smallholder market participation concepts and evidence from eastern and southern africa abstract this paper reviews the evidence on smallholder market participation with a focus on staple foodgrains i e cereals in eastern and southern africa in an effort to help better identify what interventions are most likely to break smallholders out of the semi subsistence poverty trap that appears to ensnare much of rural africa the conceptual and empirical evidence suggests that interventions aimed at facilitating smallholder organization at reducing the costs of intermarket commerce and perhaps especially at improving poorer households access to improved technologies and productive assets are central to stimulating smallholder market participation and escape from semi subsistence poverty traps macroeconomic and trade policy tools appear less useful in inducing market participation by poor smallholders in the region

the effects of real exchange rate depreciation on stochastic producer prices in low income agriculture abstract this paper considers the effects of real exchange rate depreciation on stochastic agricultural producer prices in low income agriculture conventional wisdom that real depreciation achieved through nominal currency devaluation stimulates tradables production does not universally hold in the presence of stochastic prices in fact real depreciation is only stimulative in two cases importables that remain importable and nontradables that become exportable garch estimation of time series price data on several commodities from madagascar support the hypotheses generated by the analytical model

immiserized growth in liberalized agriculture abstract this paper offers a simple model that reconciles rivalrous claims about liberalization s impact on low income agrarian economies growth can accompany smallholder welfare reduction the model developed here reverses the causality of bhagwati s immiserizing growth model price shocks cause welfare effects that drive output response rather than output shocks causing price shocks and then welfare effects as in the trade theoretic original immiserized growth seems a plausible explanation for some important cases e g the malagasay case considered here in which liberalization appears to have engendered both real agricultural growth and heightened food security stress among smallholder food producers

marketed surplus under risk do peasants agree with sandmo using a newly defined notion of aversion to income risk the behavior of the marketed surplus producer under price risk is characterized unlike the familiar case first examined by sandmo output depends on both ordinal preferences for goods and on risk attitudes conditions are found that yield an output level under risk that is smaller than under certainty if these conditions do not hold both risk and risk aversion may have a positive effect on output implications for econometric studies of risk attitudes are considered and illustrated with an example finally we examine the effect of uncertainty on the peasant s long run equilibrium

subsistence response to market shocks microeconomic models posit that transaction costs isolate subsistence producers from output market shocks we integrate microeconomic models of many heterogeneous households into a general equilibrium model and show that supply on subsistence farms may respond in apparently perverse ways to changes in output market prices price shocks in markets for staple goods are transmitted to subsistence producers through interactions in factor markets in the case presented a decrease in the market price of maize reduces wages and land rents stimulating maize production by subsistence households however real incomes of subsistence households fall

does public insurance crowd out private insurance the cost of expanding public sector health programs depends critically on the extent to which public eligibility will cover just the uninsured or will crowd out existing private insurance coverage we estimate the extent of crowd out arising from the expansions of medicaid to pregnant women and children over the 1987 1992 period we estimate that approximately 50 percent of the increase in medicaid coverage was associated with a reduction in private insurance coverage this occurred largely because employees took up employer based insurance less frequently there is also some evidence that employers contributed less for insurance and that workers dropped coverage of dependents

agricultural household models extensions applications and policy this book presents the basic model of an agricultural household that underlies most of the case studies undertaken so far the model assumes that households are price takers and is therefore recursive the decisions modeled include those affecting production and the demand for inputs and those affecting consumption and the supply of labor comparative results on selected elasticities are presented for a number of economies the empirical significance of the approach is demonstrated in a comparison of models that treat production and consumption decisions separately and those in which the decisionmaking process is recursive the book summarizes the implications of agricultural pricing policy for the welfare of farm households marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services the rural labor market budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings in addition it is shown that the basic model can be extended in order to explore the effects of government policy on crop composition nutritional status health saving and investment and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the effects on budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings methodological topics primarily the data requirements of the basic model and its extensions along with aggregation market interaction uncertainty and market imperfections are discussed the most important methodological issues the question of the recursive property of these models is also discussed

acreage decisions under risk the case of corn and soybeans an acreage supply response model is developed under expected utility maximization the resulting framework is used to specify and estimate a system of risk responsive acreage equations for corn and soybeans in the united states particular attention is given to the truncation effects of government price supports on the distribution of corn and soybean prices also a wealth variable is included in the acreage equations the empirical results indicate that risk and wealth variables play an important role in cornsoybean acreage decisions the analysis also shows that cross commodity risk reduction is important in acreage allocation decisions

can land market reform mitigate the exclusionary aspects of rapid agro export growth abstract agro export growth has been associated with land concentration and employment instability in the wake of exclusionary agro export booms land market reform has been proposed as a way to improve peasant land access through the market developing a model of the economic competitiveness of different classes of producers this paper evaluates the likely effectiveness of land market reform while the model itself gives ambiguous answers numerical simulation identifies a large gap between market price and peasants abilty to pay for land among the components of land market reform policy progressive land taxation appears unlikely to close that competitiveness gap while farm land mortgage banks appear more likely to mitigate exclusionary aspects of growth

the influence of household composition on household expenditure patterns theory and spanish evidence a concept of demographic separability is proposed that formalizes the notion that there are groups of goods adult goods that have little or no relationship to specific classes of household demographics the numbers or ages of children that there exist adult goods demographically separable from children is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the validity of rothbarth s method for measuring child costs we propose two different methods for testing demographic separability and present results from a 1981 survey of spain the econometric evidence is in fair agreement with the theoretical presuppositions

estimation of a complete system of nonlinear engel curves further evidence from box cox engel curves for sri lanka the specification and estimation of engle curves has drawn much attention over many years since the earliest attempt of working 1943 among the many approaches a complete system of engel curves stood out as more appealing as it explicitly imposes the important budget constraint in the allocation of family budgets further extended researches were undertaken on nonlinear specifications as they are likely to produce results that are closer to the reality than the linear systems beneito 2003 attempted box cox form of nonlinear specification but ended up estimating a set of linear equations using seemingly unrelated regression equations method the present research extends the previous work on engle curves in two ways first by incorporating key demographic characteristics into the determination of expenditures in the specification of the box cox form of nonlinear system and second by using primary micro data from large household surveys to estimate the system by nonlinear estimation methods our esti

engel curves and systems of demand functions abstract the functional forms of the engel curves implied by several popular complete systems of demand functions are discussed among the systems are those generated by generalized quadratic indirect utility the translog system the generalized leontief system etc the linear and quadratic expenditure systems and deaton and muellbauer s pigl and aids a new system which can produce the engel curves of all these systems as special cases is suggested the different engel curves are tested against data from a norwegian survey of consumer expenditure this is done both in a complete system of engel curves for eight commodities and commodity by commodity

gender and household education expenditure in pakistan pakistan has very large gender gaps in educational outcomes one explanation could be that girls receive lower educational expenditure allocations than boys within the household but this has never convincingly been tested this article investigates whether the intra household allocation of educational expenditure in pakistan favours males over females it also explores two different explanations for the failure of the extant engel curve studies to detect gender differentiated treatment in education even where gender bias is strongly expected using individual level data from the latest household survey from pakistan we posit two potential channels of gender bias bias in the decision whether to enrol keep sons and daughters in school and bias in the decision of education expenditure conditional on enrolling both sons and daughters in school in middle and secondary school ages evidence points to significant pro male biases in both the enrolment decision as well as the decision of how much to spend conditional on enrolment however in the primary school age group only the former channel of bias applies results suggest that the observed strong gender difference in education expenditure is a within rather than an across household phenomenon

the scramble in africa reorienting rural livelihoods abstract structural adjustment and market liberalization policies of the past 15 years have accelerated deagrarianization in sub saharan africa peasant producers have veered away from production of traditional export crops and commercial staple foods in rural areas remote from roads and urban markets nonagricultural income diversification has been substituted in the search for much needed cash earnings citing recent village survey evidence this paper argues that the economic restructuring of african smallholders work lives has been accompanied by deep rooted social change divisions of labor and decision making power within peasant households have altered and wealth differentiation between households has deepened depeasantization of the countryside is currently taking place as rural household members of both genders scramble for viable livelihoods

two moment decision models and expected utility maximization two moment decision models are consistent with expected utility maximization only if the choice set or the agent s preferences are restricted this paper identifies a restriction which is sufficient to ensure this consistency and confirms that it holds in many economic models the implications for economic analysis are then derived two different approaches to representing an agent s preferences over strategies yielding random payoffs are in wide use under the mean standard deviation ms approach the agent is assumed to rank the alternatives according to the value of some function defined over the first two moments of the random payoff while the expected utility eu criterion assumes that the expected value of some utility function defined over payoffs is used instead the fact that there are these two competing approaches has generated a considerable literature some authors are concerned with the advantages and disadvantages of each while others deal with conditions under which the potentially different approaches would yield the same results or at least approximately so space does not

informing food security decisions in africa empirical analysis and policy dialogue discussions of economic and agricultural development in africa have focused heavily in recent years on structural adjustment i e basic policy changes aimed at allowing international and domestic markets to play a greater role in coordinating national economic activities often these structural adjustments and accompanying policies aimed at improving economic performance have been based on several implicit assumptions about how african food systems operate yet for many countries little empirical information has been available to test these assumptions hence designing policies too often becomes an exercise in planning without facts this paper argues that not only is there a need to base food security and structural adjustment policies more firmly on empirical information but that the process by which the information is obtained is as important as the information itself agricultural economists and other social scientists can and increasingly should design policy research in africa in ways that simultaneously increase effective demand for empirical information as an input into the ongoing policy process and augment african capacity continually to inform policy deliberations we illustrate the payoffs to such an approach by drawing on selected experience in several african countries weber

price responsiveness efficiency and the impact of structural adjustment on egyptian crop producers abstract this paper examines the role of prices and the impact of the structural adjustment reforms undertaken by the government of egypt in 1986 on the producers of five major crops the results indicate that the program had a positive net impact on the welfare of individual crop producers evaluated as a gain in production efficiency crop profitability was also found to be highly responsive to input and output prices the results highlight the importance of market based prices in agricultural development

peasant household behaviour with missing markets some paradoxes explained a model of peasant household behavior under varying degrees of household specific food and labor market failures is constructed to show that these structural features can explain several well known patterns of peasant response which have often been attributed to peculiar motives presumed specific to peasants the model explains sluggish response to cash crops prices and high instability in perceived food and labor scarcities the key role of manufactured consumer goods prices in stimulating peasants effort in cash crops production the effectiveness of taxation as opposed to incentives in stimulating cash crops production and the key role of technological change in food production to enhance cash crop production results are obtained analytically in the case of one market failure and by numerical simulation with more than one

income elasticities of household expenditures a us cross section perspective two linear engel functions are estimated for household total expenditure and for 15 aggregated classifications of consumer durable non durable and service expenditures one model contains only income as the regressor variable the second model incorporating a broad range of household demographic variables introduces three new regressors number of earners in the household self employment status of the reference person and value of household financial assets utilizing cross section data on annual expenditures income elasticities are derived and compared across models the expanded engel model dramatically strengthens estimates for all expenditure categories and generates income elasticities generally lower than those derived from the simpler engel function

demographic variables in demand analysis in this paper the authors discuss five procedures for incorporating demographic variables into theoretically plausible demand systems translating scaling and the gorman reverse gorman and implicit prais houthakker procedures these five procedures are used to incorporate a single demographic variable the number of children in a household into the generalized ces demand system using household budget data for the united kingdom for the period 1966 1972 excerpt

does medicare save lives health insurance characteristics shift at age 65 as most people become eligible for medicare we measure the impacts of these changes on patients who are admitted to hospitals through emergency departments for conditions with similar admission rates on weekdays and weekends the age profiles of admissions and comorbidities for these patients are smooth at age 65 suggesting that the severity of illness is similar on either side of the medicare threshold in contrast the number of procedures performed in hospitals and total list charges exhibit small but statistically significant discontinuities implying that patients over 65 receive more services we estimate a nearly 1 percentage point drop in 7 day mortality for patients at age 65 equivalent to a 20 reduction in deaths for this severely ill patient group the mortality gap persists for at least 9 months after admission

the microeconomics of the developmental paradox on the political economy of food price policy abstract a longstanding puzzle in comparative economics is the developmental paradox the tendency for government support for agriculture to increase with national income and to decrease with the proportion of economic activity and of the population in agriculture this paper offers a microeconomic explanation for that puzzle it establishes analytically the microeconomic basis for coalition alignments with respect to food price policy then numerically simulates the comparative static effects of alternative food policies on coalition structure a parsimonious household model applied to a heterogeneously endowed society demonstrates how variation in individual welfare effects might beget distinct coalitions in the debate over food price policy and how those policies are inextricably linked to land population and technology policies in food agriculture moreover coalition alignments on particular policy debates are path dependent in particular food price policy creates its own political support

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

food expenditures at home and away from home in the united states a switching regression analysis the results of this study showed that the decision to eat away from home was positively affected by income while the amount spent away from home was only affected by income again positively at higher levels of household income food expenditures at home were similarly affected by income only at higher levels of household income provided the household also ate away from home if the household did not eat away from home food expenditures at home were positively affected by income at all levels the effect decreasing in magnitude with the level of income a significant economic trend in recent vdecades is the declining share of consumer expenditures on food expenditures for food fell steadily from 20 0 of disposable personal income in 1960 to 16 1 in the third quarter of 1983 usda this drop occurred as a result of a decline in the share of consumer expenditures on food purchased for consumption at home the share of consumer expenditures on meals purchased at restaurants cafeterias and fast food chains remained constant at about 4 of disposable personal income hence the consumption of purchased meals away from home has become more important relative to food consumed at home a number of studies on food consumption at home and away from home have been made houthakker and taylor 1970 obtained results that indicate away from home food expenditures were more responsive to total consumption expenditures than at home expenditures based on 1960 61 household budget data time series data were also employed by houthakker and taylor to investigate the dynamics of food consumption prochaska and schrimper 1973 found that along with income the opportunity cost of time is an important factor in determining away from home food consumption fishe et al 1979 employing simple and heteroscedastic tobit models found that income and household specific circumstances are important determinants of restaurant expenditures lamm 1982 estimated a translog demand system for food consumed at home purchased meals and non food items his results indicated that consumers have been eating away from home more often primarily as a result of increases in their incomes recently huang and raunikar 1984 estimated engel equations for at home and away from home food expenditures using ordinary least squares and tobit regressions respectively in their study huang and raunikar found that in general at home food consumption is less income responsive than away from home food consumption the major objective of huang and raunikar s study was to investigate the importance to household food expenditures of consigned income for committed expenditures this study further investigates food consumption at home and away from home employing a switching regression model the same basic data analyzed by huang and rauniker hr are also analyzed here however since the hr study focused on consigned income households not reporting complete information with regard to committed expenditures e g rent or mortgage or after tax income were not included in their study in this study the emphasis is placed on the household s choice of whether to eat out and the factors affecting consequent away from home and at home food expenditures the sample includes all households that reported before tax income and is significantly larger than the sample used in the hr study

a complete system of engel curves in the spanish economy the main goal of this article is the estimation of the consumption income relationship along with socio economic factors using cross section data from the spanish household expenditure survey 1991 the data has been grouped according to exogenous criteria to avoid the problem of null expenditure first a non linear system of equation is estimated from which the linear form that best fits the used data is tested finally income elasticities are calculated considering three alternative formulations depending on how an initial income increment is distributed among consumers income elasticities are shown for the whole income distribution

using rd design to understand heterogeneity in health insurance crowd out crowd out the switching from private to public insurance is often found but estimates are rarely consistent with prior measurements cutler and gruber 1996 found crowd out in up to half of the newly eligible children while card and shore sheppard 2004 found almost none this paper exploits many regression discontinuity rd designs to estimate heterogeneous effects of public insurance eligibility crowd out and its impact on spending and utilization is documented across the income spectrum but effects are smaller at higher income levels these differences vary by state and correspond to changes in the reimbursement rates of public insurance plans

liberalization and food price distributions arch m evidence from madagascar abstract there is no well articulated theory of how stochastic food prices respond to economic liberalization measures a surprising oversight in the vast literature on market oriented reforms this paper presents reduced form estimates of the effects of liberalization measures on food commodity prices in madagascar using autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic in mean arch m methods the data indicate that the short term effects of liberalization on the mean and variance of food prices vary substantially by commodity region and season in the long term liberalization increases both the mean and the variance of food prices the abandonment of a quantity rationed state marketing system with administrative pricing also leads to smaller inter regional and interseasonal differences in mean food prices and a sharp increase in price autocorrelation real exchange rates have pronounced positive effects on mean food prices but these effects emerge indirectly rather than directly through induced changes to border parity prices

liberalization endogenous institutions and growth a comparative analysis of agricultural reforms in africa asia and europe thirty years ago a vast share of low and middle income countries was heavily state controlled the liberalizations of the 1980s and 1990s had greatly different effects on growth in countries in africa asia and europe a comparative framework is used to document these differences and a model is developed to formally analyze how liberalization affects production and income distribution when the institutions that govern production and exchange are also affected hypotheses are derived for how endogenous institutional adjustments affect the growth response to liberalization these insights motivate a series of explanations for the differences in performance across regions and commodities following liberalization

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

farmers welfare and changing food prices nonparametric evidence from rice in madagascar this paper uses nonparametric density estimation and kernel smoothing techniques to examine the instantaneous distributional implications of rice price changes in madagascar while many farmers do not participate in product markets as either buyers or sellers and net sales or marketable surplus are fairly small for many others the roughly one third of rice farmers who fall below the poverty line face significant negative first order welfare effects from increases in the mean or variance of rice prices conversely the first order gains from rice price increases are highly concentrated among the largest rice farmers and particular regions in madagascar

public health insurance and medical treatment the equalizing impact of the medicaid expansions abstract we investigate the impact of expanding public health insurance on the medical treatment received by women at childbirth using vital statistics data on every birth in the us over the 1987 1992 period the effects of insurance status on treatment are identified using the tremendous variation in eligibility for public insurance coverage under the medicaid program over this period among low education mothers who were largely uninsured before being made eligible for medicaid eligibility for this program was associated with significant increases in the use of a variety of obstetric procedures among women with more education however there is a countervailing effect on procedure use most of these women had private insurance before becoming medicaid eligible and some may have been crowded out onto the public program moving from insurance which reimburses medical care more generously to insurance with much less generous reimbursement this movement was accompanied by reductions in procedure use thus on net the medicaid expansions had an equalizing effect increasing the treatment intensity of the previously uninsured while lowering it among the previously insured

agricultural incentives in developing countries measuring the effect of sectoral and economywide policies the impact of sector specific direct and economywide indirect policies on agricultural incentives for 18 developing countries for the period 1975 84 are estimated the direct effect is measured by the proportional difference between the producer price and the border price adjusting for distribution storage transport and other marketing costs the indirect effect has two components 1 the impact of the unsustainable portion of the current account deficit and of industrial protection policies on the real exchange rate and thus on the price of agricultural commodities relative to nonagricultural nontradables and 2 the impact of industrial protection policies on the relative price of agricultural commodities to that of nonagricultural tradable goods the authors found that a in almost all cases the direct effect is equivalent to a tax on exportable goods and to a subsidy for importables b the indirect effect also taxes agriculture and dominates the direct effect and c the direct policies for both importables and exportables stabilize domestic producer prices

an intertemporal analysis of expenditure elasticities under three expenditure specifications for sri lanka household income has been identified as one of the major determinants of demand for household goods in addition other household characteristics such as household size and composition are also fo

level playing fields and laissez faire postliberal development strategy in inegalitarian agrarian economies focusing on the rural sector in latin america this paper explores the microeconomic linkages between distribution and growth which drive the possible reproduction of rural poverty over time the result of this exploration is a neostructuralist perspective which argues that actually existing laissez faire agrarian economies do not present a level playing field and that low wealth farms face disadvantages which tend to reproduce or even deepen sectoral inequality the paper then tries to identify the sorts of public policy and collective action which might modify the nature of growth and distribution in post liberalization agrarian market economy

incentive policies and export performance in sub saharan africa abstract the paper presents the results of an econometric investigation which shows that exports in general and agricultural exports in particular are responsive to price incentives in sub saharan africa it is further shown that within sub saharan africa market oriented countries generally gained and interventionist countries lost export market shares the differences in export performance are even greater if comparisons are made between private market economies and etatist countries in a three fold classification scheme that puts some countries in an intermediate category

an exogeneity test for a simultaneous equation tobit model with an application to labor supply a test of weak exogeneity in the simultaneous equation tobit model is proposed and illustrated using a female labour supply model estimated using cross section data the test statistic can be simply output from any standard tobit maximum likelihood package and is asymptotically efficient the procedure provides consistent estimators for the simultaneous tobit model whose asymptotic covariance matrix is a simple extension of the usual tobit formula we also provide the lagrange multiplier test of weak exogeneity this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the impact of nearly universal insurance coverage on health care utilization evidence from medicare the onset of medicare eligibility at age 65 leads to sharp changes in the health insurance coverage of the u s population these changes lead to increases in the use of medical services with a pattern of gains across socioeconomic groups that varies by type of service while routine doctor visits increase more for groups that previously lacked insurance hospital admissions for relatively expensive procedures like bypass surgery and joint replacement increase more for previously insured groups that are more likely to have supplementary coverage after 65 reflecting the relative generosity of their combined insurance package under medicare

health insurance eligibility utilization of medical care and child health two economists applied data from the current population survey and the national health interview survey and state level data on child mortality to a simulation model of utilization of medical care that varies only with the states legislative environment to examine the utilization of medical care and health effects of medicaid eligibility on low income children the models took into consideration the recent expansions of medicaid to low income children 38 of those ineligible for medicaid in 1984 who became eligible due to changes during 1984 1992 were uninsured between 1984 and 1992 expansions of the medicaid program increased the proportion of children eligible for medicaid almost two fold 16 1 vs 31 2 yet coverage rates were always lower than eligibility rates 13 2 vs 16 1 in 1984 and 20 3 vs 31 2 in 1992 and the increase in coverage rates was only about 50 of the increase in eligibility rates during 1984 1992 the probability that a child was eligible for medicaid increased the probability of health insurance coverage by 29 77 when the model considered bias in variables e g a recession in a state the take up rate was only 22 73 nevertheless medicaid markedly increased use of medical care for example eligibility for medicaid increased the likelihood of making a visit to a physicians office in the last two weeks by about 50 it also increased the probability of a child visiting the hospital suggesting inefficiency in the way that providers deliver care to medicaid enrollees medicaid eligibility had a significant effect on reducing child mortality the 15 1 percentage point increase in eligibility during 1984 1992 reduced child mortality by 4 5 when the researchers examined parent assessed subjective health measures medicaid eligibility had no effect on child health medicaid eligibility reduced race and education based disparities in the number of visits and racial differences in mortality yet it may actually intensify current disparities in health care delivery site

growth and distress in a south indian peasant economy during the era of economic liberalisation this article analyses the impact of agricultural liberalisation on different farming classes in the region of telangana in south india the region has been witnessing significant growth in real agricultural output over the last 15 years at the same time as nss national sample survey household survey data indicate there have been significant welfare declines not only for marginal farmers and landless labour but for other groups as well there have also been more than a thousand farmer suicides between 1998 and 2002 i argue in this article that during the liberalisation period that is post 1990 agricultural growth and increased distress have become mutually intertwined i use the terms growth inducing distress and distress inducing growth to explain this apparent paradox