ingredients of famine analysis availability and entitlements famines often take place in situations of moderate to good food availability without any significant decline of food supply per head the paper presents an alternative approach to famines which does not concentrate on availability but on people s ability to command food through legal means available in the society including the use of production possibilities trade opportunities entitlements vis a vis the state etc the approach is explained focusing on exchange entitlement mappings fluctuations in which can lead to big shifts in the intergroup distribution of food command the approach is then applied to the bengal famine of 1943 the ethiopian famine in wollo in 1973 and the bangladesh famine in 1974 and some general conclusions are drawn about the nature and classes of famines

the institutional causes of china s great famine 1959 1961 this paper studies the causes of china s great famine during which 16 5 to 45 million individuals perished in rural areas we document that average rural food retention during the famine was too high to generate a severe famine without rural inequality in food availability that there was significant variance in famine mortality rates across rural regions and that rural mortality rates were positively correlated with per capita food production a surprising pattern that is unique to the famine years we provide evidence that an inflexible and progressive government procurement policy where procurement could not adjust to contemporaneous production and larger shares of expected production were procured from more productive regions was necessary for generating this pattern and that this policy was a quantitatively important contributor to overall famine mortality

coevolution of capitalism and political representation the choice of electoral systems protocorporatist west european countries in which economic interests were collectively organized adopted pr in the first quarter of the twentieth century whereas liberal countries in which economic interests were not collectively organized did not political parties as marcus kreuzer points out choose electoral systems so how do economic interests translate into party political incentives to adopt electoral reform we argue that parties in protocorporatist countries were representative of and closely linked to economic interests as electoral competition in single member districts increased sharply up to world war i great difficulties resulted for the representative parties whose leaders were seen as interest committed they could not credibly compete for votes outside their interest without leadership changes or reductions in interest influence proportional representation offered an obvious solution allowing parties to target their own voters and their organized interest to continue effective influence in the legislature in each respect the opposite was true of liberal countries data on party preferences strongly confirm this model kreuzer s historical criticisms are largely incorrect as shown in detail in the online supplementary appendix

centripetal and centrifugal incentives under different electoral systems inaseminalarticle cox 1990 suggestedthatelectoralsystemswithlargerdistrictmagnitudesprovideincentivesforparties to advocate more extreme policy positions in this article we put this proposition to the test informed by recent advances in spatial models of party competition we introduce a design that embeds the effect of electoral rules in the utility function of voters we then estimate the equilibrium location of parties as the weight voters attach to the expected distribution of seats and votes changes our model predicts that electoral rules affect large and small parties in different ways we find centripetal effects only for parties that are favorably biased by electoral rules by contrast smaller parties see their vote share decline and are pushed toward more extreme equilibrium positions evidence from 13 parliamentary democracies supports model predictions along with testing the incentives provided by electoral rules results carry implications for the strategies of vote maximizing parties and for the role of small parties in multiparty competition

evaluating echelon stock r nq policies in serial production inventory systems with stochastic demand this paper studies echelon stock r nq policies in serial production inventory systems with stochastic demand we provide a recursive procedure to compute the steady state echelon inventory levels of the systems which can be used to evaluate the long run average holding and backorder costs as well as other performance measures the procedure is based upon an observation of a relationship between the inventory status of adjacent stages in a serial system we also device exact formulas for replenishment frequencies and setup costs our results apply to both continuous review systems with compound poisson demand and periodic review systems with independent identically distributed demands a preliminary numerical study was conducted to explore the cost effectiveness of echelon stock r nq policies for two stage systems with simple poisson demand we compared among the minimum costs of echelon stock r nq policies a lower bound on the minimum achievable costs and the minimum costs of installation stock r nq policies finally we present a modification of an existing approximate evaluation procedure

optimal policies and approximations for a serial multiechelon inventory system with time correlated demand since clark and scarf s pioneering work most advances in multiechelon inventory systems have been based on demand processes that are time independent this paper revisits the serial multiechelon inventory system of clark and scarf and develops three key results first we provide a simple lower bound approximation to the optimal echelon inventory levels and an upper bound to the total system cost for the basic model of clark and scarf second we show that the structure of the optimal stocking policy of clark and scarf holds under time correlated demand processes using a martingale model of forecast evolution third we extend the approximation to the time correlated demand process and study in particular for an autoregressive demand model the impact of lead times and autocorrelation on the performance of the serial inventory system

rural urban disparity and sectoral labour allocation in china this study examines china s rural urban segmentation and its causes in the context of economic reforms household survey and aggregate data indicate a v shaped process in which rural urban consumption and income differentials decreased between 1978 and 1985 but then have continually increased to historically high levels this sectoral division is consistent with production function estimates based on provincial data that reveal higher labour productivity in urban state owned industries than in rural industries and agriculture to explain the v shaped change we argue that the precedent of successful rural reforms raised farmers relative earnings but the remaining obstacles to an efficient sectoral allocation of labour have prevented china from eliminating dualism recent financial policies consisting of urban price subsidies and increased investment credits have also had influential distribution effects that are biased against the rural sector

a robustness study of a multi echelon inventory model via simulation abstract this paper examines the robustness of a standard model of multi echelon inventory systems specifically the models discussed in axsater oper res 48 5 2000 686 a simulation model was developed to explore the model s ability to predict system performance for a two echelon one warehouse multiple retailer system using r q inventory policies under conditions that violate the model s fundamental modeling assumptions in particular the impact of non stationary demand on this stationary demand inventory model was examined the model performs well at the low demand and large retailer order batch size situations but our testing of the model indicated that care must be taken when applying this model to situations that violate its fundamental assumption these results should help practitioners to better understand the assumptions of these models and to determine when or when not to apply these models in practice

near optimal r q policies for a two stage serial inventory system with poisson demand we consider a two stage serial inventory system whose cost structure exhibits economies of scale in both stages in the system stage 1 faces poisson demand and replenishes its inventory from stage 2 and the latter stage in turn orders from an outside supplier with unlimited stock each shipment either to stage 2 or to stage 1 incurs a fixed setup cost we derive important properties for a given echelon stock r q policy for an approximation of the problem where all states are continuous based on these properties we design a simple heuristic algorithm that can be used to find a near optimal r q policy for the original problem numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm

stock wars inventory competition in a two echelon supply chain with multiple retailers this paper studies the competitive and cooperative selection of inventory policies in a two echelon supply chain with one supplier andn retailers stochastic demand is monitored continuously retailers incur inventory holding and backorder penalty costs the supplier incurs holding costs for its inventory and backorder penalty costs for backorders at the retailers the latter cost reflects the supplier s desire to maintain adequate availability of its product to consumers previous research finds the supply chain cost minimizing reorder point policies the cooperative solution the competitive solution is a nash equilibrium a set of reorder points such that no firm can deviate from the equilibrium and lower its cost it is shown that nash equilibria exist and a method is presented to find all of them in some settings the cooperative solution is a nash equilibrium competition does not necessarily lead to supply chain inefficiency in other settings competition leads to costs that are substantially higher than optimal usually but not always the competitive supply chain carries too little inventory three cooperation strategies are discussed change incentives change equilibrium and change control a set of contracts is provided that changes the firms incentives so that the optimal policy is a nash equilibrium an equilibrium change can improve performance but does not guarantee optimal performance to change control the firms let the supplier choose all reorder points a key component in vendor managed inventory that change leads to optimal supply chain performance

94 effective policies for a two stage serial inventory system with stochastic demand a two stage inventory system is considered where poisson demand occurs at stage 1 and stage 1 replenishes its inventory from stage 2 which in turn orders from an outside supplier with unlimited stock each shipment either to stage 2 or to stage 1 incurs a fixed setup cost under the assumption that the supply leadtime at stage 2 is zero we characterize a simple heuristic policy whose long run average cost is guaranteed to be within 6 of optimality i e a 94 effective policy the paper also provides heuristic policies for more general inventory systems and reports computational results

the competitive road to proportional representation partisan biases and electoral regime change under increasing party competition one of the most noteworthy political regularities in the early twentieth century was the shift away from majoritarian electoral rules in western europe the conventional wisdom suggests that proportional representation pr was introduced by elites who believed that under the existing majoritarian rules simple plurality block vote two ballot rules they would soon lose power to rapidly growing socialist parties but this does not explain why many electoral reforms were carried out in countries with weak or nonexistent socialist parties the author shows that increasing the number of parties distorts the seat vote properties of electoral rules to a larger degree than previously anticipated under increasing party competition electoral regimes display larger partisan biases than those observed in two party races and crowd out minority parties that have territorially dispersed constituencies in favor of minority parties that have territorially concentrated constituencies using a dynamic bayesian model for seats and votes the author measures the partisan biases brought about by the expansion of voting rights in the late nineteenth century to explain the drive to reform majoritarian electoral systems

lower bounds for multi echelon stochastic inventory systems we establish lower bounds on the minimum cost of managing certain production distribution networks with setup costs at all stages and stochastic demands these networks include serial assembly and one warehouse multi retailer systems we obtain the bounds through novel cost allocation schemes we evaluate the bounds performance for one warehouse multi retailer systems by comparing them with simple heuristic policies the bounds are quite tight for systems with a small number of retailers we also present simplified proof of known optimality results for serial and assembly systems

grain exports and the causes of china s great famine 1959 1961 county level evidence abstract this study quantitatively evaluates the relative importance of different causes of china s great famine especially for the importance of grain exports we exploit county level over time variations in crop specialization patterns to construct bartik style measures of export shocks using county level panel data from 1955 to 1963 we regress death rates on the bartik export measures with county and province year fixed effects as well as time varying effects of county level observables we use weather shocks to instrument for output and consumption the regression results suggest that increases in grain exports substantially increase death rates this effect is larger in counties that are further from railways and with fewer local chinese communist party members to examine the relative importance of different mechanisms we also estimate the effects of the procurement policy the determinants of grain output and the relationship between death rates and county level average caloric consumption during the famine period the counterfactual experiments indicate that the fall in agriculture production the increase in procurement partly driven by grain exports and the increasingly progressive and inflexible procurement policy collectively increased the number of excess deaths where no single factor dominates in particular grain exports explain 15 percent of excess deaths which is one fourth of the effect of the increase in procurement rates between 1957 and 1959

coordination mechanisms of supply chain systems supply chain management scm has become an important management paradigm as supply chain members are often separate and independent economic entities a key issue in scm is to develop mechanisms that can align their objectives and coordinate their activities so as to optimize system performance in this paper we provide a review of coordination mechanisms of supply chain systems in a framework that is based on supply chain decision structure and nature of demand this framework highlights the behavioral aspects and information need in the coordination of a supply chain the identification of these issues points out several directions of future research in this area

electoral markets party strategies and proportional representation closeness of its dialogue with historical knowledge kreuzer 2010 383 kreuzer also insists on the role that historical research plays in generating and testing theoretical propositions however in what i judge to be a more ambitious move he maintains that historical work when properly conducted may be a particularly suitable method to test the causal structures of a large swath of the theoretical work currently done in political science the crux of this position can be stated succinctly although still crucial for testing many causal propositions standard statistical methods may be inadequate to capture the underlying strategic structure that characterizes most if not all political and for that matter social events that is they may be insufficient to fully identify the players of the game inspect their beliefs payoffs and alternative strategies properly examine the sequence of decisions and verify the equilibrium conditions of the final outcome 2

newsvendor bounds and heuristic for optimal policies in serial supply chains we consider the classicn stage serial supply systems with linear costs and stationary random demands there are deterministic transportation leadtimes between stages and unsatisfied demands are backlogged the optimal inventory policy for this system is known to be an echelon base stock policy which can be computed through minimizingn nested convex functions recursively to identify the key determinants of the optimal policy we develop a simple and surprisingly good heuristic this method minimizes 2 n separate newsvendor type cost functions each of which uses the original problem data only these functions are lower and upper bounds for the echelon cost functions their minimizers form bounds for the optimal echelon base stock levels the heuristic is the simple average of the solution bounds in extensive numerical experiments the average relative error of the heuristic is 0 24 with the maximum error less than 1 5 the bounds and the heuristic which can be easily obtained by simple spreadsheet calculations enhance the accessibility and implementability of the multiechelon inventory theory more importantly the closed form expressions provide an analytical tool for us to gain insights into issues such as system bottlenecks effects of system parameters and coordination mechanisms in decentralized systems

can openness mitigate the effects of weather shocks evidence from india s famine era transformation of countries throughout history rural citizens in developing countries today however remain highly exposed to fluctua tions in the weather this exposure affects the incomes these citizens earn and the prices of the foods they eat recent work has documented the significant mortality stress that rural house holds face in times of adverse weather robin burgess olivier deschenes dave donaldson and michael greenstone 2009 masayuki kudamatsu torsten persson and david stromberg 2009 famines times of acutely low nominal agricultural income and acutely high food prices are an extreme manifestation of this mapping from weather to death lilian c a knowles 1924 describes these events as agricultural lockouts where both food sup plies and agricultural employment on which the bulk of the rural population depends plummet the result is catastrophic with widespread hun ger and loss of life though now confined to the world s poor est countries food shortages and famines were features of most preindustrial societies over time there has been intense debate over what role openness to trade in food might play in

batch size and stocking levels in multi echelon repairable systems in multi echelon repairable inventory systems with high set up cost for order and or high demand rates the use of batch ordering may be more cost effective than the common s 1 s ordering policy this paper addresses the issue of determining the optimal order batch size and stocking levels at the stocking locations in such a system a power approximation is used to estimate the total system stock and backorder levels from which the optimal batch size can be readily determined a search routine involving one pass searches are then followed to obtain the stocking levels at the depot and the local sites of the system this procedure has been evaluated using 900 test cases and has been found to be very effective the power approximation approach also results in a simple analytical relationship to test whether or not s 1 s is an optimal ordering policy for repairable items in a multi echelon environment

98 effective integer ratio lot sizing for one warehouse multi retailer systems a warehouse supplies n retailers constant external demand occurs at each retailer and shortages are not allowed there are linear holding costs and fixed costs for ordering at the warehouse and at each retailer the goal is to minimize the long run average cost over an infinite time horizon we define a new class of policies for this problem whose simple structure facilitates both computation and implementation the cost of a policy that is optimal within this class is shown to be within 2 of the cost of an optimal policy for the original problem in the worst case such a policy can be computed in on log n time

the great leap forward anatomy of a central planning disaster the great leap forward disaster characterized by a collapse in grain production and a widespread famine in china between 1959 and 1961 is found attributable to a systemic failure in central planning wishfully expecting a great leap in agricultural productivity from collectivization the chinese government accelerated its aggressive industrialization timetable grain output fell sharply as the government diverted agricultural resources to industry and imposed an excessive grain procurement burden on peasants leaving them with insufficient calories to sustain labor productivity our analysis shows that 61 percent of the decline in output is attributable to the policies of resource diversion and excessive procurement

optimization of order up to s policies for two level inventory systems with compound poisson demand abstract we consider a two level inventory system with one warehouse and n retailers leadtimes are constant and the retailers face different compound poisson demand processes all facilities apply order up to s replenishment policies we show how to evaluate holding and shortage costs exactly

modified echelon r q policies with guaranteed performance bounds for stochastic serial inventory systems we consider the classic continuous review nstage serial inventory system with a homogeneous poisson demand arrival process at the most downstream stage stage 1 any shipment to each stage regardless of its size incurs a positive fixed setup cost and takes a positive constant lead time the optimal policy for this system under the long run average cost criterion is unknown finding a good worst case performance guarantee remains an open problem we tackle this problem by introducing a class of modified echelon r q policies that do not require qi 1 qi to be a positive integer stage i 1 ships to stage i based on its observation of the echelon inventory position at stage i if it is at or below ri and stage i 1 has positive on hand inventory then a shipment is sent to stage i to raise its echelon inventory position to ri qias close as possible we construct a heuristic policy within this class of policies which has the following features first it has provably primitive dependent performance bounds in a two stage system the performance of the heuristic policy is guaranteed to be within 1 k1 k2 times the optimal cost where k1 is the downstream fixed cost and k2 is the upstream fixed cost we also provide an alternative performance bound which depends on efficiently computable optimal r q solutions to n single stage systems but tends to be tighter second the heuristic is simple it is efficiently computable and it performs well numerically it is even likely to outperform the optimal integer ratio echelon r q policies when k1 is dominated by k2 third the heuristic is asymptotically optimal when we take some dominant relationships between the setup or holding cost primitives at an upstream stage and its immediate downstream stage to the extreme for example when h2 h1 0 where h1 is the downstream holding cost parameter and h2 is the upstream holding cost parameter

optimal policies for multi echelon inventory problems with batch ordering in many production distribution systems materials flow from one stage to another in fixed lot sizes for example a retailer orders a full truckload from a manufacturer to qualify for a quantity discount a factory has a material handling system that moves full containers of parts from one production stage to the next in this paper we derive optimal policies for multi stage serial and assembly systems where materials flow in fixed batches the optimal policies have a simple structure and their parameters can be easily determined this research extends the multi echelon inventory theory in several ways it generalizes the clark scarf model by allowing batch transfers of inventories rosling 1989 shows that assembly systems can be interpreted as serial systems under the assumption that there are no setup costs we show that the series interpretation still holds when materials flow in fixed batches which satisfy a certain regularity condition finally veinott 1965 identifies an optimal policy for a single location inventory system with batch ordering this paper generalizes his result to multi echelon settings

coordination mechanisms in decentralized serial inventory systems with batch ordering this paper studies a periodic review serial supply chain in which materials are ordered and shipped according to r nq policies three information scenarios are considered depending on the level of information available echelon local and quasilocal in the echelon scenario each stage can access the inventory and cost information within its echelon comprising the stage itself and all downstream stages in the local scenario each stage only accesses its own local information finally in the quasilocal scenario each stage knows its local information plus the actual customer demands we propose coordination schemes that regulate the stages to achieve the supply chain s optimal cost under each information setting all these coordination schemes fit comfortably within an emerging practice called supply chain finance which includes the organization and technology needed to implement them

the causes of famine abstract this article argues that sen s theory of famine will lead to the wrong diagnosis and the wrong remedies for famine and will therefore worsen the situation his analysis of the bengal famine is a case in point it is based on unreliable and inaccurate statistics even the statistics he does use contradict his thesis his explanatory hypotheses are shown to be theoretically and factually wrong the actions of the bengal government of 1943 are looked at in the light of sen s recommendations

food availability entitlements and the chinese famine of 1959 61 food availability decline and sen s entitlement are two leading approaches in understanding causes of famine previous research based on case studies has given independent support to each approach this paper analyses the chinese famine of 1959 61 by considering jointly the urban bias and the decline in food availability as causes we find that both factors contributed significantly to the increase in death rates during this famine to our knowledge this paper is the first econometric study to assess the importance of famine causes using the entitlement approach

famines and economics famines have happened with and without crop failures or wars but they invariably entail a collapse in the command over food of vulnerable subgroups within a society whether through loss of endowment or a contraction in the amount of food that can be acquired from given endowments thus economic analysis can help understand famines viewed as tragic aperiodic magnifications of normal market and governmental failures recent literature in economics and other fields has reflected this change in the conceptualization of famines and it has come with policy implications for famine relieve and prevention

one warehouse multiretailer systems with centralized stock information we consider a distribution system with a central warehouse and multiple retailers the warehouse orders from an outside supplier and replenishes the retailers which in turn satisfy customer demand the retailers are nonidentical and their demand processes are independent compound poisson there are economies of scale in inventory replenishment which is controlled by an echelon stock batch transfer policy for the special case with simple poisson demand we develop an exact method for computing the long run average holding and backorder costs of the system based on this exact method we provide approximations for compound poisson demand numerical examples are used to illustrate the accuracy of the approximations we also present a numerical comparison between the average costs of a heuristic echelon stock policy and an existing lower bound on the average costs of all feasible policies

large demographic shocks and small changes in the marriage market between 1958 and 1961 china experienced one of the worse famines in her history birth rates fell during these years and recovered immediately afterwards the famine also adversely affected the health of these cohorts this paper provides non parametric estimates of the total effects of the famine on the marital behaviour of famine affected cohorts in the rural areas of sichuan and anhui these reduced from estimates incorporate general equilibrium and heterogeneous treatment effects two important components of equilibrium marital behaviour next the paper uses a structural model of the marriage market the choo siow model to decompose observed marital outcomes into quantity and quality effects of the famine the structural estimates show that the famine substantially reduced the marital attractiveness of the famine born cohort the conclusion is that the small observed changes in marriage rates of the famine born cohorts are due to a substantial decline in their marital attractiveness controlling for changes in educational attainment does not change the conclusion

exact and approximate evaluation of batch ordering policies for two level inventory systems we consider a two level inventory system with one warehouse and n identical retailers lead times transportation times are constant and the retailers face independent poisson demand in a previous paper we derived a recursive procedure for determining the policy costs for an average item in case of one for one replenishment policies in this paper we show how these results can be used for the exact or approximate evaluation of more general policies where both the retailers and the warehouse order in batches we compare our methods to the method recently suggested by a svoronos and p zipkin

estimating the long term impact of the great chinese famine 1959 61 on modern china summary this research analyzes the long term impact of the great chinese famine 1959 61 on the modern chinese economy and shows that areas in which famine was most severe have significantly lower per capita gdp today the great famine coincided with the chinese communist party s industrialization and agriculture modernization plan the great leap forward glf to remove omitted variable and endogeneity problems a unique relationship between the communist army s takeover of mainland china 1946 50 and the degree to which subnational leadership was willing to enforce glf policies to the detriment of rural citizens well being is exploited via instrumental variable iv estimation specifically areas liberated later had a higher density of zealous administrators by the start of the glf in 1958 and in turn experienced stricter enforcement of glf policies which resulted in greater famine severity as a result this research finds a relatively pronounced impact of politically triggered famine captured by the iv approach which strengthens the growing outlook that famine is a consequence of inadequate food entitlement as opposed to being simply food shortages

evaluation of installation stock based r q policies fortwo level inventory systems with poisson demands we consider a two level inventory system with one warehouse and n retailers leadtimes transportation times are constant and the retailers face different poisson demand processes all facilities apply continuous review installation stock r q policies with different reorder points and batch quantities we show how to evaluate holding and shortage costs exactly in case of two retailers in case of more than two retailers we use the same methodology as an approximation when evaluating costs at a certain retailer the other retailers are then aggregated into a single retailer

moving off the farm land institutions to facilitate structural transformation and agricultural productivity growth in china agriculture has made major contributions to china s economic growth and poverty reduction but the literature has rarely focused on the institutional factors that might underpin such structural transformation and productivity this paper aims to fill that gap drawing on an 8 year panel of 1 200 households in six key provinces it explores the impact of government land reallocations and formal land use certificates on agricultural productivity growth as well as the likelihood of households to exit from agriculture or send family members to the non farm sector it finds that land tenure insecurity measured by the history of past land reallocations discourages households from quitting agriculture the recognition of land rights through formal certificates encourages the temporary migration of rural labor both factors have a large impact on productivity at about 30 percent each mainly by encouraging market based land transfers a sustained increase in non agricultural opportunities will likely reinforce the importance of secure land tenure which is a precondition for successful structural transformation and continued economic attractiveness of rural areas

inventory management with asset based financing most of the traditional models in production and inventory control ignore the financial states of an organization and can lead to infeasible practices in real systems this paper is the first attempt to incorporate asset based financing into production decisions instead of setting a known exogenously determined budgetary constraint as most existing models suggest we model the available cash in each period as a function of assets and liabilities that may be updated periodically according to the dynamics of the production activities furthermore our models allow different interest rates on cash balance and outstanding loans which is an enhancement over most traditional models in that inventory financed by a loan may be more expensive than that by out of pocket cash we demonstrate the importance of joint consideration of production and financing decisions in a start up setting in which the ability to grow the firm is mainly constrained by its limited capital and dependence on bank financing we then explain the motivation for asset based financing by examining the decision making at a bank and a set of retailers in a newsvendor setting