the environment and emerging development issues development economics for the most part has failed to recognize renewable environmental resources as economic goods yet the lives of the poor in developing countries are intimately tied to the fate of their local common property resources soil fuel wood water and so on ignoring the loss of common property renewable resources via degradation centralization or privatization in calculations of net national product can mask the destruction of resources available to a country s poor behind the false appearance of a growing national economy this paper describes the difference between the problem of managing local common property resources in developing countries and the problem of protecting the global commons such as the atmosphere and oceans it outlines the calculations that would include the local commons in the national income accounting of capital assets and argues that the interests of those most dependent on the increasingly scarce local commons will be best served by placing control in their hands while the central government provides infrastructure and educational support to control the pollution of the global commons on the other hand the paper sketches a plan in which most countries would have a high incentive to participate a global allocation of limited tradable permits to discharge defined pollutants

split award auctions for supplier retention to stay abreast of current supply market pricing it is common for procurement managers to frequently organize auctions among a pool of qualified suppliers the supply base sole awards can alienate losing suppliers and cause them to defect from the supply base to maintain the supply base and thereby control the high costs of finding and qualifying new suppliers buyers often employ split awards which in turn inflate purchase costs this results in a trade off that we investigate in an infinite horizon stationary setting in which the relative cost position of each supplier is randomly drawn in every period we characterize the optimal split award that minimizes long run costs purchasing and qualification and show that maintaining a constant supply base size using a qualify up to policy is optimal for the buyer we find that neither the extent of multisourcing nor the buyer s value of split awards compared with winner take all auctions are monotonic in the qualification cost and that split award auctions can increase ex ante system buyer and supplier benefits simultaneously to our knowledge this is the first paper studying split award auctions for supply base maintenance and it will hopefully galvanize further research on this important topic this paper was accepted by yossi aviv operations management

sequential procurement auctions abstract two auctions are held in sequence with the possibility of learning between the second and the first the buyer optimally chooses to discriminate against the winner of the first auction in the second the optimal mechanism has a discontinuity in the winner s second bid this strictly dominates a sequence of independent sealed bid auctions

the design of procurement contracts this paper investigates the interaction between bidding for procurementprograms and fractional buys this problem is analyzed from the standpoint of a cost minimizing procuring agent it is shown that underimperfect competition a multiple source purchase is generally preferred to a single source contract similarly the author demonstrates that a strictly intermediate cost sharing arrangement i e an incentive contract dominates either the cost plus or the firm fixed price arrangements copyright 1986 by american economic association

second sourcing and the experience curve price competition in defense procurement we examine a dynamic model ofprice competition in defense procurement that incorporates the experience curve asymmetric cost information and the availability of a higher cost alternative system we model acquisition as a two stage process in which initial production is governed by a contract between the government and the developer competition is then introduced by an auction in which a second source bids against the developer for remaining production we characterize the class of production contracts that are cost minimizing for the government and that induce the developer to reveal private cost information when high costs are revealed these contracts result in a credible cutoff of new system production in favor of the still higher cost alternative system

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

recognizing progeny in the value of life abstract this note generalizes the value of life to incorporate the preferences for descendants of a dynastically altruistic decision maker it derives the value of progeny and shows how it depends on the benthamite vs millian nature of dynastic altruism

testing the external effect of household behavior the case of the demand for children this paper tests the external effect of household childbearing behavior by drawing on microfertility data from china the test is executed by regressing one woman s fertility on the average fertility of neighboring women china s unique affirmative birth control policy provides us with quasi experimental fertility variation that facilities identification we present two identification methods 1 testing the external effect from the dominant han chinese on minority women by using the fertility fine as an instrumental variable and 2 identifying the external effect using an instrumental variable that is based on the difference in differences we find that fertility has a large external effect

fertility decline as a coordination problem abstract the so called diffusion of innovation approach is often used in explanations of historical and contemporary fertility declines we investigate this issue by developing a new theoretical analysis which combines economic and sociological reasoning particular attention is devoted to the role of social networks for the selection of equilibria in situations when fertility decline constitutes a coordination problem we show that the effect of networks depends on the particular interaction among individuals and on the prevailing socioeconomic conditions information networks can only speed up a fertility transition that would also take place in the absence of social interaction while coordination networks can facilitate demographic change in societies that would otherwise be caught in a malthusian situation

awarding monopoly franchises the authors analyze how to award a monopoly franchise when the objective is to maximize expected consumers surplus net of transfer payments to the producer potential producers initially possess independent private information about uncertain production costs only the chosen producer subsequently observes realized production costs after awarding the franchise to the producer with the lowest expected costs prices are optimally set above realized marginal cost these ex post distortions foster more competitive bidding ex ante the distortions for any bid cost pair are invariant to the number of bidders n though expected distortions and profits decline with n copyright 1987 by american economic association

population consumption and resources ethical issues abstract this article is about the concept of optimum population and consumption even though it is primarily concerned with foundational issues the various ideas that have been discussed in the literature are tested in the context of economic models with limited resources it is argued that broadly speaking existing theories of optimum population and consumption are variants of average and what is often termed classical utilitarianism respectively both classes of theories are shown to have deficiencies in great measure because of their reliance on a defective concept of personhood it is also argued that contractual theories are of little use because potential people as opposed to future people cannot be parties to any contract a generation relative ethics is developed and is put to work in an overlapping generations model it is shown that generation relative ethics even when it is a variant of classical utilitarianism can prescribe a considerably lower population than classical utilitarianism

a strategic analysis of global warming theory and some numbers we model the global warming process as a dynamic commons game in which the players are countries their actions at each date produce emissions of greenhouse gases and the state variable is the current stock of greenhouse gases the theoretical analysis is complemented by a calibration exercise the first set of results establishes theoretically and then with illustrative numbers the over emissions due to a tragedy of the commons the power of simple sanctions to lower emissions and increase welfare is then examined as is the effect of cost asymmetry finally a complete theoretical charactrization is provided for the best equilibrium and it is shown that it has a very simple structure it involves a constant emission rate through time

efficiency with endogenous population growth in this paper we generalize the notion of pareto e ciency to make it applicable to environments with endogenous populations two di erent e ciency concepts are proposed p e ciency and a e ciency the two concepts di er in how they treat people that are not born we show how these concepts relate to the notion of pareto e ciency when fertility is

the population problem theory and evidence this study is concerned with the relationships among population growth poverty and environmental degradation with particular focus on the situation in developing countries the author rejects the concept of a general theory of fertility behavior in favor of an interpretation of these relationships which might be applicable to certain situations in the poorest parts of the indian subcontinent and sub saharan africa such situations include unacceptable risks of maternal death for poor illiterate women and a condemnation to extreme poverty in conditions of the deterioration of local resources and of the environment the author concludes that population growth rates are too high in certain specific areas and that an appropriate policy reaction to such conditions would be to try to change the options that men and women face so that their reasoned choice would be to lower their fertility

strategic choices in polygamous households theory and evidence from senegal this paper proposes a strategic framework to account for fertility choices in polygamous households a theoretical model specifies the main drivers of fertility in the african context and describes how the fertility of one wife might impact the behavior of her co wives it generates predictions to test for strategic interactions exploiting original data from a household survey and the demographic and health surveys in senegal empirical tests show that children are strategic complements one wife raises her fertility in response to an increase by the other wife because children are the best claim to resources controlled by the husband this result is the first quantitative evidence of a reproductive rivalry between co wives it suggests that the sustained high level of fertility in africa does not merely reect women s lack of control over births as is often argued but also their incentives to have many children this paper also contributes to the literature on household behavior as one of the few attempts to open the black box of non nuclear families

intra generational equity and sustainable welfare a time series analysis for the uk and sweden this paper discusses the importance of intra generational equity to sustainable development it outlines a number of methodologies for measuring income inequality in the economy and presents several possible ways of incorporating the impact of distributional effects into measures of welfare in the economy the authors highlight in particular an index developed by atkinson atkinson a b 1970 distributive politics and economic growth q j econ may 465 490 based on the social welfare model this method possesses two main advantages over other methods firstly it is expressed directly in terms of social well being secondly value judgements incorporated into the measure are made explicit through the parameter o which expresses society s degree of aversion to income inequality the paper calculates the value of the atkinson index for two case study countries sweden and the uk between 1950 and 1996 for a central estimate of o0 8 the results show that the welfare loss due to inequalities in the distribution of income varied between 5 and 10 for sweden and between 6 and 14 for the uk with the higher values coming towards the end of the period the paper explores the sensitivity of these results to changes in the value of o for the case of the uk and discusses the relevance of the work to the measurement of sustainable welfare 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

malthus in the light of climate change abstract to reconsider the malthusian predictions of natural limits to economic development the paper develops a multi sector growth model with exhaustible resource extraction investments in physical and knowledge capital climate change and endogenous fertility economic growth is driven by endogenous innovations which increase in the availability and productivity of research labour poor substitution of natural resources triggers sectoral change climate change is the result of polluting resource use which is like consumption and investments based on the intertemporal optimization of the households highlighting the importance of bounded resource supply and of rational extraction decisions i show that climate change is independent of population growth in steady state and there is no causal relationship between climate and population during transition to steady state the consumption per capita growth rate rises in the innovation rate and the output elasticities of labour and capital in the different sectors unlike climate policy population policy is not warranted it may be counterproductive because labour is crucial for the research sector

dual sourcing in repeated procurement competitions the issue of maintaining competition over time in a repeated procurement setting is important for both government and private sector buyers the u s department of defense has experimented with splitting production quantities between two or more contractors in an effort to make government business more attractive for the private sector this paper analyzes the effectiveness of this strategy we find that in a two period model with production learning and entry costs dual sourcing even for the specific mechanism we consider in some cases reduces overall expected cost moreover if buyers are unable to commit to long term contracts or suppliers are unable to bid away anticipated gains the incentives to dual source are often stronger

the environmental impact of poverty evidence from firewood collection in rural nepal abstract we investigate determinants of household firewood collection in rural nepal using 1995 96 and 2002 3 world bank living standards measurement survey lsms data we incorporate village fixed effects endogenous censoring measurement error in living standards and heterogeneous effects of different household assets we find no evidence in favor of the poverty environment hypothesis the evidence for the environmental kuznets curve depends on the precise measure of living standards and time period studied firewood collections fall with a transition to modern occupations and rise with increasing population and household division the local interhousehold collection externality is negligible indicating that policy interventions are justified only by ecological considerations or nonlocal spillovers

an analysis of risk and return in the defense market its impact on weapon system competition with growing austerity pressures from the administration congress and the general public the government s procurement policy has called for increased use of dual source competition as a means of reducing acquisition costs in practice however this policy has produced mixed results the cause seems to be an inadequate understanding of the peculiarities of competition in the government s market this paper examines the risk and return available in the defense market and relates it to the industry s propensity to compete the results show that intelligent observation of the industry s capacity utilization rate would contribute to the development of a more efficient acquisition policy

the economics of poverty in poor countries this paper which examines recently studied links between 1 poverty high fertility and undernourishment and 2 environmental degradation and civic disconnection in developing countries opens by reviewing the limitations of orthodox discussions of economic institutions and property rights and the orthodox dichotomy that has located the cause of poverty in the suppression of markets the introduction also notes that much of the analysis in this paper is based on data from sub saharan africa and india the next section of the paper summarizes evidence on the magnitude and extent of world poverty section 3 exposes the connection between undernourishment and a persons capacity to work as one of the pathways to the poverty trap sections 4 and 5 consider the dependence of impoverished rural populations on common property resources and how the conventional process of economic growth can break down this system and make certain sections of the population especially vulnerable to economic shocks the next two sections explore the possibility that links between poverty high fertility and environmental degradation may constitute another pathway to the poverty trap the eighth section reviews the methodology of using net national product which includes resource depletion and environmental deterioration as an evaluation criterion and argues that mainstream development economists may have neglected environmental and population problems because they have been relying on the wrong economic indices the final section concludes that a number of policies must be used to improve options for people

poverty income distribution and policy making this paper deals with the key distributional issues arising from the regulation of the environment and the management of natural resources the paper is divided into a section dealing with poverty and a section dealing with broader income distribution effects although there is much discussion of the linkages of poverty to environmental degradation empirical studies establishing these linkages are few the relationship is critically dependent on the institutional structures in the countries concerned and how they respond to changing environmental pressures on the broader distributional impacts the papers focusses on the analysis of ganiers and losers from environmental regulations the analysis is complex because the direct incidence is not the same as the final incidence much of the work has looked only at the former in addition the political economy of regulation needs to pay greater attention to impacts on key and vulnerable groups more so than can be done by looking at broad income bands

reproductive externalities and fertility behaviour abstract this article studies reproductive externalities within rural communities in poor countries it is shown that such externalities create a link between household poverty household size and the local natural resource base each of which is viewed as being endogenous the models presented here offer an explanation for the fact that in recent decades large groups of people in various parts of the world have been unable to lift themselves out of acute poverty even while their national economies have on average enjoyed economic growth implications for policy and institutional changes are drawn

old age pensions and fertility in rural areas of less developed countries some evidence from mexico this paper reviews the theoretical relationship between old age pensions and human fertility and offers preliminary evidence from mexico on the direction and magnitude of the effect on fertility of the introduction of a formal old age pension system the security motive is an untested but plausible hypothesis especially for rural areas where alternative methods for caring for the elderly if they exist are likely to be relatively risky and unprofitable a number of different effects can theoretically be expected following introduction of a system of old age pensions in such areas including a savings reduction effect and life cycle effects such as effects on the time phasing of labor force participation and of consumption and effects on family fragmentation and intergenerational transfers and on the sex composition of the labor force and the allocation of family resources between the sexes information costs uncertainties about various aspects of the social security system and the possibility of differences between desired and actual fertility must also be considered given the long list of possible effects and offsetting influences and uncertainties about the magnitudes of such effects the actual outcome can only be resolved empirically data on sugar cane workers who began to be covered by a social security system in 1963 in 34 contiguous rural municipalities in the papaloapan river basin in southeastern mexico were used to test the relationship a regression analysis of the determinants of change in the child woman ratios in the 34 municipalities from 1960 70 indicated among other findings that the proxy used for the influence of participation in an old age pension system had a significantly negative effect on fertility an increase in social security participation from 0 to 50 would appear to reduce the child woman ratio by more than 1 10 despite the simplicity of the testing procedure shortcomings in the available data and the possibility of specification bias the results indicate that the security motive may be important and requires further empirical and theoretical research

population and the environment a parable of firewood and other tales the author analyzes the relationship between population and the environment with a focus on the role which environmental degradation and natural resources depletion may play in producing the population pressure which lies behind such degradation and depletion especially in developing countries the principal conclusion of this analysis is that the possibilities for a stable equilibrium between human population and its environment are quite limited i show that parental altruism toward their children can only make matters worse if socially unchecked by leading to an increase of the birthrate in every environmental state in comparison with that which would occur in its absence excerpt

nonlinearities and heterogeneity in environmental quality an empirical analysis of deforestation we use a panel data set of 59 developing countries over the 1972 1994 period to study the deforestation process relying on both parametric and semiparametric models we examine nonlinearities and heterogeneity in the deforestation process we first study the existence of an environmental kuznets curve ekc and then analyze determinants of deforestation our data sample provides no evidence of an ekc we also find that political institution failures may worsen the deforestation process in developing countries

population growth and natural resource scarcity long run development under seemingly unfavorable conditions in this paper i consider an economy that is constrained by the use of natural resources and driven by knowledge accumulation resources are essential inputs in all sectors i show that population growth and poor input substitution are not detrimental but on the contrary are even necessary to obtain a sustainable consumption level i find a general rule to define the conditions for a constant innovation rate the rule does not apply to capital but to labor growth which is the crucial input in research furthermore the rule relates to the sectoral structure of the economy and to demographic transition the results continue to hold with a backstop technology and are extended for the case of minimum resource constraints

split awards procurement and innovation in many procurement settings it is possible for a buyer to split a production award between suppliers in this article we develop a model of split award procurement auctions in which the split choice is endogenous we characterize the set of equilibrium bids and allocations for optimizing agents in an environment in which suppliers are fully informed about each other s costs split award equilibria simultaneously exhibit strong collusive features and cost efficiency properties despite the former property of the equilibria upstream investment considerations may lead a buyer to prefer a split award auction format to a winner take all auction format

entrants reputation and industry dynamics this article analyzes entry exit decisions in a market where reputation determines the price that firms may charge within a rational expectation model of competition in a nonatomic market under heterogeneous reputations the analysis focuses on the class of name switching reputational equilibria in which a firm discards its name if and only if its reputation falls below the entrants reputation the main technical result is the existence of a unique steady state equilibrium within this class in which the entrants reputation is endogenous the resulting industry dynamics is largely on agreement with the findings in the empirical literature

dynamic business share allocation in a supply chain with competing suppliers this paper studies a repeated game between a manufacturer and two competing suppliers with imperfect monitoring we present a principal agent model for managing long term supplier relationships using a unique form of measurement and incentive scheme we measure a supplier s overall performance with a rating equivalent to its continuation utility the expected total discounted utility of its future payoffs and incentivize supplier effort with larger allocations of future business we obtain the vector of the two suppliers ratings as the state of a markov decision process and we solve an infinite horizon contracting problem in which the manufacturer allocates business volume between the two suppliers and updates their ratings dynamically based on their current ratings and the current performance outcome our contributions are both theoretical and managerial we propose a repeated principal agent model with a novel incentive scheme to tackle a common but challenging incentive problem in a multiperiod s

birth rates and border crossings latin american migration to the us canada spain and the uk we use census data for the us canada spain and uk to estimate bilateral migration rates to these countries from 25 latin american and caribbean nations over the period 1980 to 2005 latin american migration to the us is responsive to labor supply shocks as predicted by earlier changes in birth cohort sizes and labor demand shocks associated with balance of payments crises and natural disasters latin american migration to canada spain and the uk in contrast is largely insensitive to these shocks responding only to civil and military conflict the results are consistent with us immigration policy toward latin america which is relatively permissive toward illegal entry being mediated by market forces and immigration policy in the other countries which favor skilled workers and asylum seekers among other groups insulating them from labor market shocks in the region