stabilization adjustment and the poor abstract this paper attempts to survey the recent literature on the impact of stabilization and adjustment programs upon the poor and to consider some of the key issues in the context of a particular equity oriented low income country tanzania after looking at some of the approaches of earlier studies this paper analyzes the effects of restructuring policies macroeconomic restraint and strategic policy change the author then reviews available evidence on the recent experience of tanzania with external shock efforts at stabilization and relations with the imf in conclusion the author argues that in order to better understand their impact on poverty we need more detailed analyses of specific countries experience with different kinds of macroeconomic imbalance and different short to medium term policy responses however he does indicate with some certainty that when equivalent external blows impact upon very low income countries there must be a presumption that other things being equal including the distribution of income the proportion of households and people pushed over the line into absolute poverty will be greater than in middle income countries the international community should provide external finance to aid these low income countries in limiting the negative impact on the poorest

instant gratification temporal discounting and self employment differences in temporal discounting could separate self employed individuals from employees working for wages drawing on a sample of 13 198 individuals from the 2012 2013 cross sectional step skills measurement survey we find that higher temporal discounting is more positively associated with the likelihood of self employment we further find that younger individuals with higher temporal discounting are more likely to engage in self employment the association of lower socioeconomic status at a young age or those who experienced economic shocks at a young age with the likelihood of self employment is only significant when interaction effects of temporal discounting and age are present in the model risk seeking is not associated with the likelihood of engagement in self employment under higher discounting these findings have implications for the self employment literature as well as the literature on behavioral decision making

simple analytics of segmented markets what case for liberalization abstract discussion about the liberalization of controlled markets in developing countries frequently assumes that the removal of price or quantity restrictions will lead rapidly to increased marketed output however when parallel markets exist market controls may not depress marketed output and may actually increase it conversely liberalization may not increase marketed output much if at all the benefits of liberalization will be greater where parallel markets are costly to enter so that decontrol increases efficiency and scarce resources such as entrepreneurial and administrative ability are diverted into the rent seeking activity of gaining access to illegal parallel markets this paper employs partial equilibrium techniques to analyze market controls and liberalization in the presence of parallel markets for foodgrains credit labor and foreign exchange

accounting technologies and sustainability assessment models abstract within ecological economics there is recognition of the need for new approaches to decision making to support sustainable development initiatives there is an increasing acknowledgement of the limitations of cost benefit analysis approaches as a measure of the un sustainability of organizational activities these are viewed as particularly inappropriate within the participatory settings that sustainable development proponents seek to foster they also fail to deal with the highly contested nature of sustainable development discourse in contemporary pluralist democracies while advances have been made in the field of multi criteria decision making there is still a relative dearth of versatile models that accommodate monetization in a way that recognizes the limits of calculative technologies this article introduces readers to developments within the accounting discipline designed to support sustainable development decision making and evaluation in particular it proposes sustainability assessment models as a viable alternative to cost benefit analysis sustainability assessment models are based on an inter disciplinary approach that recognizes the need for accountings that facilitate more participatory forms of decision making and accountability as such they address many of the weaknesses in current approaches to cost benefit analysis the authors first experiences with sustainability assessment models were with bp and the united kingdom oil and gas sector where models were developed as a means of making previously external costs more central to organizational decision making later work has included exploration of a range of decision making situations in private and public sector organizations in both the united kingdom and new zealand this has involved more explicit attention to plural values and issues of participation dialogue and democracy

home based work and women s labor force decisions home based work differs from other employment because the work site is the home itself this difference means that the fixed costs of working at home are less than the fixed costs of working on site and that home based workers may engage in joint market and household production using data from the 1990 census we find that home based work is an attractive option for women for whom the fixed costs of work are high women who have small children are disabled or live in rural areas and that home based workers are more likely to choose self employment than are on site workers

high interest rates a new conventional wisdom for development policy some conclusions from sri lankan experience abstract the paper is concerned with the general proposition that high interest rates paid to savers can contribute significantly to the long run development of ldcs as well as to stabilization of their economies in the short run by relating this general proposition to some simple theory about the behaviour of imperfect financial markets as well as to specific institutional circumstances in sri lanka it is demonstrated that there are important qualifications that have to be borne in mind in particular in the current institutional circumstances of sri lanka which are closely replicated in other ldcs the instinctive argument of the neoclassical economist that interest rates should reflect the scarcity price of capital is not a great deal of help to policy makers

the compatibility of market liberalization and local economic development strategies cook p and hulme d 1988 the compatibility of market liberalization and local economic development strategies reg studies 22 221 231 the last decade has witnessed a growing emphasis on economic liberalization this new orthodoxy has come at a time when there is an increasing atmosphere of disillusionment surrounding conventional approaches to regional policy calls have been made for the creation of a new regional paradigm of development from below but most proposals are inappropriate for the majority of third world nations as they assume that planning occurs within a socialist framework this paper outlines the concepts that underpin policies of macroeconomic liberalization and the local economic development approach and examines the compatability of these policies it is argued that the local economic development approach could provide the basis for a development from below regional policy that complements a market oriented macroeconomic philosophy the conclusion notes the lack of empirica

the political economy of stabilization commitment capacity and public response abstract political pressures are generally recognized as important in determining success or failure of economic stabilization and adjustment programs but there has been little comparative analysis of the politics of stabilization this study examines the factors affecting i political leaders commitment to stabilization measures often called political will ii governmental ability to implement stabilization measures and iii the responses of key interest groups and the public at large to those measures the study also discusses political implications of the design of programs and the attempted speed of stabilization and sketches the tactics available to governments to manage political risk including partial compensation persuasion diversion or obfuscation and containment of protest the discussion is based on case studies of stabilization efforts in five fairly poor small highly trade dependent countries ghana in the late 1960s and early 1970s and zambia kenya sri lanka and jamaica in the late 1970s and early 1980s a subsidiary theme within the broader discussion is the ways in which the political economy of stabilization may differ in such countries as compared to larger semi industrialized economies

valuation by conflict abstract nonmarket valuation remains a central issue in ecological and environmental economics this paper examines the properties of an ex post revealed preference approach to value nonmarket goods valuation through observed effort expended in an environmental conflict we consider the strategic interaction between players in a conflict address the implied nash equilibrium and report a benchmark 4x rule as an ex post valuation estimate for a symmetric player conflict we then illustrate the degree of bias that exists once one allows for asymmetries in delegation ability and valuation the benchmark tends to overestimate value if a firm hires a powerful delegate who receives a large contingency fee

temporary contracts and work family balance in a dual labor market a well established finding in the literature is that self employment enables mothers to accommodate work and family needs better than when they are engaged in organizational employment with this result in mind the authors investigate within a dual system of job protection if women under temporary contracts face greater work family conflicts than those under permanent contracts the authors use data on women s work and fertility histories from the spanish continuous sample of working histories to analyze whether women under temporary contracts transition to self employment upon motherhood more than those who are under permanent contracts analyses show that being under a temporary contract increases women s likelihood of transitioning to self employment upon childbirth supplementary analyses show that this is partly the result of voluntary transitions and not an employer s decision to terminate a temporary contract upon motherhood overall these findings reveal a hidden cost of temporary contracts the greater difficulty in balancing work and family

assessing the impact of interest rates in less developed countries abstract empirical results obtained do not unambiguously support what one should expect on the basis of conventional economic theory cross country evidence on the average relationship for 64 ldcs during the period 1971 1980 between some of the macroeconomic variables such as rate of growth of real gdp real financial assets saving income and investment income ratios and rate of return on investment on the one hand and the level of the real interest rate on the other is analyzed by applying a non parametric mann whitney test it is found that there is no difference with any statistical significance between the two groups of ldcs above and below the mean real interest rate this implies that the level of the real interest rate by itself has little or no impact on the selected macroeconomic variables

the incidence and wage consequences of home based work in the united states 1980 2000 abstract this study documents the rapid growth in home based wage and salary employment and the sharp decline in the home based wage penalty in the united states between 1980 and 2000 these twin patterns observed for both men and women in most occupation groups suggest that employer costs of providing home based work arrangements have decreased consistent with information technology it advances being an important source of these falling costs i find that occupation gender cells that had larger increases in on the job it use also experienced larger increases in the home based employment share and larger declines in the home based wage penalty

narrative valuation in a policy judgment context much natural resource policy work stresses the importance of involving lay and expert stakeholders in a dialogue about environmental values pertaining to decisions about land management to this end there is growing interest in value elicitation techniques that a provide alternatives to values expressed as willingness to pay formulas and b do a good job of representing the many social ethical scientific or economic value dimensions of a problem and linking those dimensions to the evaluation of a specific policy toward these objectives this paper explores the technique of narrati6e 6aluation that is the act of situating a valuation and decision problem in the context of a narrated story it reports on an experiment that tested a narrative based representation of a problem against a utilitarian one didactic text to see which representation better served the decision process the relative proficiency of both formats was tested in the context of a policy decision about the impact of hydroelectric power production on a river s salmon population the narrative technique appeared better able to help participants consider relevant value information such that they could apply that information to a complex policy judgment some reasons for the success of the narrative condition are discussed including the technique s capacity for engaging participants and rendering technical information salient the paper closes with some recommendations for further tests of narrative based valuation tools 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

a comparison of choice based multinomial and nested logit models the family structure and welfare use decisions of divorced or separated women home based work differs from other employment because the work site is the home itself this difference means that the fixed costs of working at home are less than the fixed costs of working on site and that home based workers may engage in joint market

self employment and the paradox of the contented female worker a large literature finds that the self employed are more satisfied in their jobs interestingly like in the wage and salary sector ceteris paribus self employed women are found to have more satisfaction in their jobs than self employed men even though the gender earnings differential is higher for the self employed this paper examines the so called paradox of the contented female worker for both sectors focusing on the importance of certain job attributes and whether workers actually experience these attributes properly controlling for the gap between desiring and actually obtaining these attributes explains the gender differential in job satisfaction of the self employed

investment spending and interest rate policy the case of financial liberalisation in turkey the purpose of the present study is to analyse the impact of interest rate policy on investment spending in turkey over a period which covers years of both financial repression and financial liberalisation the model presented suggests that investment will be positively correlated with below equilibrium interest rates and negatively correlated with above equilibrium rates the model is tested using a switching regime model with an unknown equilibrium rate of interest the results suggest that setting interest rates too high may be as detrimental to economic health as setting them too low moreover there is evidence of an autonomous downward shift in the investment function during the liberalisation period which may have resulted from heightened uncertainty during the period

incommensurability and monetary valuation at the very heart of environmental cost benefit analysis cba is the claim that benefits and costs can be expressed in terms of money and hence made comparable in particular cba puts all benefits and costs on a cardinal monetary scale it assumes monetary commensurability a significant literature in ethics and political philosophy has arisen which doubts this assumption but has so far had little impact on the theory or practice of cba in light of this the paper assesses the defense of monetary commensurability offered by cost benefit analysts and the wider economics literature

grit and self employment a multi country study blending the literatures on grit and self employment we propose the role of grit in separating the self employed from the employed based on a sample of 13 210 respondents from nine countries our results indicate that not only is grit related to self employment but also grit is more strongly related to self employment for risk takers females and younger individuals the findings are robust controlling for several individual characteristics and alternate specifications and have implications for the broader literature on self employment

national and international aspects of financial policies in ldcs a prologue after a period of animated controversy between keynesians advocating policies of low interest rates and monetary expansion and monetarists who insisted on the importance of the distinction between nominal and real interest rates economists have now almost reached a consensus on the role of money in the development process this consensus has arisen because it was increasingly felt that what was called for was not new concepts so much as new ways of looking at them in ldcs money s role need be neither denigrated nor exaggerated money s traditional functions as a medium of exchange and a store of value remain important in ldcs but its function as a conduit of resources from savers to investors is more central to an inderstanding of its contributions to development coats and khatkhate 1980 p 3 the body of the consensus derives from the framework set up by mckinnon and shaw fleshed out by the earlier work of goldsmith and patrick goldsmith 1969 patrick 1966 and extended by the theoretical and empirical output of a large number of younger economists fry 1981 this analysis attached central importance to financial policies of higher real interest rates which were supposed to encourage the build up of real money balances increased financial intermediation and unification of financial markets eventually such a policy would lead to the efficient utilization of resources and particularly of scarce capital this new paradigm has contributed to an improved understanding and perception of the economies of ldcs their problems and how these problems are accentuated by distortions arising from interventionist policies for a while it was believed that the programme contained the secret of how to reconcile stabilization objectives with those of development roe 1982 however the accumulation of empirical evidence on several developing countries where the prescribed set of policies was adopted has raised doubts about the validity of this conclusion in the presence of distortions in the financial markets it is no doubt a sensible policy to raise real interest rates the problematic issue is how far to go raising real interest rates without any regard for the rates of return on investment may run counter to the requirements of development to argue that once funds are generated through the accumulation of real balances investment can take care of itself ignores the very dynamics of development thus the hiatus between stabilization and development has not really been bridged this is evident from the recent concern with supply side policies rather than demand management policies a dichotomy which parallels the distinction between the stabilization and development problems it is this dual distinction which provides the theme of this special issue of world development

consumer discrimination and self employment self employment rates and incomes differ significantly by race we show that these differentials arise in markets with consumer discrimination and incomplete information about the price of the good and the race of the seller equilibrium income distributions have two properties mean black incomes are lower than mean white incomes and the returns to ability are lower for black than for white sellers able blacks therefore are less likely to self select into the self employment sector than able whites using the 1980 census data we find that observed racial differences in the self employment income distributions are consistent with the theoretical predictions

financial market liberalisation in ldcs the incidence of risk allocation effects of interest rate increases high deposit interest rates are central to the financial liberalisation argument the article investigates the relatively neglected issue of who must pay two issues are stressed if loan charges increase the incidence falls on typically highly geared businesses and overall financial saving may not rise as claimed second although loan charges need not increase and enhanced credit availability may compensate borrowers if they do the financial risks of banks increase these risks are pertinent to monetary policy and may force actions contrary to the liberalisation approach institutional developments to foster the supply of risk bearing capital are emphasised in conclusion

the paradox of growth critique narrative analysis of the finnish sustainable consumption and production debate abstract academic discussion on economic growth and the environment has made a comeback under the auspices of the degrowth debate to date however literature on the topic has been mainly theoretical and empirical studies of actual policy discussions have received less attention this article contributes to the debate with a narrative policy analysis of interviews with members of finland s committee on sustainable consumption and production narrative policy analysis is suitable for complex policy cases by tracing and comparing the different stories non stories and counterstories in the debate the analysis clarifies the issue and paves the way for solutions we found that it is common even among business and ministry representatives to criticize the current growth bound economic system from the perspective of narrative policy analysis however this critique only increases uncertainty and complexity in the policy field which paradoxically leads to a strengthening of the dominant growth stories we suggest that constructing a complete degrowth story is essential for supporting democratic deliberation on sustainability robust institutional support for degrowth work together with research and experimentation are important milestones on the way

local development conceptual bases and policy implications coffey w j and polese m 1985 local development conceptual bases and policy implications reg studies 19 85 93 although local development is frequently cited as an option within the broader context of regional policy the concept remains vague the bases of the local development approach lie in its complementarity with three traditional pillars of regional theory and policy capital and infrastructure policies migration as an adjustment mechanism and growth centre strategies in examining the potential utility of local development as an effective element of regional development policy we emphasize the emergence of local entrepreneurship and the role of the state in stimulating local initiatives local development policy may be generalized in terms of three options involving financial assistance access to information and social animation

valuing environmental policy options a case study comparison of multiattribute and contingent valuation survey methods this paper describes a promising new evaluation approach called a value integration survey that uses the objectives and tradeoffs expressed by participants to value environmental policy options this constructive technique which builds on the interactive elicitation process of decision analysts assists stakeholders in clarifying their values and in agreeing on a policy alternative the paper compares this multi attribute valuation method to contingent valuation surveys describes the sequence of respondents tasks and presents results from a case study comparison of contingent valuation and value integration survey methods in the context of valuing options for fire control in oregon s oldgrowth forests

ecosystem service arguments enhance public support for environmental protection but beware of the numbers abstract the trend in the discourse around environmental protection towards arguments based on ecosystem services and monetary valuation has prompted considerable controversy among academics and practitioners concerned with conservation this paper informs the debate by exploring which arguments are most effective in garnering support for environmental protection in a survey based online experiment participants stated their level of dis approval of a large scale hydropower dam project after being presented with various kinds of arguments and information about the environmental impacts the results show that ecosystem service arguments reduced levels of approval of the dam significantly i e they increased support for environmental protection however moral ecological arguments for protecting the environment proved even more effective while a combination of both types of arguments reduced the dam approval ratings the most including a cost benefit analysis cba with monetary valuation of the costs of losing ecosystem services altered dam approval upwards or downwards depending on the outcome of the cba the approval rates of males of older participants and of politically right wing participants were particularly sensitive to the outcomes of monetary valuation more research is needed to understand the short and long term influence of different environmental discourses on peoples judgments and levels of environmental concern