market state and civil organizations in latin america beyond the debt crisis the context for rural development abstract the development strategy emerging in latin america implies a sharply redefined balance in the relative roles of the market the state and civil organizations market liberalization has been extensive and intense efforts have been undertaken to make the new rules credible the state has been divested of many productive and regulatory activities but descaling is a reflection of short run stabilization policies and signaling not of long term tendencies since an active state remains strongly in demand civil organizations are assuming active roles as alternative forms to produce and service members and as pressure groups agriculture has gained considerably from the policy reforms together with democratic representation and decentralization of governance this gives renewed opportunities for successful rural development initiatives

the political economy of ngos and information sharing abstract to a large extent information sharing is what nongovernmental organizations ngos do and the costs of sharing information are falling dramatically joining politics and economics this paper builds an analytical framework to illuminate how these falling costs are affecting information intensive ngos in latin america case studies describe the various information sharing outputs and inputs of nonprofit ngo production i argue that the participatory activity of ngos affects both political and economic realms and that as the costs of sharing information fall ngos will be a more powerful link in the changing balance between states markets and civil society

optimal ngo financing of a resource management certification scheme the development of voluntary certification schemes in areas as diverse as fish coffee and forestry offer the promise of environmental improvements without the requirement of governmental regulation and intervention in many cases however the costs to landholders of making the transition are too large for them to do so at the same time the large intermediaries appear to have little economic incentive to introduce certification because the market does not adequately value the environmental benefits instead ngos and other aid and development agencies who would like to see small producers benefit from the change in production practices have typically stepped in to provide financial support for certification this paper shows how voluntary price discrimination in the form of donations by the consumers that most highly value certification can be used to finance a switch to environmentally sustainable practices and thus address a market failure this analysis shows that an ngo s optimal intervention depends on the size of its budget the elasticity of supply of the product and the elasticity of participation by producers ngos with smaller budgets rely more heavily on lump sum transfers to the intermediary and less heavily on volume and participation dependent subsidies volume and participation dependent subsidies are inversely related to the elasticity of supply and the elasticity of participation in a standard lerner relationship

a step back as donors shift institution building from the public to the private sector abstract frustrated with public sectors in developing countries donors have shifted support to nonprofit nongovernmental organizations this paper questions the preferability of the nonprofit or public sector from the donor and host country perspectives case study experience from agriculture and natural resource institutions in ecuador and the dominican republic is presented to expand upon current thinking about the role of the nonprofit sector nonprofits are found to possess substantially increased flexibility for donor purposes and avoid many of the pitfalls of the political process they are however subject to free rider problems and bear no responsibility to the general public

the aggregation of environmental benefit values welfare measures distance decay and total wtp abstract we review the literature regarding the aggregation of benefit value estimates for non market goods two case studies are presented through which we develop an approach to aggregation which applies the spatial analytic capabilities of a geographical information system to combine geo referenced physical census and survey data to estimate a spatially sensitive valuation function these case studies show that the common reliance upon political rather than economic jurisdictions and the use of sample mean values within the aggregation process are liable to lead to significant errors in resultant values we also highlight the fact that for resources with use values then we should expect overall values to reduce with increasing distance from such sites but that changes in the choice of welfare measure will determine whether such distance decay is to be expected within values stated by those who are presently non users the paper concludes by providing recommendations for future improvements to the methodology

learning by doing and learning from others human capital and technical change in agriculture household level panel data from a nationally representative sample of rural indian households describing the adoption and profitability of high yielding seed varieties hyvs associated with the green revolution are used to test the implications of a model incorporating learning by doing and learning spillovers the estimates indicate that i imperfect knowledge about the management of the new seeds was a significant barrier to adoption ii this barrier diminished as farmer experience with the new technologies increased iii own experience and neighbors experience with hyvs significantly increased hyv profitability and iv farmers do not fully incorporate the village returns to learning in making adoption decisions

spatial externalities in agriculture empirical analysis statistical identification and policy implications summary spatial externalities can affect economic welfare and landscape pattern by linking farm returns on adjoining parcels of land while policy can be informed by research that documents spatial externalities statistically quantifying the presence of externalities from landscape pattern is insufficient for policy guidance unless the underlying cause of the externality can be identified as positive or negative this article provides a springboard for empirical research by examining the underlying structure social environmental interactions and statistical identification strategies for the analysis and the quantification of agricultural spatial externalities that are derived from observations of landscape change the potential for original policy treatments of agricultural spatial externalities in development and environment outcomes is highlighted

governments ngos and agricultural development perspectives on changing inter organisational relationships there are divergent interests in involving ngos in public sector programmes of agricultural development some commentators seek to foster popular participation through such involvement while others view it largely within the logic of public sector cutbacks using material primarily from latin america and also from africa and asia the potential gains and risks inherent in a range of ngo government relationships are considered strengths and weaknesses in ngo development strategies and practice are reviewed and potential public sector contributions discussed while closer relationships between ngos and governments seem likely to emerge in the context of current public sector reform the form these relationships will assume is less clear and will probably be highly diverse

capturing household level spatial influence in agricultural management using random effects regression abstract data on agricultural and natural resource management typically have spatial patterns related to the landscapes from which they came consequently econometric models designed to explain the determinants of humans natural resource management practices or their outcomes often have spatial structure that can bring bias or inefficiency to parameter estimates although econometric tools are available to correct for spatial structure such tools are largely lacking for use with discrete dependent variable models while one obvious solution would be to develop the necessary tools an alternative is to identify conditions under which spatial dependency can be managed effectively without formal spatial autoregressive models this study examines conditions under which spatial structure corresponds closely to defined agro ecological zones making it possible to model spatial effects by random effects regression using household survey data sampled along agro ecological zone strata this article develops two models of links between farmer assets and agricultural natural resource degradation in southern peru the first stage model looks at determinants of crop yield loss over time an index of soil productivity while the second stage model looks at determinants of the extent of fallow cycles in crop rotation a key agricultural practice reducing crop yield loss diagnostic statistics for spatial dependency reveal spatial structure particularly in the fallow model this spatial dependency is eliminated in the ordinary least squares ols models by inclusion of the agro ecological zone random effects in the spatially dependent fallow model comparison of coefficient estimates between ols and the spatial autoregressive maximum likelihood models showed ols with random effects to give virtually identical results to the spatial autoregressive models making the latter unnecessary these results show that spatial structure in natural resource management models can sometimes be captured by zonal variables when this occurs random effects regression can largely eliminate spatial dependency a necessary precondition for this approach with household survey data is prior sample stratification according to landscape characteristics where random effects models can effectively capture spatial structure they may also offer analysts greater flexibility in analyzing models with limited dependent variables

toward a theory of induced institutional innovation in this paper we elaborate a theory of institutional innovation in which changes in the demand for institutional innovation are induced by changes in relative resource endowments and by technical change we illustrate from agricultural history how changes in resource endowments and technical change have induced changes in private property rights and in the development of non market institutions we also consider the impact of advances in social science knowledge and of cultural endowments on the supply of institutional change in a final section we present the elements of a model of institutional innovation that maps the relationships among resource endowments cultural endowments technology and institutions

introduction to the special issue on spatial analysis for agricultural economists abstract the goal of this special issue is to introduce agricultural economists to new analytical approaches involving spatial data this paper provides a brief history of the special issue and an introduction to von thunen s model of the determinants of land use and rent that underlies all spatial analysis

opportunism and ngos entrepreneurship and green north south transfers abstract through the lens of entrepreneurship this paper applies the new institutional economics to examine two case studies of environmental nongovernmental organizations ngos in latin america to clarify their political economic roles southern ngos that rely on northern donors are viewed as entrepreneurial economic entities producing international public goods these nonprofit ngos take their place alongside for profit firms as contributors to economic production employment institutional innovation and technology transfer the theoretical framework proposed assumes that self interested behavior coexists with loyalty commitment and altruism as well as opportunism

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

if homo economicus could choose his own utility function would he want one with a conscience reply in my model of the evolution of honesty 1 i assumed the existence of a signal a blush perhaps extreme values of which served to identify some individuals as being honest with certainty joseph harrington notes that without this assumption honest individuals have difficulty invading a population initially dominated by defectors for readers who do not wish to work through the algebra in his comment the argument is easily summarized in nontechnical terms suppose two honest mutants a and b arrive in an uncountably large population consisting entirely of dishonest persons and suppose that the probability that an honest person exhibits an intense blush is say 0 999 while the corresponding probability for everyone else is only 0 001 when a sees an intense blush on the face of b what will then be his estimate of the probability that b is honest assuming that a knows the laws of elementary probability and corrects for the base rate of honest persons in the population it will be zero when virtually everyone in the population is dishonest even a person with an intense blush will be pegged as dishonest provided that even the smallest fraction of dishonest persons also shows an intense blush with

deforestation land use and property rights empirical evidence from darien panama economic conventional wisdom suggests that providing land users with more secure property rights will result in more sustainable land use and less deforestation in this paper we use spatial econometric techniques to evaluate quantitatively the effect on land use of designated property rights in three parts of darie n province a national park where no human activity is supposed to occur and two reserves for indigenous peoples results suggest that legal property rights for an indigenous population can influence land use geography appears to be more important than legal protection for the national park

rationality and the market for human blood abstract this paper presents a theoretical model of blood supply illustrating an argument advanced by titmuss that it is better to rely on voluntary donation than on the market to obtain whole human blood for transfusion the model incorporates a social custom in the manner of akerlof which causes different equilibria to occur depending on whether the custom of giving blood prevails or not since preferences differ across equilibria the pareto criteria cannot be used to compare them several other possible criteria are proposed but these criteria imply that some preferences are more rational or are preferable to other preferences

the politics of government ngo relations in africa abstract non governmental organizations ngos deservedly or not have gained a reputation as the leading practitioners of rural development in africa african governments have responded ambiguously to the presence of these new agencies on the one hand valuing the economic resources ngos can raise but resisting the political pluralization implied by popular development action this article describes the growth of ngos in africa and proposes a framework for analyzing the dynamics of government ngo relations by means of examples drawn from kenya and zimbabwe among other african countries the article illustrates the strategies used by governments to exercise control and by ngos to assert autonomy an argument is made that politics rather than economics best explain the contribution of ngos to development as well as the attitude of governments toward the burgeoning voluntary sector

property rights genetic resources and biotechnological change it is well recognized that wild genetic resources the genetic constitutions of plants and animals have substantial social and economic value as repositories of genetic information today genetic information provides direct and indirect inputs into plant breeding programs the development of natural products including drugs and pharmaceuticals and increasingly sophisticated applications of biotechnology 2 recognition of the potential of wild genetic resources in the development of drugs has led the national cancer institute to initiate a massive plant collection project 3 which is a follow up to an earlier 1970s project that sought to identify drugs effective against a variety of cancers and to look at the immune system effects of various drugs it is estimated that 70 percent of the 3 000 species known to have anticancer properties are found in the tropical forests 4 in recent years a number of widely used drugs have been developed from plants including two important anticancer drugs derived from the rosy periwinkle found in tropical madagascar with the recent major breakthroughs in biotechnology the future potential of these resources seems limitless species that have no current commercial application have useful natural chemicals or are as yet undiscovered never

grassroots organizations and ngos in rural development opportunities with diminishing states and expanding markets abstract this article undertakes to deal systematically with nongovernment organizations ngos and grassroots organizations gros usually treated as a residual category ten levels for development decision making and action are identified in the tradition of central place theory three of these are considered local or grassroots because of their collective action possibilities then three sectors are delineated instead of the usual two ngos are part of the collective action sector which differs from the public and private sectors in theoretically consistent ways a careful distinction is made between institutions and organizations usually conflated in the literature examples of accelerated rural development through grassroots organizations and ngos are discussed form asia africa and latin america