landlords tenants and technological innovations abstract there is a long standing belief that landlords and capitalists have used their control over the means of production to direct the development and adoption of technologies which have increased their welfare at the expense of workers there is also a wide spread belief that the interlinkage between credit and tenancy markets which seems so prevalent in ldcs provides further impetus to the resistance of innovations innovations which make tenants better off reduce their demand for loans and thus make landlords qua creditors worse off these contentions have typically been dismissed out of hand by standard welfare economics arguments the rural environment of most ldcs may not however be adequately described by the standard economic model on which this welfare analysis is based in particular in many ldcs sharecropping contracts are widely employed there is evidence of widespread unemployment and there is not the full set of risk and capital markets required by the competitive paradigm the objective of this paper is to show under quite general conditions that the institutional structure of the economy may indeed be an important determinant of whether a particular innovation will or will not be adopted we show that 1 i landlords may wish to and can resist innovations which unambiguously increase production whenever sharecropping contracts are employed 2 ii conversely landlords may adopt innovations which not only lower the welfare of workers but even lower net national product 3 iii the presence of interlinkage may indeed affect the adoption of a new technology however the reason for this is only partly related to the effect of innovations on tenants borrowing indeed we show that innovations may increase as well as decrease the tenants demand for borrowing

what is capital economists and sociologists have changed its meaning should it be changed back this is a pre copyedited author produced pdf of an article accepted for publication in cambridge journal of economics following peer review the version of record geoffrey h hodgson what is capital economists and sociologists have changed its meaning should it be changed back cambridge journal of economics vol 38 5 1063 86 september 2014 is available online at http dx doi org 10 1093 cje beu013

out of the wallet and into the purse using micro data to test income pooling this paper uses an exogenous change in the intrahousehold distribution of income provided by a change in united kingdom family allowance policy to test the income pooling hypothesis implied by unitary household models expenditure shares are estimated for a wide range of goods using household level data shifts in expenditure shares suggest that children and mothers benefited at the expense of fathers when this policy change shifted income within households from men to women similar shifts are not found among married couple households with no children this paper refutes income pooling and confirms and extends results in lundberg pollak and wales 1997

usury and collateral pricing towards an alternative explanation in a contribution to this journal bhaduri 1977 built an interesting model to show how the method of usury operates in the agricultural sector of less developed countries in his model the money lender could make capital gains by taking over the asset or the collateral of the borrowers at a price much below the market price this model was put forth as an explanation for high interest rates lenders would charge high rates of interest to force borrowers with cash constraints to default and then take away from the latter an under priced collateral bhaduri s model was a critique of bottomley s 1963 1975 default rate

territorial innovation models a critical survey moulaert f and sekia f 2003 territorial innovation models a critical survey reg studies 37 289 302 this paper provides a critical review of the literature on territorial innovation models industrial districts milieux innovateurs new industrial spaces local production systems etc the review is organized in two stages first the main features of each of these models and their view of innovation are compared second their theoretical building blocks are reconstructed and evaluated from the point of view of conceptual clarity and analytical coherence it is found that despite some semantic unity among the concepts used economies of agglomeration endogenous development systems of innovation evolution and learning network organization and governance territorial innovation models tims suffer from conceptual ambiguity the latter is mainly a consequence of the way territorial innovation is theorized i e in terms of technologically driven innovation and a business culture that is ma

generalised morality and the problem of transition to an impersonal exchange regime a response to platteau this essay addresses the problem of transition from a personalised exchange regime that characterises most ldcs to the more impersonal form of exchange that marks advanced market economies this debate has received impetus from the discussion launched by platteau 1994 in the pages of this journal where he seeks to clarify the social conditions that allow the market system to evolve while the role of private and public order institutions in generating market order is recognised this is regarded as inadequate necessitating the invocation of generalised morality gm to complete the explanation it is argued here that gm does not need to be invoked the article pleads for taking a closer look at the historical role of risk bearing institutions especially financial institutions evidence from the bangladesh rice market is adduced in support of the contention that there exist elements even within a traditional exchange regime that can evolve into modern impersonal forms this is brought out by ex

cash by any other name evidence on labelling from the uk winter fuel payment standard economic theory implies that the labelling of cash transfers or cash equivalents e g child benefits food stamps should have no effect on spending patterns the empirical literature to date does not contradict this proposition we study the uk winter fuel payment wfp a cash transfer to older households exploiting sharp eligibility criteria in a regression discontinuity design we find robust evidence of a behavioural effect of the labelling on average households spend 41 of the wfp on fuel if the payment was treated as cash we would expect households to spend approximately 3 of the payment on fuel

zero expenditures and the estimation of engel curves over the brief interview periods typical of budget surveys such as the u k family expenditure survey households recorded expenditures are liable to be misleading indicators of their underlying consumption most starkly a household may not be observed to purchase commodities that it nevertheless consumes this paper considers the implications of such measurement errors for the estimation of demand systems and derives a consistent estimator for the special case of linear engel curves

the economic theory of agrarian institutions introduction alternative approaches to the theory of institutions in economic development pranab bardhan rational peasants efficient institutions and a theory of rural organization methodological remarks for development economics joseph e stiglitz part 1 land and labour theories of sharecropping nirvikar singh a comparison of principal agent and bargaining solutions the case of tenancy contracts clive bell contracts with eviction in infinitely repeated principal agent relationships bhaskar dutta et al production relations in semi arid african agriculture hans binswanger et al part 2 credit and interlinked transactions rural credit markets the structure of interest rates exploitation and efficiency kaushik basu credit and agrarian class structure mukesh eswaran and ashok kotwal credit rationing tenancy productivity and the dynamics of inequality avishay braverman and joseph e stiglitz on choice among creditors and bonded labour contracts t n srinivasan some aspects of linked product and credit market contracts among risk neutral agents clive bell and t n srinivasan a note on interlinked rural economic arrangements pranab bardhan interlinkages and the pattern of competition debraj ray and kunal sengupta part 3 marketing and insurance agricultural institutions for insurance and stabilization david m newbery peasants risk aversion and the choice of marketing intermediaries and contracts a bargaining theory of equilibrium marketing contracts pinhas zusman part 4 co operatives technology and the state agricultural producer co operatives louis putterman institutional analysis of credit co operatives avishay braverman and j luis guasch agrarian structure technological innovations and the state alain de janvry et al

falling short of the promise poverty vulnerability in the united states and britain 1993 2003 the welfare state promises to moderate the duration and concentration of poverty the authors ask how well this promise has been fulfilled in the united states and britain from 1993 to 2003 they examine two aspects of poverty vulnerability during this period of welfare reform 1 its persistence and associated risk factors and 2 the efficacy of social transfers after accounting for measurement error sociodemographic characteristics and the impact of redistributive programs the authors find that poverty is often persistent and risk is concentrated especially in the united states moreover the british safety net appears to better protect those at risk

a theory of interlinked rural transactions this paper argues that the interlinking of labor output and credit contracts often observed in rural economies can be regarded as an attempt to improve allocative efficiency in the face of moral hazard it advances an economic explanation of the phenomenon which is rooted in the view that prevalent modes of transaction of which interlinked contracts are an example are shaped by technological considerations interlinking is shown to be an efficient economic response to unequally distributed information arising from the uncertainty which characterizes subsistence agriculture all pareto efficient allocations require a combination of wage cum output sharing with consumption credit contracts the analytical framework set up to demonstrate the results is used to examine the response of the contractual parameters to changes in i the returns to alternative occupations available to tenant laborers ii the cost of credit to the village economy and iii the riskiness of cultivation the analysis concludes that public policy to alleviate rural poverty must recognize the relationships between technological considerations and modes of transaction in the absence of a complete set of markets

facilitating the provision of farm credit the role of interlocking transactions between traders and zamindars in crop marketing systems in sindh abstract formal credit institutions in pakistan have largely failed to provide access to farm credit to small and medium scale landowners or zamindars this paper examines interlocked transactions between traders and landowners in the cotton and wheat markets in sindh that facilitate the provision of credit by traders it is concluded that the case examined provides an example where traders lend to landowners in a segment of the credit market that approximates competitive behavior without surplus extraction by traders key conditions resulting in this favorable outcome are the existence of both competition for market share and information sharing on borrowers between traders whether this outcome is also beneficial for other rural groups who may borrow from landowners in particular sharecropping tenants is independent of market relations between landowners and traders and is not determined here

trust interlinking transactions and credit in the industrial district an essential feature of the industrial district is trust among individuals and firms within it this paper focuses mainly on trust based on investments in building up a good reputation that is a personal capital that can even substitute for collateral in obtaining credit informal credit often linked to other transactions and especially subcontracting is therefore an important way of financing economic development in the industrial district moreover the importance of trust as personal capital gives rise to a double financial intermediation in the industrial district this double intermediation constitutes a device to reduce information problems that are usually responsible for credit rationing c 1994 academic press inc copyright 1994 by oxford university press

reconsidering the labeling effect for child benefits evidence from a transition economy i consider expenditure on food alcohol and tobacco and clothing in households with children in slovenia at the start of its transition to a market economy i exploit the unique structure of its child benefit program in order to look for evidence that labeling a cash transfer a child benefit influences how that cash transfer is spent contrary to much of the recent literature on the non fungibility of income i do not find evidence supporting a labeling effect

markets power and productivity in rural asia abstract this article deals with three themes first the evidence that rural markets are responsive to scarcity is open to two interpretations i that markets closely approach the competitive ideal and ii that such responses are also consistent with various market imperfections second there is the nature of power and its influence on economic transactions lacking a satisfactory definition of the concept many contributions dealing with power yield few insights third there is the relationship between agrarian structure and economic progress a signal accomplishment of some contributions has been to show that south asia s diverse experience casts considerable doubt on the proposition that this relationship is a simple one

what do we learn about consumer demand patterns from micro data the aim of this paper is to assess the importance of using micro level data in the econometric analysis of consumer demand to do this we utilize a time series of repeated cross sections covering some 4 000 households in each of 15 years employing a number of different aggregation procedures we conclude that aggregate data alone are unlikely to produce reliable estimates of structural price and income coefficients however once certain aggregation factors as well as trend and seasonal components are included an aggregate model is not necessarily outperformed across all demand equations in terms of forecasting ability jel d12 c52 c31 the purpose of this paper is to develop a complete consumer demand system based on a time series of individual household data and to use it to measure the biases introduced into the study of consumer de mand behavior when aggregate data are used in place of the appropriate microeco nomic data we assess the suitability of ag gregate data through the impact on income and price elasticities and by evaluating the ability of both micro and aggregate based models to forecast aggregate consumer de mand the biases introduced by the use of aggregate data depend upon the way that household characteristics interact with in come and price effects and on departures of demand systems from linearity we explore the structure of microeconomic demand sys tems and the role of household characteris tics in the behavior of consumer demand both for the light this may shed on the pattern of future demands and for the im plications this behavior has for issues of aggregation consumer demand patterns typically found in micro data sets vary considerably across households with different household characteristics and with different levels of income we model this variability by making intercept and slope parameters in the budget share equations of our demand sys tem depend on household characteristics and by allowing for nonlinear total log expenditure terms in fact in theory consistent demand systems it is total ex penditure rather than disposable income that is allocated across goods we find that this general framework leads to a well specified data coherent demand system which is a quadratic extension of the popu lar almost ideal model of angus s deaton and john muellbauer 1980 the micro level estimates are shown to be sensitive to the treatment of endogeneity of total expen diture and to the specification of interaction terms with household characteristics in ad dition this specification is also shown to possess many attractive features for the evaluation of aggregate models

industrial districts social cohesion and economic decline in italy the paper argues that the so called canonical view of the italian industrial district id depicts it as a system whose economic and social vitality requires the interaction between two major sub systems a community of people and a community of firms a range of circumstances including insufficient aggregate demand competition from low cost coun tries and technological change have determined inconsistencies between the rationales of these two sub systems as a result lead firms have emerged that substitute the id as coordinating instances in the pursuit of their goals they tend to prefer cost scrapping to quality enhancement thereby determining a competition that further undermines the id as a system the paper contends that this outcome is not the only possible one an alternative would require the regulatory as opposed to merely permissive action of pub lic actors in that it would have to change the incentive system that leads firms to choose short sighted strategies

slipping into and out of poverty the dynamics of spells this paper examines the dynamics of poverty previous analyses have examined either fluctuations in the male heads earnings or the frequency of poverty periods over a fixed time frame our approach depends on a definition of spells of poverty using this methodology we find that the majority of poor persons at any time are in the midst of a rather long spell of poverty the methodology also allows us to estimate that less than 40 percent of poverty spells begin because of a drop in the heads earnings while 60 percent of the spells end when the heads earnings increase thus researchers must focus on household formation decisions and on the behavior of secondary family members there has been a dramatic resurgence recently of discussion of the underclass the discussion is reminiscent of debates about poverty during the 1960s when the notions of a culture of poverty particularly as popularized by michael harrington s other america 1962 dominated both intellectual and policy thinking the idea of an underclass seems inconsistent however with much of the research on the dynamics of poverty during the 1970s that research using new longitudinal data seemed to show that the bulk of the poor were poor for only a few years the research also showed that the poor were a very heterogeneous group including a small minority of persistently poor the persistence of poverty is of interest both for understanding the phenomenon and for developing policy claims about dependency and separate life styles among the poor rest on assumptions about the long term nature of poverty questions

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

class relations in an asiatic regime this paper develops a theoretical analysis of the economic and political relationships among the state the peasantry and zamindars in mughal india 1550 1750 the analysi s rests on a pasinetti type accumulation model which also incorporate s state taxation tax evasion a wages fund and a variable peasant s aving propensity it is shown that zamindar incomes and the economic dependence of peasants are related to the extent of state taxation an d of evasion potential sources of systematic change are identified b y highlighting both conflict and harmony of class interests arising f rom taxation evasion military or luxury expenditures and productiv e investments copyright 1987 by oxford university press

the effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and wages in this paper we estimate the effects of children and the differential effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and hourly wage rates the responses to fatherhood of two cohorts of men from the psid sample are examined separately and we use fixed effects estimation to control for unobserved heterogeneity we find that fatherhood significantly increases the hourly wage rates and annual hours of work for men from both cohorts most notably men s labor supply and wage rates increase more in response to the births of sons than to the births of daughters

an evolutionary analysis of industrial districts the changing multiplicity of production know how nuclei this paper deals with the evolution of place based division of labour considering in particular the dynamics of differentiated pools of knowledge that can be embedded in local production systems such as industrial districts drawing on conceptual framework of marshallian industrial districts the paper develops a model that links knowledge dynamics to possible tendencies towards either industrial progress lock in transition or decline of such systems the model is complemented by a related new statistical method that allows us to analyse the evolution of the multiplicity of production know how nuclei inside industrial districts the methodology is applied to two cases the ceramics district of stoke on trent uk and the textile district of prato ita over the period 2005 2013

forced commerce and agrarian growth abstract the paper explains why contractually interlocked agrarian markets differ from price and quantity adjustments under pressures of excess demand supply in neoclassical general equilibrium analysis such contractual interlocking arising say from the indebtedness of the peasants gives rise to a contrived system of forced commerce this commercial mode of exploitation not only exhibits unequal relations of economic power but more important it is also a mechanism for maintaining such unequal power structure often at the cost of retarding agrarian growth the paper thus emphasizes the need to understand the very notion of market exchange and commerce in backward agriculture from an unconventional viewpoint

do husbands and wives pool their resources further evidence this paper replicates results of an article showing that families with children increased expenditures on women s clothing relative to men s after implementation of a policy that shifted a child subsidy payment from the father to the mother these results were interpreted as evidence that families do not pool their income but allocate consumption based on income source however the current paper also finds an increase in relative spending on women s clothing among childless couples a sample the policy change did not impact alternative explanations are explored for observing these patterns but none can rule out either bargaining or income pooling

a theory of expropriation and deviations from perfect capital mobility there are many reasons why commodity trade fails to equate the rewards to factors of production in different countries consequently there is an incentive for factor movements between countries while movements of factors especially capital are important in the world economy they have not been sufficient to equate factor returns among countries the failure of capital flows to equate returns to capital is frequently attributed to political risks and left outside the sphere of economic analysis specifically investments abroad especially in ldc s are said to be more subject to the risk of expropriation or at least to unpredictable changes in the tax and exchange control regime adopted by the host country fears of foreign investors have often been realised williams i975 estimates that about 20 of the value of foreign investments carried into or made during i956 72 in ldc s was expropriated without compensation in this period in the past researchers in disciplines other than economics have been responsible for most of the analysis of expropriations we argue that an important set of economic considerations affect the nature of these impediments to capital mobility and this paper provides a theory of expropriation based on maximising behaviour by host countries and investors we use this theory to identify industry and national characteristics increasing the threat of expropriation and implying large deviations from equal returns on capital and to examine host country and home country policies minimising distortions from the threat of expropriation three broad conclusions follow from the analysis first the threat of expropriation can significantly distort the international allocation of capital even if the act of expropriation is relatively rare in the extreme acts of expropriation would never occur in a world of perfect foresight and rational decision making yet actions by investors to ensure that countries do not expropriate would be distorting second the ability of a country s government to expropriate foreign investments may actually reduce its welfare furthermore a host may be better off if home governments can retaliate against an expropriating country indeed an increase in the penalty imposed on an expropriating country may increase its welfare a government s power to expropriate after investments are made may alasdair smith and an associate editor made numerous valuable suggestions we would also like to thank g m grossman r w jones l a sjaastad n h stern and j e stiglitz for comments much of eaton s work on this paper was completed while he was a visitor at the graduate institute for international studies geneva an earlier version of this paper appeared under the same title as rpds

credit constraints credit unions and small scale producers in guatemala abstract efficient and equitable development outcomes may depend in part on whether formal financial institutions leave low wealth producers tightly constrained in their access to credit if so can cooperative institutions efficiently relax these constraints these issues are explored using survey data gathered from 950 small scale producer households in areas of guatemala with market oriented credit unions that mobilize savings and make unsubsidized loans nonprice rationing by banks is found to be common among lower wealth households while credit unions relax credit constraints for a significant portion of those rationed by banks but not the poorest of the study households

interlocking transactions obstacles precursors or instruments of agrarian capitalism abstract rural labor arrangements often change rapidly and in ways that prevailing theories cannot explain explicit understanding of the exercise of power in rural society sheds considerable light on how and why rural labor arrangements change in the course of economic development this paper shows how different labor tying arrangements embody exclusionary mechanisms that can serve as instruments of both labor management and social control macro political and economic conditions shape the ways in which these mechanisms operate and are in turn influenced by them viewing labor arrangements in this way helps resolve problems confronted by the prevailing theories and allows for a broader understanding of dynamic processes

a life cycle consistent empirical model of family labour supply using cross section data this paper estimates a utility maximising model of the joint determination of male and female labour supplies using a sample of married couples from the u k family expenditure survey the emphasis is on the estimation of within period preferences that are consistent with intertemporal two stage budgeting under uncertainty however the approach we adopt provides an alternative method of estimating certain aspects of life cycle behaviour to the fixed effects constant approach of heckman and macurdy 1980 macurdy 1981 and browning deaton and irish 1985 moreover it relaxes some of the underlying restrictions that are implicit in these constant models under uncertainty

what s different about banks abstract negotiable certificates of deposit cd s trade in the capital market in competition with other securities like commercial paper and bankers acceptances if cd s must pay lenders competitive monetary interest the reserve tax on cd s is borne by bank borrowers viability of the tax means there must be something special about bank loans that makes some borrowers willing to pay higher interest rates than those on other securities of equivalent risk moreover there must be something special about banks that prevents other intermediaries from competing to assure that it never pays to finance loans with cd s

do husbands and wives pool their resources evidence from the united kingdom child benefit common preference models of family behavior imply income pooling a restriction on family demand functions such that only the sum of husband s income and wife s income affects the allocation of goods and time testing the pooling hypothesis is difficult because most family income sources are not exogenous to the allocations being analyzed in this paper we present an alternative test based on a natural experiment a policy change in the united kingdom that transferred a substantial child allowance to wives in the late 1970s using family expenditure survey data we find strong evidence that a shift toward greater expenditures on women s clothing and children s clothing relative to men s clothing coincided with this income redistribution

interest rates in backward agriculture the role of economic and extra economic control this paper examines the nature and roles of personalized control exercised by the rural moneylender over a class of poor borrowers to extract as much as possible in the form of high interest charges and income from undervalued and or forfeited collaterals based on primary survey data from rural india it analyzes the strategies adopted by the lender through economic and extra economic instruments to enforce the credit contracts to accomplish his goals it also provides a vivid picture of the variations in the level of interest rates and the reasons for it across a class of borrowers in the sample copyright 1990 by oxford university press

market failure and control of labour power towards an explanation of structure and change in indian agriculture part 1 1 although existing approaches do on occasion shed light on certain specific aspects of indian agriculture in general they run into problems of methodology or content or more frequently both in particular it is misleading to treat indian agri culture in peasant economy no markets or neoclassical perfect market terms and problematic to view it as semi feudal markets subordinate to extra economic factors 2 analysis of the relationships between farm size land productivity sharecropping and mechanisation suggest the need for an integrated model which emphasises both the unemployment and poverty of poor peasants and the problems of supervision and control of wage labour and tenants 3 proper appreciation of the interlinked role of these factors can help to explain the system s inability to combine the abundant labour of the poor with resources owned largely by the rich it can also go on to explain institutional responses like sharecropping as partial solutions to the problem of intensifying labour use and technological ones such as mechanisation as a means of delinking large farm growth from the need to intensify labour use 4 the tensions and choices between these responses underlie both the problem of stagnation and the phenomenon of switches from sharecropping to mechanisation 5 for associated reasons more rapid growth in indian agriculture is unlikely without major institutional changes to create much new employment and is likely to be more capital intensive than is usually assumed

interlinked contracts and social power patronage and exploitation in india s waste recovery market abstract interlinked contracts have been examined almost exclusively in the context of the rural sphere this article describes the nature of exchange regimes between two sets of primary collectors of recyclable waste that is waste pickers and itinerant buyers and their dealers in the city of delhi far from the casualised labour transaction commonly described for the unorganised urban sector the findings portray a picture of personalised and surprisingly long term exchange between the parties while a new institutional economics approach might explain the underlying motivation and consequent general form of the implicit contracts it cannot explain the differential nature of each it is suggested that in order to do that a political economy approach must be taken this would understand interlinked transactions as being embedded within and consequently influenced by the particular social context in this case of an inequitable and impermeable caste hierarchy amongst those that engage in waste work

moral hazard and nonmarket institutions dysfunctional crowding out or peer monitoring the authors examine a situation in which insurance is characterized by moral hazard when market insurance is provided supplementary mutual assistance between family and friends unobservable to market insurers will occur when nonmarket insurers have no better information than market insurers the mutual assistance not only crowds out market insurance but is also harmful and therefore dysfunctional alternatively when nonmarket insurers can observe each other s effort perfectly mutual assistance is beneficial these results point to the potential importance of peer monitoring mechanisms in mitigating moral hazard copyright 1991 by american economic association

do migrants really save more understanding the impact of remittances on savings in rural china abstract this article studies the impact of remittances on the savings behaviour of rural households in china using a primary survey undertaken by the authors in 2006 allowing for endogeneity and left censoring of remittances we find that the marginal propensity to save out of remittances is well below half of that out of other sources of incomes moreover we find no evidence of any direct effect of remittances on either capital input or gross output of farm production these findings are robust with respect to alternative definition of savings and are in line with recent studies which conclude that remittances are largely used for consumption purposes by rural chinese households

expenditure response to increases in in kind transfers evidence from the supplemental nutrition assistance program recent studies on food stamp participant households marginal propensity to spend out of food stamps versus income have had contradictory results experimental studies have found household behavior aligns with standard economic theory where households marginal propensity to spend on food out of food stamps is equivalent to cash income observational studies nd that households have a larger marginal propensity to spend out of food stamps than cash income in this study we re examine this question by estimating how an unprecedentedly large increase in food stamp benets due to the implementation of the american recovery and reinvestment act aects food at home expenditure we nd that the policy change caused households to increase food at home expenditure as well as increase households share of total expenditure allocated toward food at home expenditure we compare these results to a time period without a meaningful food stamp policy change and nd our results are unique to the arra implementation time period

the hazards of piecemeal reform british civil courts and the credit market in colonial india abstract the colonial experience of developing countries provides valuable evidence regarding the impact of legal and institutional innovations on economic growth however there has been little effort by economists to study colonial policies to gain theoretical insights into the process of institutional reform this paper considers the introduction of civil courts in colonial india and its impact on agricultural credit markets in the bombay deccan drawing on historical records and a formal analysis of the credit market the paper finds that the reform led to increased competition among lenders ex ante we expect that this would have raised farmers welfare but increased competition also reduced lenders incentives to subsidize farmers investments in times of crisis leaving them more vulnerable in bad times

targeting child labor in debt bondage evidence theory and policy implications despite recent multilateral efforts to single out child labor in debt bondage as one of the worst forms of child labor several important questions have yet to be addressed how pervasive is the phenomenon are there systematic correlations between the incidence of children in debt bondage and the economic legislative and financial development indicators of the economy how does an understanding of these correlates affect the way national and international policy measures aimed at targeting this form of child labor are perceived this article addresses each of these questions the empirical findings suggest strong correlation between the likelihood of the incidence of child labor in debt bondage with the stage of development of an economy the stage of financial development and enforcement of core labor rights building on this evidence the article presents a theoretical model that highlights the drawbacks and merits of a number of policies aimed at putting checks on child labor in debt bondage

from local networks of smes to virtual districts evidence from recent trends in italy abstract industrial districts as local networks of small and medium enterprises smes rooted their competitiveness in a mix of economic relationships and social ties recently network technologies have promised gains of efficiency through a reduction in transaction costs and showed new commercial opportunities for small firms despite the morphological similarities between industrial districts and network technologies a longitudinal analysis of ict diffusion within italian districts shows that the foreseen convergence between the district economic model and new technologies should not be taken for granted the observed specific evolutionary paths concerning technology innovation in local systems also opens up issues of economic policy

empirical models of political risks in u s oil production operations in venezuela in 9 of the years between 1961 and 1978 venezuelan regimes took actions adverse to the profitability of u s oil companies local production operations in this study 2 time series discriminant models were developed for classifying each of the 18 years according to the occurrence of such action in the first model adverse government action was found more likely to occur following years of economic decline and periods when u s companies earned high profits from petroleum investments in venezuela in the second model government action tended to occur after periods of relative deprivation experienced by venezuelans to illustrate the use of discriminant models in forecasting political risks hypothetical scenarios were formulated from which projections were made through 1985 of the likelihood of government action against those u s oil companies operations remaining since the nationalization of petroleum

the effects of benefit timing and income fungibility on food purchasing decisions among supplemental nutrition assistance program households the supplemental nutrition assistance program snap is the largest nutritional safety net in the united states prior research has found that participants have higher consumption shortly after receiving their benefits followed by lower consumption towards the end of the benefit month known as the snap benefit cycle this consumption pattern has been found to have negative effects on beneficiaries we hypothesize two behavioral responses of snap participants may work in tandem to drive much of the cycle 1 short run impatience a higher preference to consume today and 2 fungibility of income the degree of substitutability between a snap dollar and a cash dollar using data from the national food acquisition and purchase survey foodaps a newly developed nationally representative survey of daily food acquisitions by snap households we find evidence of both behavioral responses however the degree of short run impatience and fungibility of income is found to differ significantly across poverty levels and use of grocery lists to plan food purchases snap households could gain from food purchase planning education

where did all the remittances go understanding the impact of remittances on consumption patterns in rural china we focus on the impact of migrants remittances on consumption patterns in china using a large homogenous sample of rural households surveyed in 2001 and 2004 we find that remittances are spent on nonhousing consumption expenditures at the margin virtually dollar for dollar when we instrument remittances and local employed earnings using proxies of social networks our findings are robust to intra household division of labour and to fixed effect for the county in which the respondents are registered these results imply that rural households largely take remittances as permanent income and are consistent with the prevalence of circular and repeat migration in china

does parents money matter abstract this paper asks whether parents income per se has a positive impact on children s abilities previous research has established that income is positively correlated across generations this does not prove that parents money matters however since income is presumably correlated with ability this paper estimates the impact of parents income by focusing on income variation due to factors union industry and job loss that arguably represent luck i find that changes in parents income due to luck have a negligible impact on children s human capital for most families although parents money does matter for families whose father has low education

informal sector and informal capital market in a small open less developed economy abstract a three sector static model of a small open economy has been developed with special consideration to the urban informal sector and the informal capital market informal capital is mobile between the rural sector and the urban informal sector policy effects in this model appear to be different from those analysed in other three sector models

who benefits from child benefit governments over much of the developed world make significant financial transfers to parents with dependent children for example in the united states the recently introduced child tax credit ctc which goes to almost all children costs almost 1 billion each week or about 0 4 of gnp the united kingdom has even more generous transfers and spends an average of about 30 a week on each of about 8 million children about 1 of gnp the typical rationale given for these transfers is that they are good for our children and here we investigate the effect of such transfers on household spending patterns in the united kingdom such transfers known as child benefit cb have been simple lump sum universal payments for a continuous period of more than 20 years we do indeed find that cb is spent differently from other income paradoxically it appears to be spent disproportionately on adult assignable goods in fact we estimate that as much as half of a marginal dollar of cb is spent on alcohol we resolve this puzzle by showing that the effect is confined to unanticipated variation in cb so we infer that parents are sufficiently altruistic toward their children that they completely insure them against shocks

the role of input vouchers in modernizing the fresh fruit and vegetable market in turkey contractual arrangements between farmers and traders aiming at providing input credit in return for output selling have been widely studied in the literature on agricultural economics nonetheless there is one issue which is barely mentioned in the literature how to enforce the contract terms when traders offer credit in cash rather than input advances this article aims to describe an innovation in farming contracts used by fresh fruit and vegetable wholesalers in turkey which involves a kind of private voucher system drawing on original data collected from wholesalers a segment in the supply chain hardly covered in the literature we investigate the factors determining contract adoption using a two limit tobit model our results suggest that this private voucher system contributes to supply chain coordination and facilitates smallholder farmer participation in export and supermarket channels which are growing rapidly in this developing country resume d auteur

child health and household resources in south africa evidence from the old age pension program this paper presents nonparametric evidence on the effects of the expansion of the old age pension program in south africa on child health did this increase in household resources improve child health and nutrition does the gender of the recipient of the pension affect its impact the answers to these questions have very important policy implications there is evidence that inadequate nutrition during childhood and even in utero affects long term physical development as well as the development of cognitive skills this in turn affects productivity later in life see partha dasgupta 1993 john strauss and duncan thomas 1998 t paul schultz 1999 in the united states the evidence suggests that monetary transfers to the poor have very little impact on child welfare janet currie 1995 susan mayer 1997 however the effects of parental income and monetary transfers on child outcomes are likely to be of greater magnitude among poor households in developing countries the south african pension program provides an unusual opportunity to evaluate the possible effects of such a monetary transfer this paper exploits the rapid increase in the coverage and benefits of the old age pension program in south africa which took place in the early 1990 s anne case and angus deaton 1998 at the end of the apartheid era the government committed to achieving parity of benefits and eligibility requirements between whites and africans this was achieved mostly by increasing the benefits received by the africans in 1993 80 percent of african women above age 60 and 77 percent of african men above 65 received the pension the maximum benefit of 370 rands per month aproximately 3 per day was equal to half of the minimum wage and about twice the median income per capita in rural areas due to living arrangements inherited from the apartheid era close to onethird of african children under the age of 5 currently live with a pension recipient children who live with a pension recipient tend to come from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds as a consequence they tend to be smaller than other children their age to estimate the effect of receiving a pension on the anthropometric status of children this paper exploits the fact that height reflects accumulated investments in child nutrition the larger the proportion of her life during which a child is well nourished the taller she will be given her age due to the expansion of the program in the early 1990 s individuals of qualified age became more likely to receive a pension and the benefits became substantially larger thus children born after the expansion of the program are more likely to have spent a larger fraction of their lives wellnourished if they live with a pension recipient to the extent that the pension resulted in improved nutrition in this paper i present nonparametric evidence of the program s effect on nutrition based on this observation

what really happened to child poverty in the uk under labour s first term child poverty in britain fell in labour s first term though by much less than micro simulation exercises suggested nonetheless the decline is statistically significant and is greater if measured just in the last 6 months of 2000 1 rather than the whole year the decline also proves robust to the choice of poverty line although that which the government has emphasised 60 of contemporary income shows a somewhat bigger drop than any other than any other poverty line that is a fraction of median income among those who remain poor the average shortfall in measured income below the poverty line has increased since 1996 7 looking ahead the methodology currently used in official poverty statistics may limit the potential to reduce child poverty significantly further

targeting child labor in debt bondage despite recent multilateral efforts to single out child labor in debt bondage as one of the worst forms of child labor several important questions have yet to be addressed how pervasive is the phenomenon are there systematic correlations between the incidence of children in debt bondage and the economic legislative and financial development indicators of the economy how does an understanding of these correlates affect the way national and international policy measures aimed at targeting this form of child labor are perceived this article addresses each of these questions the empirical findings suggest strong correlation between the likelihood of the incidence of child labor in debt bondage with the stage of development of an economy the stage of financial development and enforcement of core labor rights building on this evidence the article presents a theoretical model that highlights the drawbacks and merits of a number of policies aimed at putting checks on child labor in debt bondage

trust and inter firm relations in developing and transition economies the role of trust in facilitating economic growth has been highlighted in previous contributions to this journal in order to take this debate forward this article argues 1 that more attention needs to be given to the relationship between sanctions and trust and 2 that it is worth distinguishing between the minimal trust for making markets effective and the extended trust required for deeper kinds of inter firm co operation to work the article goes on to ask why minimal trust is lacking and so hard to construct in the republics of the former soviet union it then examines how extended trust grows or can be made to grow in industrial supply chains and clusters in developing countries

interest rates collateral and de interlinkage a micro study of rural credit in west bengal this study based on a primary field survey in rural west bengal analyses the terms and conditions of the differentiated structure of rural credit with the advent of capitalist agriculture within the interventionist state the sample households are classified according to the economic classes of patnaik as well as the standard acreage criterion the possibility of interlinkage between credit and all other structures is remote the average rate of interest is inversely related to ascending class status there is a systematic association between rate of interest and the value of collateral on the one hand and marketability of collateral and interest rates on the other

food marketing liberalization and trader entry evidence from madagascar abstract food marketing liberalization was expected to induce massive trader entry and competitive markets in africa despite evidence of trader entry enterprise expansion remains difficult and many claim market power persists though perhaps in different hands this paper confronts this puzzle of substantial market entry that might not foster competition data from madagascar reveal distinct groups within rural food marketing channels separated by intraindustry mobility barriers that limit entry to a few niches moreover individuals place within the rural marketing network is defined largely by a priori social identity so the experience of food marketing liberalization varies across socially distinct subpopulations

microfinance and investment a comparison with bank and informal lending summary comparing the impact of different types of credit on households investment in bangladesh we find that loans from microfinance institutions are likely to be channeled toward non agricultural activities while both informal and bank lending are associated to a higher expenditure in agricultural inputs estimated effects are net of the differences in the amount borrowed interest rates and collateral results suggest that features which are specific to microfinance such as tight repayment schedules and land based eligibility rules may reduce the suitability of this source of funds for the farming sector

segmentation collateral undervaluation and the rate of interest in agrarian credit markets some evidence from two villages in south india this paper examines certain issues pertaining to the structure of agrarian credit markets in developing countries using empirical evidence on credit transactions from two villages in south india first the bases for the segmentation between formal and informal sectors of the credit market are identified as being 1 the type of collateral offered on credit contracts and 2 the purpose for which credit is taken secondly the paper shows the occurrence of a systematic association between rates of interest and types of collateral the evidence supports the hypothesis that lower marketability of collateral security and hence higher undervaluation increases the rate of interest charged on a loan thirdly the evidence shows an inverse relationship between the value of land owned by a borrower and the rate of interest on a credit contract copyright 1991 by oxford university press

a fresh look at the rotten kid theorem and other household mysteries gary becker s rotten kid theorem asserts that if all family members receive gifts of money income from a benevolent household member then even if the household head does not precommit to an incentive plan for family members it will be in the interest of selfish family members to maximize total family income i show by examples that the rotten kid theorem is not true without assuming transferable utility i find a simple condition on utility functions that is necessary and sufficient for there to be the kind of transferable utility needed for a rotten kid theorem while restrictive these conditions still allow one to apply the strong conclusions of the rotten kid theorem in an interesting class of examples

policies for the development of knowledge intensive local production systems starting from the empirical literature concerning the analysis of industrial districts this paper focuses on the importance of industrial policies in supporting the development and consolidation of local production systems here institutions and markets are envisaged as equally important for long term performance the objective is to propose a conceptual framework for the formulation of public policies that places organisational learning at the centre of interest

local financial development and the trade credit policy of italian smes we investigate the relation between local financial development and trade credit in an integrated financial market our results suggest that trade credit complements the formal finance of small and medium sized enterprises smes at the local level provincial banking development in italy increases the provision of trade credit by smes and stimulates the redistribution of loans via trade credit however cooperative banking reduces the use of trade credit at the local level evidence shows that lower levels of provincial banking development are linked with a stronger decline in trade credit at the start of the global financial crisis we also find that smes in provinces with industrial districts use more trade credit our results confirm that local differences in banking development and the trade credit policy of smes within countries matter adding to earlier findings that the provision of trade credit is complementary to the development of financial institutions at the country level

implicit interest rates usury and isolation in backward agriculture the unusually high interest rates in many backward agricultural regions have been a source of some puzzlement to economists adding to this puzzle is the fact that these rates can take on a wide range of values often within the same region one important question is why arbitrage between sectors does not lead to more homogeneous and lower interest rates the traditional answer to this is in terms of lender s risk it is argued that moneylenders in backward regions face a great risk of default and once this is taken into account the effective interest rate turns out to be no higher than its counterpart in the organised sector consequently there is no real room for arbitrage and the high interest rates are equilibrium prices while this explanation may be of use in some situations it is in general inadequate and can even be misleading the reason which novelists describing rural india have repeatedly written about is that in these financial transactions the lender s risk frequently ranges from minimal to non existent because the personalised relation between the borrower and the lender enables the latter to extract the defaulted loan in the form of asset transfers from the borrower in a somewhat stylised manner these deals could be thought of as follows a peasant takes a loan from his employer keeping some of his assets like land a standing crop or even the promise of labour services as security or collateral a collateral price is then fixed this is the conversion price used to calculate the amount of collateral that has to be relinquished to the lender given a certain amount of default clearly the lower the collateral price the larger the quantity of collateral that the peasant has to forfeit hence the underpricing of collateral amounts to the charging of an implicit interest a widespread feature of rural credit markets reported in many diverse studies bardhan and rudra 1978 myint 1964 raj 1981 roth 1979 and sivakumar 1978 to mention just a few is the underpricing of collateral an interesting attempt to bring collateral explicitly into a model of usury was made by bhaduri 1977 see also 1983 who argued that one of the reasons why landlords raise interest rates is in fact to encourage default and to claim ownership of the asset kept as collateral a sharp contrast to the lender s risk model this hypothesis has deservedly received much attention 1

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

expropriation of foreign direct investments empirical evidence and implications for the debt crisis the message from the empirical tests is the following first we were not able to support the public interest hypothesis stating that selective expropriations are driven by a national welfare calculus with costs and benefits directly related to the technological characteristics of foreign firms instead the hypothesis that governments decide on expropriations with regard to their political self interest seems to be more appropriate this is true if we look at more widespread expropriations that are unspecific in terms of technological standards industries the main factor that drives politically motivated expropriations is the poor overall economic performance of a country which reinforces earlier findings e g picht 1988 351

economic returns to social power merchants finance and interlinkage in the grain markets of bangladesh abstract the paper describes contrasting forms of interlinked transaction and the exchange regimes in which they are situated in two rural areas of bangladesh a fast growing green revolution area and a slow growing backward area some interlinkages fix output and finance prices for producers others establish personalized monopsony in trade the implication for rates of return and vulnerability of the different forms of interlinked transaction are explored perverse risk transfer from less to more vulnerable parties is found particularly when interlinkages are combined the market structures described appear to emerge not from government intervention but from the uneven distribution of local power and are thus unlikely to be improved by structural adjustment reforms or by price focused policies

against parsimony three easy ways of complicating some categories of economic discourse economics as a science of human behavior has been grounded in a remarkably parsimonious postulate that of the self interested isolated individual who chooses freely and rationally between alternative courses of action after computing their prospective costs and benefits in recent decades a group of economists has shown considerable industry and ingenuity in applying this way of interpreting the social world to a series of ostensibly noneconomic phenomena from crime to the family and from collective action to democracy the economic or rational actor approach has yielded some important insights but its onward sweep has also revealed some of its intrinsic weaknesses as a result it has become possible to mount a critique which ironically can be carried all the way back to the heartland of the would be conquering discipline that the economic approach presents us with too simpleminded an account of even such fundamental economic processes as consumption and production is the basic thesis of the present paper this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

trust networks and norms the creation of social capital in agricultural economies in ghana this paper contributes to the continuing debate over the multifaceted concept of trust and its ability to provide a richer explanation of processes of economic activity using case studies of agricultural production marketing and financing systems in brong ahafo region of ghana the analysis documents the means by which trust is created among farmers traders and agricultural input suppliers the mechanisms include formal and informal networks of working relations customer friendships pre existing networks and intermediaries the study shows that trust is necessary for the development of a vibrant private sector based on microenterprises in conditions where actors cannot rely on formal legal institutions at present

sharecropping and the interlinking of agrarian markets one of the often noted features of less developed agrarian economies is the existence of interlinkages among the land labor credit and product markets the landlord is often the supplier of credit he frequently purchases and markets the output of the tenant farmers and often sells raw materials and even consumption goods to his tenant farmers how can this phenomenon be explained what are the welfare consequences of attempts to restrict these practices which often seem to constitute restraints on free trade these are the questions to which this paper is addressed a general set of arguments applicable to both competitive and noncompetitive environments are presented to situations where all the terms of the contract are determined in an optimal way as well as to situations where many of the terms are specified institutionally section i examines interlinked credit and tenancy contracts section ii examines interlinked marketing and tenancy contracts section iii points out the possible interlinking between labor contracts and consumption goods markets and section iv presents the different equilibrium frameworks discussed in the paper such as monopoly monopsony competition and equilibria with surplus labor

the labeling effect of a child benefit system child benefit systems exist in many countries while they show a lot of differences in terms of eligibility rules amounts involved and implementation tax deduction tax credit or direct benefit the common motivation for their existence is to increase children s welfare in the dutch child benefit system the case i focus on in this paperone of the parents usually the mother is entitled to an untaxed child benefit amount which only depends on the child s age and the number of children in the household thus child support does not depend on household income marital status or labor market status as a result child benefit is exogenous to the household given the presence of children this is in contrast with the situation in many other countries including germany france the united kingdom and the united states where government provided child support is partly means tested see jonathan bradshaw et al 1993 in the netherlands child benefit is generally a nonnegligible addition to the household income the median share of child benefit in the total net income of households with children is 8 percent on the national level expenditures on child benefits amount to 1 2 percent of gnp the use of the child benefit is completely at the discretion of the parent there are no legal requirements that a certain amount be spent on particular goods or services nor does the government provide any guidelines regarding expenditure on children a policy question that arises is to what extent children benefit from child benefits standard microeconomic demand theory allows no role for effects of the composition of income given the fungibility of income sources it is only the sum of income components that is relevant in explaining expenditure patterns thus within that framework the answer would be that the marginal propensity to consume child goods from one guilder of child benefits is no different than from one guilder of any other income source in the more general class of gametheoretic models of household behavior however the composition of household income will generally affect expenditure patterns see e g shelly j lundberg and robert a pollak 1993 and martin browning et al 1994 if fathers and mothers have different preferences and mothers have control over child benefits the effect of child benefits on expenditures will differ from the effect of other income sources lundberg et al 1997 provide empirical evidence showing that a transfer of control over child benefits from fathers to mothers in the united kingdom due to a change in legislation resulted in a significant increase in expenditures on child clothing daniela del boca and christopher j flinn 1994 have analyzed the effect of income composition on expenditure decisions of divorced mothers they find that the coefficients associated with child support and alimony income differ from those for other income in engel curves for expenditures on childspecific goods their results can be explained in terms of a noncooperative nash model in which the child support transfer decisions of the noncustodial father and the expenditure decisions of the mother are determined simultaneously in contrast to del boca and flinn s analysis in which child support is a decision variable the present paper focuses on the possible differential effect of government provided child support which is truly exogenous in this paper i analyze the effects of child benefits on expenditures by running regressions in which child benefit enters as a separate explanatory variable the enipirical analysis is based on a time series of 17 cross section consumer expenditure surveys in the netherlands covering the period 1978 through 1994 it is important to note that in a single cross section it department of economics university of groningen p o b 800 9700 av groningen the netherlands e mail p kooreman eco rug nl i am indebted to two anonymous referees for constructive comments helpful comments were also provided by rob alessie maarten allers chris bojke werner de bondt bert schoonbeek and tom wansbeek i thank vincent linderhof for organizing the data financial support was provided by the dutch organization for scientific research nwo homes project grant

what s mine is yours the influence of male and female incomes on patterns of household expenditure this paper uses microdata from the 1992 statistics canada family expenditure survey to provide evidence that male and female incomes do not always exert identical influences on household expenditures the novelty of the paper lies in its demonstration that while incomes may be pooled for some categories of consumption e g housing the income pooling hypothesis must be rejected for others we also go beyond simply rejecting the pooling hypothesis to ask how male versus female income is used our results stress the on going importance of traditional gender roles for example we find that expenditures on child care increase only with women s incomes higher male income is not associated with higher expenditure on child care even when both spouses are full time full year paid workers

an inquiry into quasi credit contracts the role of reciprocal credit and interlinked deals in small scale fishing communities in agrarian village societies beset with many hazards and uncertainties people evolve various means of coping with risk what is perhaps less known is that credit transactions can sometimes serve the function of reducing risk in such societies this article is concerned with examining several insurance motivated credit arrangements in small scale fishing communities a hunger insurance mechanism of reciprocal credit and a system of interlinked contracts aimed at insuring against risks in the spheres of labour and marketing relations will be extensively dealt with moreover the concept of triadic relationships will be shown to have special relevance in the case of traditional insurance arrangements aiming at controlling problems of moral hazard

rural credit markets and institutions in developing countries lessons for policy analysis from practice and modern theory this article presents evidence of the failure of government intervention in rural credit markets of ldcs in the past three decades it then shows how lessons for policy analysis can be drawn from modern theory particularly those theories focussing on credit rationing in competitive markets and interlinking of credit contracts with labor and land contracts the article outlines the policy implications of these theories and finds them insufficient to account for the empirical evidence it contends that a more systematic and rigorous analysis of institutions and institutional environments is essential for understanding and implementing effective policy reforms of rural credit markets it presents suggestions for undertaking such an analysis

spatial proximity and firm survival in a declining industrial district the case of knitwear firms in baden wu rttemberg the literature on small firm networks in industrial districts postulates the importance of territorial proximity for business innovation and regional development but empirical research to test this proposition is sparse while there is some research on the extent of interfirm co operation little is known about the performance outcomes of co operation i develop competing hypotheses from institutional ecological and random action theories concerning the survival chances of firms located in geographic proximity and test them with data on the complete population of knitwear firms in baden wurttemberg germany for the period from 1960 to 1998 proportional hazard estimates show that location in clusters of firms in the same industry increased business failure rates and location in diversified clusters of firms operating in complementary industries reduced failure rates the empirical results are most consistent with the ecological model of localized competition in resource environments la documentation

determinants of relative poverty in advanced capitalist democracies using relative poverty measures based on micro level data from the luxembourg income study in conjunction with pooled time series data for 14 advanced capitalist democracies between 1970 and 1997 the authors analyze separately the rate of pretax transfer poverty and the reduction in poverty achieved by systems of taxes and transfers socioeconomic factors including de industrialization and unemployment largely explain pre tax transfer poverty rates of the working age population in these advanced capitalist democracies the extent of redistribution measured as poverty reduction via taxes and transfers is explained directly by welfare state generosity and constitutional structure number of veto points and the strength of the political left both in unions and in government

the market for land an analysis of interim transactions abstract an interim sale is a sale undertaken with the intention of buying back the same good in the near future interim transactions play a prominent role in several markets and they tend to generate multiple equilibria such markets can get caught at a low turnover equilibrium it is alleged that in many ldcs the market for buying and selling land is extremely inactive an interim transactions model is constructed to explain this phenomenon wider issues in land markets including distress sales are analysed as well the model is applied also to labour tying and seasonality in backward agriculture

exit voice and the evolution of industrial districts the case of the post world war ii economic development of prato in this paper the hirschmanian exit voice approach is applied to the development of industrial districts the analysis of the post world war ii evolution of the prato district helps to make explicit how the industrial district competitive advantage can be reproduced over time during periods of regular development in addition the exit voice polarity helps in understanding also the specific difficulties that industrial districts face in responding to major changes in their external circumstances in particular the case examined sheds light on the role that conscious collective action has in permitting the successful adjustment of a local system

testing market integration a model of spatial price differentials for a tradable good is proposed which avoids the inferential dangers of received methods using static price correlations the proposed method also extracts more information on the causes of price differentials from the same data the method is illustrated using monthly rice price data for postindependence bangladesh including the very substantial regional price shocks during the 1974 famine impediments to market integration are indicated

child poverty in britain and the united states child poverty rose sharply in britain and the us in the period preceding the blair and clinton governments so that over a third of children were in poverty in both countries demographic change falls in work and increasing wage inequality all contributed to this rise in britain with benefit changes having an offsetting effect in the us demographic and wages changes were the drivers both administrations acted with a range of welfare reforms aimed at increasing work incentives and in britain benefits for those not working were also raised child poverty fell under the blair and clinton governments with work and benefit changes explaining most of the fall in britain and work and demographic change the us fall

from ascribed to earned trust in exporting clusters abstract this paper is concerned with the role of trust in export manufacturing it asks how trust has developed in two industrial clusters which are located in developing countries and export most of their output to north america and europe the main conclusion is that trust was based initially on socio cultural ties between clustered firms and later on conscious investments in inter firm relationships