Transforming Gender Relations through the Market: Smallholder Milk Market Participation and Women`s Intra-household Bargaining Power in Ethiopia

We study the relationship between smallholder milk market participation and women`s intra-household bargaining position in Ethiopia, using a quasi-experiment and propensity score matching. In market participant households, milk income is higher and its control has shifted from women to men. Our data also indicate that men transfer this income partly to their wives. Qualitative findings indicate that men see this as recognition for their wife’s household maintenance responsibility. Women argue however that transferring income is also men`s tactic for reducing intra-household conflict. Overall, dependency between husbands and wives seems higher and a woman’s bargaining position stronger in participant households.     

Public Debt,Economic Growth,and Public Sector Management in Developing Countries: Is There a Link?

The article investigates whether differences in public sector management quality affect the link between public debt and economic growth in developing countries. For this purpose, we primarily use the World Bank's institutional indices of public sector management (PSM). Using PSM thresholds, we split our panel into country clusters and make comparisons. Our linear baseline regressions reveal a significant negative relationship between public debt and growth. The various robustness exercises that we perform also confirm these results. When we dissect our data set into “weak” and “strong” county clusters using public sector management scores, however, we find different results. While public debt still displayed a negative relationship with growth in countries with “weak” public sector management quality, it generally displayed a positive relationship in the latter group. The tests for non‐linearity shows evidence of an “inverse‐U”‐shape relationship between public debt and economic growth. However, we fail to see a similar significant relationship on country clusters that account for PSM quality. Yet, countries with well‐managed public sectors demonstrate a higher public debt sustainability threshold. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Challenges and prospects of implementing the access and benefit sharing regime of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Africa: the case of Ethiopia

An analysis of the implementation of the access and benefit sharing (ABS) regime under the Convention on Biological Diversity and other related regimes in Africa and, in particular, Ethiopia, reveals the following challenges: (a) centralization of power in the hands of the federal government with little attention to regional and local governments; (b) lack of effective mechanism for the participation of communities in ABS; (c) generality and vagueness of the regulatory regime and lack of regulations and guidelines for the effective implementation of the regulatory regime, (c) poor drafting of ABS Agreements; and (d) lack of effective enforcement and follow-up mechanisms for ABS Agreements. Nonetheless, despite the shortcomings, the article suggests that Ethiopia’s experience provides an important lesson for other countries confronted with the challenge of designing fair genetic resource governance at the national level and, more importantly, shows the challenges poor countries face in developing and implementing ABS Laws and in negotiating, concluding and enforcing ABS Agreements.