targeting assistance to the poor efficient allocation of transfers when household income is not observed abstract this paper examines the problem of how to transfer money or other forms of assistance to poor households when one observes some characteristics of households but not their incomes this and related issues are often referred to as the targeting problem the paper first sets out the problem formally as one of minimizing a poverty index given a fixed amount of money available for transfers assuming that household survey data are available which include accurate income and or expenditure information the solution for the problem is formulated as a non linear mathematical programming exercise using household survey data from cote d ivoire the technique is applied to both urban and rural areas separately the paper concludes with a general discussion and suggestions for future research

marginal commodity tax reforms a survey as noted 30 years ago by martin feldstein optimal taxes may be useless for practical purposes and emphasis should instead be placed on the possibility of enhancing welfare by reforming existing tax rates in this perspective marginal commodity tax reforms are gaining increasing attention due to political and economic constraints on large reforms of direct or indirect taxation in this paper we summarize the main features and results of the literature on marginal commodity tax reforms pioneered by ahmad and stern further developed by yitzhaki and thirsk and recently reinterpreted by makdissi and wodon we establish new links to other fields of research namely the literature on the use of equivalence scales and on poverty measurement we also critically examine some issues associated with the implementation of marginal tax reforms with special reference to the calculation of welfare weights and revenue effects finally we suggest directions for future research on poverty reducing commodity tax reforms

means testing versus universal provision in poverty alleviation programs this paper contrasts the use of means tested and universal schemes in the alleviation of poverty using a class of poverty measures the authors illustrate the trade off from the fact that means testing is costly to both the government and the claimant while universal provision entails a leakage to the nonpoor the paper provides numerical as well as analytical results copyright 1990 by the london school of economics and political science

welfare analysis of tax reforms using household data abstract this paper discusses a methodology for calculating the distribution of gains and losses from a policy change using data for a large sample of households estimates are based on the equivalent income function which is money metric utility defined over observable variables this enables calculations to be standardised and a computer program to compute the statistics presented in the paper is available for a general demand system equivalent income is related to measures of deadweight loss and standard errors are computed for each of the welfare measures an application to u k data for 5 895 households is given which simulates a reform that involves eliminating housing subsidies

corruption and development new initiatives in economic openness and strengthened rule of law corruption is a major problem in many of the world s developing economies today world bank studies put bribery at over 1 trillion per year accounting for up to 12 of the gdp of nations like nigeria kenya and venezuela though largely ignored for many years interest in world wide corruption has been rekindled by recent corporate scandals in the us and europe corruption in the developing nations is said to result from a number of factors mass poverty has been cited as a facilitating condition for corruption just as an inability to manage a sudden upsurge in mineral revenues has been credited with breeding corruption and adventurous government procurement among public officials in countries like nigeria and venezuela virtually all developing nations that have serious corruption problems also have very limited economic freedom and a very weak enforcement of the rule of law in such nations corruption represents a regressive taxation that bears hard on the poor it has a dampening effect on development and it could result in the production of inferior goods as companies find ways to accommodate under the table payments finally corruption is a dangerous threat to the legitimacy of the governments of some of the developing nations themselves it is suggested that new urgent initiatives are needed to deal with the dangers posed by corruption in the developing economies they include making the economies of these nations more open by the withdrawal of the government from the productive sector and by the abolition of unnecessarily stringent restrictions on business conduct the rule of law needs to be strengthened in these nations and those countries like nigeria and venezuela should ignore scruples over sovereignty and seek foreign assistance in the management of their oil wealth finally multinationals should be made to disclose all the payments they make in developing nations to such organizations like international chamber of commerce or transparency international where they can be reviewed by anyone interested

the environmental and economic impact of the carbon tax in australia to fulfil its emission reduction target pledged in the copenhagen accord the australian government has determined to introduce a carbon tax from july 1st 2012 this paper simulates the effects on the environment and on the economy of a carbon tax of a 23 per tonne of carbon dioxide proposed by the government with and without a compensation policy we employ a computable general equilibrium model with an environmentally extended social accounting matrix according to the simulation results the carbon tax can cut emissions effectively but will cause a mild economic contraction because the price signal is intact the proposed compensation plan has little impact on emission cuts while significantly mitigating the negative effect of a carbon tax on the economy

poverty and inequality under income and price dispersions many policies simultaneously affect the distribution of prices and incomes in the economy moreover a bias may occur when there is a stochastic relationship between prices and incomes and this relationship is being ignored it is therefore important to dispose of an analytical framework for welfare analysis that could account for changes in this joint distribution how can the joint influences of price and income distributions on poverty and inequality indicators be analysed we offer a method to deal with this problem by using parametric formulae of poverty and inequality measures we propose statistical indicators for the levels variabilities and a statistical link of price indices and nominal living standards these indicators are consistent with an approximation of the problem based on a bivariate lognormal distribution of price indices and nominal living standards our analysis provides hints about the social welfare impact of economic shocks or policies affecting levels variabilities and correlation of prices and incomes intuitive insights are obtained while using arithmetic means and variances instead does not lead to illuminating results the role of price and income variabilities for poverty and inequality is more complex than generally expected with the possibility of several variation regimes empirical investigation of these statistics would guide social policies

the dynamic relationship between agricultural sustainability and food energy water poverty in a panel of selected sub saharan african countries abstract the relationship between food energy water resources and agricultural sustainability has got a significant policy attraction that generally in favor of livelihood of the poor which is largely affected by climate change food security challenges poor access of water resources and less access of electricity these challenges generally faced by less developing countries while sub saharan african ssa countries has no exemption to escape out from this food water energy poverty nexus due to inadequate socio economic and environmental action programs of sustainable development this study examined the dynamic nexus between agricultural sustainability and food energy water poverty in a panel of selected ssa countries over the period of 1980 2013 the study used pooled least squares regression pooled fixed effects and pooled random effects regression techniques to absorb country specific time variant shocks the hausman 1978 test results reveal that country specific shocks influence the food energy water poverty model therefore the fixed effects regression results are consider a better fit model than that of the pooled random effect model the overall results conclude that agricultural value added cereal yields and forest area significantly decreases food energy water poverty nexus leading to higher economic growth and price levels at the cost of environmental degradation in general agricultural sustainability is the prerequisite for reducing food energy water poverty

non welfarist optimal taxation and behavioral public economics research in behavioral economics has uncovered the widespread phenomenon of people making decisions against their own good intentions in these situations the government might want to intervene indeed individuals might want the government to intervene to induce behavior that is closer to what individuals wish they were doing the analysis of such corrective interventions through taxes and subsidies might be called behavioral public economics however such analysis where the government has an objective function that is different from that of individuals is not new in public economics in these cases the government is said to be non welfarist in its objectives and there is a long tradition of nonwelfarist welfare economics especially the analysis of optimal taxation and subsidy policy where the outcomes of individual behavior are evaluated using a preference function different from the one that generated the outcomes the object of this paper is to first of all present a unified view of the non welfarist optimal taxation literature and secondly to present behavioral public economics as a natural special case of this general framework

organizational isomorphism and corruption in financial institutions empirical research in emerging countries the globalizations of capital markets in the last 20 years has led to a historic degree of financial integration in the world it is clear however that globalization is not conducive to a complete homogeneity of financial markets and institutions among others one element of diversity is the importance of the impact of corruption in emerging countries corruption decreases the credibility of financial institutions and markets scandals and unethical behavior in financial institutions erode confidence in such firms relying on neoinstitutional literature this article focuses on the link between corruption and organizational isomorphism in financial institutions in emerging countries therefore our aim is to examine the institutional reasons for corruption in financial institutions in emerging countries our structural equation model is based on empirical research in financial institutions in emerging countries a questionnaire was administrated to 70 top executives of financial institutions in 18 different emerging countries

public procurement and rent seeking the case of paraguay summary a model of entrepreneurial choices in an economy with a corrupt public procurement sector is built providing predictions along two dimensions first corrupt public institutions operate by offering contracts without competition and more corrupt entities channel larger share of their budget in this way second these firms enjoy extra returns so that procurement related activities attract the best entrepreneurs a large scale microeconomic database including all public procurement operations over a 4 year period in paraguay amounting annually to approximately 6 of the country s gdp is then used to corroborate these predictions

is corruption an efficient grease this paper tests whether corruption may be an efficient grease in the wheels of an otherwise deficient institutional framework it analyzes the interaction between aggregate efficiency corruption and other dimensions of governance for a panel of 69 countries both developed and developing using two measures of corruption and two other aspects of governance we observe that corruption is less detrimental to efficiency in countries where institutions are less effective it may even be positively associated with efficiency in countries where institutions are extremely ineffective we thus find evidence for the grease the wheels hypothesis in its weak and strong forms

entrepreneurship and illegality abstract illegal business activity is common throughout the world occurs in a diversity of forms and is often viewed as the darker side of entrepreneurship of particular interest is illegal cross border trade which occurs at low levels between developed countries but is often widespread between developing countries it is on the increase despite many attempts by governments to eradicate it yet illegal trading is poorly studied both theoretically and empirically from an entrepreneurial perspective the paper outlines a working model exploring the relationships between key entrepreneurial factors and illegal trading and explores the model using fieldwork data collected by the first author in nigeria during an 8 month ethnographic study of cross border trading the nigerian cross border trade is particularly interesting as it takes place in an environment of long standing illegality and corruption the findings reveal that illegal practices are so widespread that they are a norm an almost parallel economy with its own traditions and values in this context entrepreneurial advantage in trading illegally is quite different from that which would be expected in more familiar western contexts the entrepreneurial advantages of trading in illegal goods and evading duties appear overwhelming at first as bribery of officials is widely accepted which reduces risk of law enforcement to negligible levels and most traders do not view illegal trading as immoral closer analysis reveals however that traders need to bribe to trade any goods legal as well as illegal bribery is part of a system of harassment by officials that pervades all aspects of the trade in this climate there are no special advantages in targeting illegal goods to trade in the distinction between what is legal and illegal becomes blurred and irrelevant traders target any goods irrespective of their legal status if potential profit margins are high entrepreneurial advantage thus lies in the trade itself and making it work not in its illegality most entrepreneurial energy is devoted to creatively circumvent the harassment of corrupt officials not to exploit illegal business opportunities the paper concludes by demonstrating that certain factors are crucial to our understanding of the relationship between entrepreneurship and illegal trading in both western and nigerian contexts but that the relationships between the factors differ widely in the two contexts the model constructed provides a basis for further comparative research in other regional contexts in terms of policy implications the illegality of the trade is of some benefit in that it has created hundreds of associated jobs and businesses which enable traders to operate more securely and efficiently in the climate of corruption harassment and uncertainty most traders however have learnt to profitably live with illegality but nonetheless would still prefer to trade in a less stressful and impartial legal system illegality on balance is more harmful than beneficial for economic development removing illegality once institutionalised however is not a simple matter and no solution can be found without fuller understanding of the sociology and the entrepreneurial processes of illegal trading

shadow economies size causes and consequences using various methods the size of the shadow economy in 76 developing transition and oecd countries is estimated average size varies from 12 percent of gdp for oecd countries to 23 percent for transition countries and 39 percent for developing countries increasing taxation and social security contributions combined with rising state regulations are driving forces for the increase of the shadow economy especially in oecd countries according to some findings corruption has a positive impact on the size of the shadow economy and a growing shadow economy has a negative effect on official gdp growth

start up costs limited enforcement and the hidden economy abstract this paper examines how much of the difference in the size of the informal sector and in per capita income across countries can be accounted by regulation costs and enforcement of financial contracts it constructs and solves numerically a general equilibrium model with credit constrained heterogenous agents occupational choices over formal and informal businesses financial frictions and a government sector which imposes taxes and regulations on formal firms the benefit from formalization is better access to outside finance the quantitative exercises suggest that i regulation costs and not the level of enforcement account for differences in the size of the informal sector between united states and mediterranean europe ii for a developing country like peru however contract enforcement and regulation costs are equally important in accounting for the size of the informal sector and iii regulation costs and contract enforcement do not account for most of the income differences observed among countries

optimal non linear income taxation for the alleviation of income poverty there has been much discussion recently of structuring tax and transfer programs to ensure that resources go to the poor with minimal leaks to the nonpoor the poor have no incentive to earn income with 100 percent marginal tax rates but how high or low the marginal rate of taxation should be and how they should vary with income is a complex issue and opinions vary social security schemes that withdraw benefits represent an extremely high effective marginal tax rate other schemes call for relatively low marginal tax rates at the bottom of the income distribution which tax transfer schedule does most to reduce poverty the issue is one of optimal nonlinear income taxation the authors show that one of the key theoretical results of the welfarist literature is overturned if it is desirable for everybody to work the optimal marginal tax rate on the very poorest individuals is strictly negative they argue that the nonwelfarist perspective points toward lower marginal tax rates in the lower part of the income distribution than does the welfarist perspective but numerical simulations suggest that the effect is of limited quantitative significance using conventional functional forms and parameter values optimal marginal tax rates on the poor are in the 60 70 percent range

marginal reductions in vehicle emissions under a dual blend ethanol mandate evidence from a natural experiment among the many reasons policy makers across the world have sought to supplement fuel supplies with ethanol blended fuels are the cited environmental benefits that come with replacing a fossil fuel with a cleaner burning alternative dual blend ethanol mandates in which multiple ethanol blends are simultaneously available are one way policy markers can move forward with more aggressive mandates more quickly the recent ethanol mandate in the state of new south wales australia offers a unique natural experiment to quantify the potential environmental benefits and costs of a dual blend ethanol policy this paper estimates the impact on carbon dioxide co2 emissions from road activity that are attributable to the implementation of the new south wales ethanol requirements we find that there was a decrease in emissions due to the policy but that the decrease is relatively minor given the size of the market and that it comes at a high cost the cost was over 1200 per ton of carbon to reduce gasoline emissions by just 1 2

the effects of embeddedness on the entrepreneurial process abstract this paper uses giddens theory of structuration to develop the conception of entrepreneurship as an embedded socio economic process the qualitative examination of the actions of rural entrepreneurs finds that embeddedness plays a key role in shaping and sustaining business being embedded in the social structure creates opportunity and improves performance embedding enabled the entrepreneurs to use the specifics of the environment thus both recognition and realisation of opportunity are conditioned by the entrepreneurs role in the social structure

labor supply and targeting in poverty alleviation programs the introduction of variable labor supply raises some fundamental issues in analyzing the targeting of poverty alleviation programs in developing countries it forces a reconsideration of the standard objective function which is based on income or expenditure and so makes no allowance for the effort made in earning that income the authors show that alternative views on the appropriate valuation of effort have very different implications for commodity based targeting rules they also establish a benchmark for marginal effective tax rates inclusive of benefit withdrawal in income tested schemes and show that indicator targeting rules may also have to be modified significantly when labor supply responses are recognized

targeting of food aid in rural ethiopia chronic need or inertia abstract this paper quantifies the factors underlying the allocations of food aid by the ethiopian government together with local and international non governmental organizations ngos both across rural regions and to households within regions we focus on reduced form specifications in which as little structure as possible is put on the decision rules because so little is known about these rules and their implementation nationally representative rural household data from ethiopia collected in 1996 are used the paper determines the extent to which food aid both free distribution and food for work is targeted to poor households and communities we also demonstrate that food aid allocations display a large degree of spatial continuity over time and are concentrated in areas that at least during the time of the survey are not the poorest the paper attempts to disentangle two competing explanations for the apparent spatial rigidity of food aid allocations that the recipient areas are chronically needy or that needs shift geographically from 1 year to the next but that fixed costs in setting up operations and in the process of identifying needs lead to a degree of inertia in the location of food aid programs over time we conclude that the evidence best fits the inertia explanation

structural adjustment macroeconomic adjustment and poverty a methodology for analysis abstract the object of this paper is to set out a methodology for analyzing the impact on the poor in less developed countries ldcs of adjustment to disturbances arising in the international sectors sectors of these economies the methodology is not based on a detailed general equilibrium model of the whole economy but instead focuses on the effects of the adjustment process on the sectoral composition of national output and expenditure the paper provides a framework for the calculation of quantitative estimates of the impact of adjustment on poverty using household income and expenditure surveys currently available in ldcs it is proposes the use of decomposable poverty indices as a tractable vehicle for calculating the impact of adjustment on overall poverty this framework does require however reasonably disaggregated data on income distribution

the speed of gasoline price response in markets with and without edgeworth cycles retail gasoline prices are known to respond fairly slowly to wholesale price changes this does not appear to be true for markets with edgeworth price cycles recently many retail gasoline markets in the midwestern u s and in other countries have been shown to exhibit price cycles in which competition generates rapid cyclical retail price movements we show that cost changes in cycling markets are passed on 2 to 3 times faster than in markets without cycles we argue that the constant price movement inherent within the edgeworth cycle eliminates price frictions and allows firms to pass on cost fluctuations more easily

optimal subsidy for the poor abstract this paper considers the problem of allocating an antipoverty budget subsidy among the poor in a society in an optimal and inequality reducing manner optimality requires minimization of some exogenously given poverty index on the other hand for inequality reduction a poorer poor should receive a higher amount of subsidy than a richer poor minimal progressivity and the ranks of the persons in the pre and post subsidized distributions should be the same an illustration of the general optimal subsidy function using some specific poverty index and an income distribution is provided

economic performance through time prize lecture to the memory of alfred nobel december 9 1993 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

corruption in procurement and public purchase abstract the paper studies capture and extortion in public purchase it shows that capture yields a dead weight loss while extortion does not based on the calibration of the model the total cost of capture is between 1 2 and 2 88 times the amount of the bribes the theoretical analysis focuses on capture fight the legal framework that emerges from the normative analysis involves open tender for larger purchases and no monitoring for the smaller ones the rule is independent of a country s characteristics large public purchases should hence be ruled by international legislation for markets of medium range national legislation differs when susceptibility to corruption rises there is a shift from the capture to the extortion regime

poverty alleviation and tax policy abstract this paper examines public good provision and tax policy optimal non linear income taxation and linear commodity taxation when the government departs from purely welfarist objective function and seeks to minimise poverty this assumption reflects much policy discussion and may help understand some divergences of practical tax policy from lessons in optimal tax analysis in contrast to atkinson and stiglitz j public econom 6 1976 55 it may be optimal to use differentiated commodity tax rates including the taxation of savings even if preferences are separable in goods and leisure the optimal effective marginal tax rate at the bottom of the distribution may be negative suggesting that wage subsidy schemes can be optimal finally optimal provision of a public good is analysed under poverty minimisation

inducing efficiency in the use of foreign aid the case for incentive mechanisms in this article we point out that one of the main problems in foreign aid allocation is the efficient use of these funds as resources available for foreign aid are intrinsically scarce their efficient use would be in the interest of donors and especially recipient countries the aim of this paper is to show how it is possible to design incentive schemes which by relating the allocation of aid to the way it is used may induce the recipient country to use these resources appropriately we discuss potential benefits and problems of different contractual forms showing how comparing the performances of different countries may help to design optimal incentive mechanisms finally we illustrate a proposal of performance conditioning of the grant element which may help in tackling the efficiency problem

the politics of government decision making a theory of regulatory capture the paper develops an agency theoretic approach to interest group politics and shows the following 1 the organizational response to the possibility of regulatory agency politics is to reduce the stakes interest groups have in regulation 2 the threat of producer protection leads to low powered incentive schemes for regulated firms 3 consumer politics may induce uniform pricing by a multiproduct firm 4 an interest group has more power when its interest lies in inefficient rather than efficient regulation where inefficiency is measured by the degree of informational asymmetry between the regulated industry and the political principal congress

analysis of the distributional impact of out of pocket health payments evidence from a public health insurance program for the poor in mexico many governments have health programs focused on improving health among the poor and these have an impact on out of pocket health payments made by individuals therefore one of the objectives of these programs is to reach the poorest and reduce their out of pocket expenditure in this paper we propose the distributional poverty impact approach to measure the poverty impact of out of pocket health payments of different health financing policies this approach is comparable to the impoverishment methodology proposed by wagstaff and van doorslaer 2003 that compares poverty indices before and after out of pocket health payments in order to escape the specification of a particular poverty index we use the marginal dominance approach that uses non intersecting curves and can rank poverty reducing health financing policies we present an empirical application of the out of pocket health payments for an innovative social financing policy implemented in mexico named seguro popular the paper finds evidence that seguro popular program has a better distributional poverty impact when families face illness when compared to other poverty reducing policies the empirical dominance approach uses data from mexico in 2006 and considers international poverty standards of 2 per person per day

food subsidies and poverty alleviation this paper formulates the problem of the optimal pattern of food subsidies in a general setting where the objective is to minimize a class of poverty indices within the framework of the mo dern public finance theory taking explicit account of the budget con straint and preferences and technologies the authors derive rules fo r retargetting food subsidies to reduce poverty many operational rul es of thumb appear as special cases of the general results the analy sis thus provides not only the microfoundations of these operational rules but also their appropriate generalizations when the conditions under which they arise are not fulfilled copyright 1988 by royal economic society

child growth shocks and food aid in rural ethiopia this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled child growth shocks and food aid in rural ethiopia conducted between 1995 and 1996 in ethiopia the study observed the impact of food aid on child growth and shocks in communities on the child level food aid has a positive significant impact on the growth in height of children the total amount of food aid appears on average to be sufficient to offset the negative effects of plot damage on child growth given the fact there remains a massive amount of child stunting there must be large amounts of mis targeting of aid girls seem to be more resilient to shocks than boys

a meta analysis of the price elasticity of gasoline demand a sur approach abstract automobile gasoline demand can be expressed as a multiplicative function of fuel efficiency mileage per car and car ownership this implies a linear relationship between the price elasticity of total fuel demand and the price elasticities of fuel efficiency mileage per car and car ownership in this meta analytical study we aim to investigate and explain the variation in empirical estimates of the price elasticity of gasoline demand a methodological novelty is that we use the linear relationship between the elasticities to develop a meta analytical estimation approach based on a seemingly unrelated regression sur model with cross equation restrictions this approach enables us to combine observations of different elasticities and thus increase our sample size furthermore it allows for a more detailed interpretation of our meta regression results the empirical results of the study demonstrate that the sur approach leads to more precise results i e lower standard errors than a standard meta analytical approach we find that with mean short run and long run price elasticities of 0 34 and 0 84 respectively the demand for gasoline is not very price sensitive both in the short and the long run the impact of a change in the gasoline price on demand is mainly driven by responses in fuel efficiency and mileage per car and to a slightly lesser degree by changes in car ownership furthermore we find that study characteristics relating to the geographic area studied the year of the study the type of data used the time horizon and the functional specification of the demand equation have a significant impact on the estimated value of the price elasticity of gasoline demand

merchants of corruption how entrepreneurs manufacture and supply bribes summary we wondered how corruption endemic in nigeria is experienced by a specific and understudied set of actors entrepreneurs semi structured interviews with founders ceos of firms in three industries associated with high levels of corruption revealed entrepreneurs rather than victims of bribe demanding government agents are themselves active perpetrators of bribery adopting a set of bribery best practices governed by a well embedded set of social norms rules routines and power relations to deliberately subvert formal state budgetary systems while reforming institutions is a key focus of anti corruption policies in many sub saharan african countries our results suggest a bottom up approach to remediation based on understanding the practice from the perspective of those who actively engage in it

decomposition of s concentration curves for any given order of inverse stochastic dominance standard concentration curves are decomposed into three components called contribution curves those compo nents correspond to within group inequalities between group inequalities and transvari ational inequalities we prove for all orders that contribution curve dominance implies systematically welfare improving tax reforms and conversely accordingly as welfare ex pansions may be costly in terms of particular inequalities we propose targeted fiscal reforms jel classification d63 h20

measuring the intensity of poverty among subpopulations applications to the united states this paper proposes an approach to measuring the intensity of poverty within a group relative to that of the population to which the group belongs a poverty intensity index is presented which is easy to interpret and satisfies a number of desirable properties the intensity of poverty among racial and residential groups in various geographical locations is measured using 1980 united states census data

measuring welfare poverty and inequality a class of poverty measures is identified the members of which satisfy strong monotonicity and transfer conditions these measures are closely related to indices of income inequality based on the notion of a mean equivalent income a restriction on the class of admissible measures allows poverty to be interpreted in terms of the loss in mean equivalent income resulting from the fact that some people are poor copyright 1987 by royal economic society

poverty dominant program reforms the role of targeting and allocation rules we propose simple graphical methods to identify poverty reducing marginal reforms of transfer programs the methods are based on program dominance curves that display cumulative program benefits weighted by powers of poverty gaps these curves can be decomposed simply as sums of targeting dominance curves and allocation dominance ones and can serve to verify whether the assessment of marginal program reforms is sensitive to the choice of poverty lines and poverty measures as well as to differences across programs in revenue sources and incentive effects

impact of state and civil institutions on the operation of rural market and nonmarket configurations abstract the approach undertaken in this study is based on the concept of configurations configurations are shaped by specific combinations of characteristics of the following elements the item transacted the actors and the underlying physical technological cultural and policy environment configurations can be either market or nonmarket configurations in turn transactions are endogenously determined within given configurations the impact of government intervention on the performance of a number of prototypical rural configurations and agrarian institutions such as the food and cash crops market configurations the farm household sharecropping and the rural official and unofficial credit markets is evaluated critically

a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence this paper presents a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence political equilibrium depends on the efficiency of each group in producing pressure the effect of additional pressure on their influence the number of persons in different groups and the deadweight cost of taxes and subsidies an increase in deadweight costs discourages pressure by subsidized groups and encourages pressure by taxpayers this analysis unifies the view that governments correct market failures with the view that they favor the politically powerful both are produced by the competition for political favors

using micro surveys to measure and explain corruption summary this paper discusses survey techniques aimed at a better measurement of corruption at the micro level and argues that with appropriate survey methods and interview techniques it is possible to collect quantitative micro level data on corruption public expenditure tracking surveys service provider surveys and enterprise surveys are highlighted with several applications these surveys permit measurement of corruption at the level of individual agents such as schools health clinics or firms they also permit the study of mechanisms responsible for corruption including capture of public funds and bribery 2005 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

on the measurement of poverty official statistics in the united states and the united kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970 s and the 1980 s but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings in particular the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism this paper re examines three basic issues in measuring poverty the choice of the poverty line the index of poverty and the relation between poverty and inequality one general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted there is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line affecting both its level and its structure in this situation we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering the first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons illustrating their application by reference to data for the united states the choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed in the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class which includes many of those proposed give the same ranking those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded the third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare

multidimensional poverty targeting abstractthe importance of taking into account multidimensionality in poverty measurement has recently been emphasized the poverty alleviation literature however has not yet addressed the importa

the impacts of india s food security policies on south asian wheat and rice markets we quantify the extent to which india s success in stabilizing its wheat and rice markets affects other countries in south asia we deal with the variability of indian trade and price policies by a

consumption dominance curves testing for the impact of indirect tax reforms on poverty abstract a new tool is presented to test for the robustness of the impact on poverty of marginal tax reforms for pairs of commodities consumption dominance curves exist for every order of stochastic dominance an illustration is provided with bolivian data