage it

poverty reduction strategy papers a new convergence abstract poverty reduction strategy papers represent both a primary policy device of international development institutions and an instance of a wider international convergence of public policy around global integration and social inclusion charting the emergence of these approaches this paper argues that this convergence has a number of structural predilections which favor the technical and juridical over the political economic and a disciplinary framework over a practical contest drawing extensively on decentralized governance and poverty reduction programs in uganda this paper shows how these predilections obscure power relations and restrict practical and political options while exacting heavy establishment and compliance costs

from correlates and characteristics to causes thinking about poverty from a chronic poverty perspective summary poverty and poverty reduction are currently the central concerns of development discourse and policy despite recent theoretical advances poverty analysis continues to be dominated by an income consumption conception of poverty we argue for understandings of poverty that go beyond measurement led conceptualizations to more adequately expose the causes of poverty chronic poverty is one such concept its focus on poverty duration and dynamics highlights the forms of social relations that produce poverty and which are often embedded within political institutions and economic structures poverty reduction does not simply require good policy it requires creating the capacity of poorer people to influence and hold accountable those who make policies

nuclear brinkmanship with two sided incomplete information a brinkmanship crisis with two sided incomplete information is modeled as a game of sequential bargaining in which each state is uncertain of its adversary s resolve the sequential crisis equilibria are characterized explicitly and used to analyze the influences of resolve misperception and the status quo on escalation and crisis stability the description of brinkmanship as a contest of resolve is found to be misleading the state with the greatest resolve may not prevail in the crisis a state may be less not more likely to prevail the greater its resolve and a states expected payoff may be less not more the greater its resolve moreover reducing misperception may destabilize a crisis surprisingly increasing the stake a potential challenger has in the status quo may not make a challenge less likely finally crises involving severe conflicts of interest are shown to be less likely than crises not entailing a severe conflict of interest

rescuing gender from the poverty trap the new poverty agenda is seen as incorporating gender within a new broader concept of poverty lipton and maxwell 1992 capable of measuring evaluating and redressing gender bias along with poverty reduction policies based on labor intensive growth targeted social services and safety nets multilateral positions on gender and development gad for their part also stress the poverty of women as a primary justification for development interventions designed to improve the position of women it is argued here however that the concept of poverty cannot serve as a proxy for the subordination of women that antipoverty policies cannot be expected to improve necessarily the position of women and that there is no substitute for a gender analysis which transcends class divisions and material definitions of deprivation the instrumental interest in women as the means to achieve development objectives such as poverty reduction may ultimately undermine gad gender appears to have collapsed into a poverty trap this essay raises a call for help or at least a discussion about the relative benefits of captivity vs escape

cournot oligopoly and the theory of supermodular games abstract we reconsider the cournot oligopoly problem in light of the theory of supermodular games invoking the recent ordinal version of this theory proposed by milgrom and shannon we generalize novshek s existence result derive the associated uniqueness result give an extension of a classical existence result under symmetry and provide conditions making a cournot oligopoly into a log supermodular game with the natural order on the action sets we also provide extensive and precise insight as to why decreasing best responses are widely regarded as being typical for the cournot model with production costs several illustrative examples are provided journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c72 l10 l13

poverty persistence and transitions in uganda a combined qualitative and quantitative analysis despite uganda s impressive reduction in income poverty during the 1990s recent evidence has shown there to be substantial mobility into and out of poverty this paper represents one of the first attempts to combine qualitative and quantitative information to understand the factors and processes underlying poverty transitions and persistence in some instances similar factors are identified by both qualitative and quantitative approaches including lack of key physical assets high dependency ratios and increased household size in other instances though one approach identifies additional factors not so easily identified by the other for example the impacts of excessive alcohol consumption in many cases the paper argues that there is considerable value added in combining the two approaches allowing us to provide a much richer understanding of many of the processes underlying poverty and poverty transitions

national trade policies and smuggling in africa the case of the gambia and senegal summary much of inter regional trade in africa is unrecorded and consists of smuggling the gambia is almost wholly enclosed within senegal yet official trade statistics show almost no trade between the two countries failing to capture large scale smuggling smuggling reflects pre colonial traditional trading relationships the artificial nature of borders created in the colonial era and the disparities in trade policies between the two countries following independence inducing large cross border price differentials for goods this paper documents the magnitude of trade protection in the two countries the resulting price differences and estimates the volume of smuggling

programs for the poorest learning from the igvgd program in bangladesh abstract this article examines a program that seeks to reach bangladesh s hardcore poor by combining elements of livelihood protection food aid with livelihood promotion skills training and microfinance bangladesh rural advancement committee s income generation for vulnerable group development program has deepened the outreach of its poverty reduction activity and achieved impressive results detailed local level fieldwork revealed however that program practice differed markedly from program plans this is found to have important implications for both future program design and the understanding of who does not benefit from such innovative programs we conclude that while such programs mixing livelihood protection and promotion should be a major focus for anti poverty strategies there will remain a role for more traditional social welfare schemes

what makes deterrence work cases from 1900 to 1980 the use of military force to achieve foreign policy objectives is an enduring feature of international politics force or the threat of force may be used either to change the status quo or to maintain it threatening the use of force to maintain the status quo often takes the form of deterrence defined by patrick morgan as the threat to use force in response as a way of preventing the first use of force by someone else 1 deterrence sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails failures are attested to by numerous international wars of history in the nuclear age a failure could cost us our lives the conditions of successful deterrence thus require thorough logical and empirical analysis

the inequality of social capital and the reproduction of chronic poverty summary this paper draws on ethnographic research in tanzania to question ideas inherent to mainstream development policy that building social capital can be readily created used or substituted for other missing assets and thereby overcome poverty the poorest experience clusters of interlocking disadvantage that make it highly unlikely that they can draw on social capital to ameliorate their poverty or that increased association and participation at community level is necessarily beneficial to them moreover social relationships collective action and local institutions may structurally reproduce the exclusion of the poorest as such a politically neutral and undersocialized policy focus on strengthening associational life and public participation of the poor is unlikely to lead to their greater inclusion nor to significant poverty alleviation

enduring poverty and the conditions of childhood lifecourse and intergenerational poverty transmissions abstract in this paper we explore the conditions of childhood that can lead to poverty throughout the lifecourse and affect transfers of poverty to the next generation the largely inconclusive evidence base surrounding lifecourse and intergenerational poverty transmission is reviewed before a discussion of the key social processes and contexts that impact on childhood lifecourse and intergenerational poverty prioritized issues nutrition childcare and guidance education child work and aspirations and attitudes are explored within the context of unicef s basic framework of survival protection development and participation the paper concludes with an analysis of elements of the wider environment critical to enabling action in childhood to break poverty cycles

statistical tragedy in africa evaluating the data base for african economic development measurement is increasingly at the centre of debates in african economic development some remarkable upward revisions of gdp which are signs of statistical systems improving caused the declaration of a statistical tragedy in africa this special issue evaluates the database for african economic development with articles on the quality of the data on gdp health and education poverty labour agriculture and income distribution

military coercion in interstate crises in an international crisis states make demands backed by threats to use force although these threats can be explicit in diplomatic communications they will not generally carry much weight unless substantiated by some show of force military measures designed to convey the commitment to resort to arms if one s demands are not satisfactorily met to have an impact this commitment must be credible it must be in one s interest to carry out the threat if the opponent refuses to comply in an environment where states possess private information about their valuations capabilities or costs credibility can be established by actions that a state unwilling to fight would not want or would not dare to take military moves such as arms buildups troop mobilizations and deployments to the potential zone of operations can alter incentives in a crisis by changing one s expected payoff from the use of force these are tacit bargaining moves that can restructure the strategic context thereby creating and possibly signaling one s commitments while undermining those of the opponent how can states use the military instrument to establish commitments and how does the nature of the instrument affect their ability to communicate them credibly to their adversaries there are two distinct mechanisms for credible signaling in economic models information can be transmitted reliably by sinking costs actors burn money to reveal that they value the disputed issue even more in contrast theories of interstate crisis bargaining usually rely on choices that increase the difference between backing down and fighting actors tie their hands by running higher risks of war to reveal their resolve the first mechanism involves costs that actors pay regardless of outcome and the second involves costs that actors pay only if they fail to carry out some threat or promise

the government of chronic poverty from exclusion to citizenship development trustees have increasingly sought to challenge chronic poverty by promoting citizenship amongst poor people a move that frames citizenship formation as central to overcoming the exclusions and inequalities associated with uneven development for sceptics this move within inclusive neoliberalism is inevitably depoliticising and disempowering and our cases do suggest that citizenship based strategies rarely alter the underlying basis of poverty however our evidence also offers some support to those optimists who suggest that progressive moves towards poverty reduction and citizenship formation have become more rather than less likely at the current juncture the promotion of citizenship emerges here as a significant but incomplete effort to challenge poverty that persists over time

guns butter and anarchy a state in the international system implicit in realism must allocate its limited resources between satisfying its intrinsically valued ends and the means of military power i formalize this guns versus butter problem in a simple infinite horizon model in which two states must continually decide how to allocate their resources and whether to attack the other state the analysis establishes sufficient conditions to ensure the existence of an equilibrium in which neither state attacks shows that there is a strictly pareto dominant pair of peaceful equilibrium payoffs characterizes the unique peaceful markov perfect equilibrium that yields them and describes the comparative statics of the equilibrium allocations more broadly the analysis also suggests that the notion of anarchy has little if any substantive significance distinctively related to international politics and that the problem of absolute and relative gains is superfluous

do rights work law activism and the employment guarantee scheme summary recent rights based approaches offer a promising route for bringing about social change however we have little experience with state provided legally enforceable socio economic rights this paper examines one of the few examples of a legally granted socio economic right a limited right to work that has existed in one state of india for over 25 years in the form of the employment guarantee scheme the paper argues that legal underpinnings do not automatically enable the poor to obtain rights however legal rights have important indirect effects for pro poor activist organizations including mobilizing membership protecting activists from arbitrary action and shifting public discourse

the escalation of great power militarized disputes testing rational deterrence theory and structural realism realism we test the relative explanatory power of these two theoretical approaches on the escalation of deterrence encounters among great powers from 1816 to 1984 we derive a set of hypotheses from each model operationalize them for systematic empirical analysis and test the hypotheses on 97 cases of great power deterrence encounters by means of probit analysis the results are that the hypotheses derived from deterrence theory receive considerable support whereas none of the hypotheses derived from structural realism are supported in contemporary research on the causes of international conflict the realist paradigm has been the dominant theoretical approach within this broad framework however scholars have developed at least two prominent alternative models of the conditions under which conflict is likely to arise the first approach structural realism 1 focuses on the attributes of the international system while the second deterrence theory is largely dyadic and emphasizes the resolve and relative military capabilities of adversarial states while both theoretical approaches attempt to identify the conditions under which international crises and wars are likely to arise their

adverse incorporation and microfinance among cross border traders in senegal summary this paper highlights the relevance of adverse incorporation as a neglected theoretical approach to debates on microfinance through a case study of cross border traders in senegal although women s organizations do not exclude even the poorest women traders in remote areas were unable to access credit due to particularly harsh standards of joint liability and adverse relations with donors lenders and elite women meanwhile the peer monitoring function of group microcredit schemes is challenged by the fact that traders are strikingly uncritical of defaulting borrowers findings highlight the detrimental consequences of donors misconceptions regarding women s organizations and economic activities

poverty and famines an essay on entitlement and deprivation this book focuses on the causes of starvation in general and famines in particular the traditional analysis of famines is shown to be fundamentally defective and the author develops an alternative analysis

nuclear superiority and the balance of resolve explaining nuclear crisis outcomes scholars have long debated whether nuclear superiority or the balance of resolve shapes the probability of victory in nuclear crises but they have not clearly articulated a mechanism linking superiority to victory nor have they systematically analyzed the entire universe of empirical cases beginning from a nuclear brinkmanship theory framework i develop a new theory of nuclear crisis outcomes which links nuclear superiority to victory in nuclear crises precisely through its effect on the balance of resolve using a new data set on fifty two nuclear crisis dyads i show that states that enjoy nuclear superiority over their opponents are more likely to win nuclear crises i also find some support for the idea that political stakes shape crisis outcomes these findings hold even after controlling for conventional military capabilities and for selection into nuclear crises this article presents a new theoretical explanation and the first comprehensive empirical examination of nuclear crisis outcomes

crime and punishment the role of norms in crisis bargaining in this work i test the proposition that normative standards of behavior can influence state actions in security related conflicts specifically i examine the construction of norms in the settlements of security related disputes and the effects these settlements have on subsequent militarized interactions i argue that dispute settlements alter subsequent crisis bargaining in two important ways first they act as normative referents that alter the interpretation of subsequent crisis bargaining behavior both by identifying a solution to the dispute which alleviates fears of demands for future concessions and by defining a set of acts which both sides consider illegitimate second in combination with the response to their violation dispute settlements inflict reputational costs on states that violate them i test these arguments against a realist theory of crisis bargaining through an analysis of 122 reinitiated international crises between 1929 and 1979 i find strong support for the hypothesis that states can and do construct normative standards that guide their behavior in international crises whereas realist theory receives only mixed support

global stability of unique nash equilibrium in cournot oligopoly and rent seeking game abstract a sufficient condition is derived for the global stability of a unique interior nash equilibrium in an aggregative game the condition is applied to investigate the global stability of the nash cournot equilibrium in cournot oligopoly without product differentiation and that of the nash equilibrium in rent seeking games

a general analysis of rent seeking games in this paper we reconsider the basic model of efficient rent seeking we stress the importance of the shape of the players reaction curve in order to understand the impact of the technology of rent seeking on the structure of the outcome of the game we give a complete characterization of the pure strategy equilibria moreover the possibility of preemption by a stakelberg leader is discussed according to the nature of the technology of rent seeking available to the agents

nuclear deterrence and the strategy of limited retaliation recent formal work in nuclear deterrence theory has focused on brinkmanship crises in which states exert coercive pressure by manipulating the risk of an unlimited nuclear exchange this essay extends the formal analysis of deterrence theory to the strategy of limited retaliation in which states exert coercive pressure by inflicting limited amounts of damage in order to make the threat of future punishment more credible this strategy is modeled as a game of sequential bargaining with incomplete information the equilibria suggest that states prefer relatively smaller less destructive limited options that counterforce options are desirable even if they cannot limit the total amount of damage an adversary can inflict that smaller less destructive limited nuclear options may make a nuclear exchange more likely and that uncertainty and incomplete information may significantly enhance deterrence

do monetary and nonmonetary indicators tell the same story about chronic poverty a study of vietnam in the 1990s this paper investigates whether monetary and nonmonetary indicators tell the same story about chronic poverty using a unique panel data from vietnam in the 1990s defining chronic poverty as occurring when an individual is monetarily poor stunted malnourished or out of school in both waves of the panel the overlap and correlation between subgroups of the chronically poor are shown to be modest some but not all nonmonetary indicators are more persistent and complement monetary indicators of chronic poverty taking account of the multiple dimensions of chronic poverty cannot be a simple additive exercise

the stability of the cournot oligopoly model a reassessment abstract the stability properties of the cournot oligopoly model are examined for the continuous adjustment process sufficient conditions for instability are established which are shown to be of significance when the number of firms n is small local and global stability are shown under appropriate conditions which for global stability include the restriction n 5 the proof of global stability corrects a well known proof by f hahn rev econ stud 29 1962 329 331 results for the discrete time adjustment process are reported and the restrictiveness of the model s assumptions are discussed

is a unique cournot equilibrium locally stable abstract we consider a homogeneous product oligopoly where the cournot equilibrium is regular and unique we show that for a duopoly a unique cournot equilibrium is always locally stable for a n firm asymmetric cost oligopoly a unique cournot equilibrium is locally stable under very general conditions the sufficient conditions for local stability of a unique cournot equilibrium are much less restrictive than what the existing literature suggests for a symmetric cost oligopoly the unique cournot equilibrium is almost always locally stable except for a perverse case journal of economic literature classification number l13

combining income and assets measures to include the transitory nature of poverty in assessments of forest dependence evidence from the democratic republic of congo abstract a considerable amount of research on poverty environment relations in developing countries under the cifor pen initiative focuses on household income generation from forests using total annual income as a measure of poverty however income alone produces a static picture in a snapshot of time while poverty is a dynamic state that can be a transitory phenomenon using income only also fails to consider that households can liquidate asset to overcome income shocks here we show that using asset quintiles measured by value of assets produce a distinctly different pattern than the commonly observed negative relation between income and forest dependence we then present an approach enabling categorization of households as chronic or transient poor transient rich and rich providing a more nuanced picture than that provided by cifor pen studies so far the validity of groupings is tested by comparing household characteristics and exposure to shocks we then show that the chronic poor are most reliant on forest income while the transient poor consume a higher share of harvested forest products the transient rich have higher agricultural productivity and absolute forest income rich households relies more on business based on the results we suggest recommendations for improving future studies on poverty environment relations

arms races and arms control modeling the hawk perspective of the three major theories developed by post world war 11 american social science to explain arms races the repeated prisoner s dilemma the spiral model and the deterrence model the deterrence model has received the least attention from game theorists i present a model of this perspective and discuss its implications for arms racing and armscontrol theory arms races arise in the model when there is a conflict of interest between two states and uncertainty about the ability of at least one side to bear the strains of increased military spending the model provides support for two common critiques of arms control first arms control is difficult to achieve when it is most needed when there is a dispute accompanied by uncertainty that could lead to war second arms races though they occur in times of tension do not necessarily increase the likelihood of war and may even reduce it by reducing uncertainty about relative power

crisis bargaining escalation and mad although incomplete information is recognized to be an essential feature of crises game theoretic formulations have not generally modeled this explicitly this paper models a mutually assured destruction mad crisis as a game of sequential bargaining with incomplete information sufficiently simple that its equibria may be found these provide better game theoretic foundations for the notions of resolve and critical risk and their role in crises and also make it possible to compare the bargaining dynamics of this model with those of descriptively richer but incompletely specified models revealing several inconsistencies several analyses of mad conclude that the state with the greatest resolve in this contest of resolve will prevail many models based on critical risks suggest that a state is less likely to escalate the greater its adversary s resolve in our model however the state with the weakest resolve sometimes prevails and some states prove more likely to escalate if their adversaries resolve is greater

livelihoods and chronic poverty in semi arid zimbabwe abstract remoteness and geographic natural physical human and social capital are contrasted with social and political exclusion in explaining persistent rural poverty we found that persistent poverty was strongly associated with the structural poverty of zimbabwe s semi arid communal areas relative urban proximity assisted income diversification and improvement in a very poor socially and politically excluded area less excluded but remote areas remained poor but not as poor as the excluded population livelihoods changed and diversified more in the nonremote area speeding poverty reduction as measured by an index of perceived change we conclude with what policy options and sequence might support the inclusion of chronically poor people

nuclear brinkmanship limited war and military power an open question in nuclear deterrence theory is whether and how the balance of military power affects the dynamics of escalation the balance of military strength plays virtually no role in standard accounts of brinkmanship but this is largely by assumption and seems incompatible with an apparent trade off between power and risk that decision makers have faced in some actual crises this paper incorporates this trade off in a modified model of nuclear brinkmanship a main result is that the more likely the balance of resolve is to favor a defender the less military power a challenger brings to bear the model also formalizes the stability instability paradox showing that a less stable strategic balance that is a sharper trade off between power and risk makes conflict at high levels of violence less likely but conflict at lower levels more likely the analysis also helps explain the incentives different states have to adopt different nuclear doctrines and force postures

the heckman correction for sample selection and its critique this paper gives a short overview of monte carlo studies on the usefulness of heckman s 1976 1979 two step estimator for estimating selection models such models occur frequently in empirical work especially in microeconometrics when estimating wage equations or consumer expenditures it is shown that exploratory work to check for collinearity problems is strongly recommended before deciding on which estimator to apply in the absence of collinearity problems the full information maximum likelihood estimator is preferable to the limited information two step method of heckman although the latter also gives reasonable results if however collinearity problems prevail subsample ols or the two part model is the most robust amongst the simple to calculate estimators

redistributive conflict and social policy in latin america summary inequality has been a long standing feature of latin america this article is an examination of the redistributive and social policy struggles in two countries of the region mexico and chile while electoral democracy has propelled redistributive issues onto the policy agenda redistributive struggles are intense and progress in policy to address inequality is slow to emerge attention has been focused on cash transfer programs because of their ability to garner approval from a cross section of public opinion particularly from the most powerful while such programs have an important contribution to make to poverty reduction societal redistributive compromises are essential to an efficacious strategy to reduce poverty and inequality over the long term