Urban Wage Behaviour and Food Price Inflation in Ethiopia

Theoretically, increases in food prices could benefit the poor by increasing the demand for unskilled labour, and hence their wages. This paper tests this hypothesis in urban Ethiopia. We exploit a unique panel of monthly price and wage data from 111 urban markets to first construct welfare-relevant measures of real wages, before employing various panel estimators to formally test wage-food price integration. We find moderate rates of long-run adjustment to increases in food prices, but that adjustment is very slow. This implies highly adverse short-run welfare impacts of higher food prices on the urban poor.     

国际粮价高位运行对中国粮食安全的影响及应对策略

当前,国际粮食价格持续上涨,根据联合国粮农组织(FA0)统计报告,2007年全球粮价指数上涨加%.导致全球粮价不断攀升的因素,除国际谷物的低库存、趋紧的供给现状与强劲的需求之间严重失衡,致使供求状况紧张,国际粮价一路走高外,生物质能源的广泛利用、大量玉米被用于生产乙醇也推高了玉米价格,进而导致其他粮食价格上涨.此外,气候变化带来的自然灾害致使庄家歉收,对全球粮食供给和需求产生了较大影响,也成为推动国际粮价上涨的诱因之一.面对国际粮食短缺和国际粮价上涨的现状,作为发展中国家的中国,保障粮食安全,减轻国际粮价高位运行带来的影响,制定切实可行的应对策略则至关重要.     

全球化与蒙古经济发展战略

经济全球化与蒙古的应对战略措施 蒙古在上个世纪90年代初,伴随苏联东欧剧变后,选择了东欧型激进改革模式,进入了向"西方式民主制度"和市场经济体制"全面过渡"的转型时期.     

Food security politics and the Millennium Development Goals

This article reviews proposals regarding the recent food crisis in the context of a broader, threshold debate on the future of agriculture and food security. While the MDGs have focused on eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, the food crisis pushed the hungry over the one billion mark. There is thus a renewed focus on agricultural development, which pivots on the salience of industrial agriculture (as a supply source) in addressing food security. The World Bank's new 'agriculture for development' initiative seeks to improve small-farmer productivity with new inputs, and their incorporation into global markets via value-chains originating in industrial agriculture. An alternative claim, originating in 'food sovereignty' politics, demanding small-farmer rights to develop bio-regionally specific agro-ecological methods and provision for local, rather than global, markets, resonates in the IAASTD report, which implies agribusiness as usual 'is no longer an option'. The basic divide is over whether agriculture is a servant of economic growth, or should be developed as a foundational source of social and ecological sustainability. We review and compare these different paradigmatic approaches to food security, and their political and ecological implications.     

Economic Factors for Piracy: The Effect of Commodity Price Shocks

This study treats piracy as a civil conflict event where participants are substituting from legal work to illegal activity in response to lower commodity prices (opportunity cost effect). The analysis exploits exogenous variation in nine different commodity prices across seventeen countries around the globe. Results show that as commodity prices decrease maritime piracy attacks increase, which is consistent with results found in civil conflict literature. In the context of actual commodity shocks these piracy attacks represent increases ranging from .452 to 2.59 more attacks per year in the ordinary least squares and .495 to 20.71 attacks per year in the Poisson specification.     

Food Price Volatility and Vulnerability in the Global South: considering the global economic context

Abstract

Most official analyses of the recent food price crisis have focused on the market fundamentals of supply and demand for food as key explanatory factors. As a result, most of the policy recommendations emanating from the major international institutions include measures to boost supply and temper demand. In this paper I argue that international macroeconomic factors played a key role in fostering both price volatility and vulnerability, and as such they need to be recognised. With respect to the recent price volatility, the weak US dollar and speculation on agricultural commodities futures markets greatly influenced agricultural prices. With respect to price vulnerability, global economic forces played an important role in dampening production incentives in the world's poorest countries over the past 30 years, leading to a situation of food import dependence. Policy responses to the food crisis must consider the role of these broader international macroeconomic forces—both in the immediate context and their longer term impact.     

The Effect of Food Price Changes on Child Labour: Evidence from Uganda

Most people in developing countries spend up to 60 per cent of their income on food, even though the majority of them are farmers. Hence, a change in food prices affects both their revenue as well as expenditure, and it may thereby affect their labour market decisions. Using the Uganda National Panel Survey and monthly regional food prices, this paper examines the effect of changes in food prices on child labour. The empirical evidence shows that an increase in food prices is linked to an increase in the probability and the intensity of child labour. We find the effect of food price increases to be smaller among landowning households, which is consistent with the view that landowning households can better compensate for price shocks. The empirical results suggest that periodic shocks in food prices may have longer lasting effects on economic development in developing countries through the channel of child labour.     

Inequality,Economic Development,and Democratization

Although multiple theories suggest that economic development and inequality somehow affect democratization, these claims have received only limited empirical support. I contend that much of the confusion stems from the implicit assumption held by the literature that development and inequality affect democratization independently of one another. In this paper, I argue that the effect of income distribution on democratization is in fact contingent on the income level: in middle-income countries inequality fosters democratization; in rich countries, however, it harms democratization. Using a data set covering almost all autocracies between 1960 and 2007, I find evidence consistent with my hypothesis.     

金砖国家近期经济形势及政策协调

当前,世界经济避免重蹈20世纪30年代＂大萧条＂覆辙,主要原因是金砖国家等新兴经济以V型强劲反弹,成为引领全球经济复苏的生力军。后危机时代,金砖国家等新兴市场发展依然鹤立鸡群,新兴大国群体性崛起,推动力量格局向东转移,促进世界经济发展更趋多元。     

Mobile Phones and Economic Development in Rural Peru

We estimate the effects of mobile phone coverage on different measures of economic development. We exploit the timing of mobile coverage at the village level merging it with a village-level panel dataset for rural Peru. The main findings suggest that mobile phone expansion has increased household real consumption by 11 per cent, reduced poverty incidence by 8 percentage points and decreased extreme poverty by 5.4 percentage points. Moreover, those benefits appear to be shared by all covered households regardless of mobile ownership.     

经济全球化的发展及其两重性

人类的经济活动从社会化向国际化和全球化演进,是历史发展的必然趋势和不以人们意志为转移的客观进程。随着世界经济国际化程度的不断提高和必要条件的出现,20世纪90年代以来,世界经济进入全球化发展的新阶段。 经济全球化发展的新特点 经济全球化作为世界经济发展的新阶段还处在初期,具有不同于此前阶段的新特点。 第一,市场经济成为全球性经济体制,世界统一的市场体系形成和发展。所谓市场经济,是指在经济运行中,资源的配置主要由市场导向。20世纪80年代以来,越来越多的国家放弃传统的计划经济或内向型民族保护主义经济模式,采用市场经济模式并以此为本国经济与世界经济对接     

The Guardian State and its Economic Development Model

Abstract

This article outlines the core features of a particular, resource-led development model, the oil-rich guardian state. Its key distinguishing feature from other resource-rich economies consists in its strong economic welfare objective function, which in line with its exceptional oil wealth renders its population amongst the wealthiest nations in the world. However, the guardian state also illustrates some of the negative externalities associated with resource wealth, namely the policy dilemma of directing seemingly abundant financial resources into the economy. The state faces a high propensity for waste, and for the systemic dilution of market incentives, thereby rendering sustained and self-generating economic growth more difficult than in less resource-rich economies.     

The Heterogeneous Effects of a Food Price Crisis on Child School Enrolment and Labour: Evidence from Pakistan

Using a panel survey, this paper investigates how food price increases in Pakistan in 2008–2010 affect children’s school enrolment and labour. The causal identification relies on the geographical variations in food (wheat) price. The results show that the negative impacts of food price increase on school enrolment differ by gender, economic status and the presence of siblings. The negative effects on school do not directly correspond to the increase in child labour because the transition from being idle to labour activity or from school to being idle is significant, particularly among poor girls. The results also show that children in households with access to agricultural lands are not affected by higher food prices. The analyses reveal a more dynamic picture of the impact of food price increase on child status and contribute to broader policy discussion to mitigate the impact of crises on child education.     

Trade and Growth at Different Stages of Economic Development

The paper investigates whether trade openness contributes to long-run economic growth and the effect varies with the level of economic development. We implement this analysis through the instrument-variable threshold regressions approach. The empirical evidence shows that there indeed exists an income threshold above which greater trade openness has beneficial effects on economic growth and below which heightened trade has detrimental consequences. It implies that greater international trade and integration may contribute to more diverging economies. In addition, the relationship of trade with growth is found to work possibly through both investment and productivity growth channels.     

Economic Development Subsidies and the Funding of Private Prisons

For-profit prison corporations have sold prison privatization as a tool for economic development. The idea of prisons became more appealing once for-profit prison corporation demonstrated that they could finance, build, design, and construct prisons with private capital from private investment companies. Many private prisons throughout the United States are provided local, state, and federal economic development subsidies — which may include tax advantaged financing, property tax abatements, infrastructure improvements, and personnel training and development resources. Most research on prison privatization has examined costs and quality comparisons of private run prisons to government run correctional facilities. This article examines the factors that predict economic development subsidies to private prisons, which include: economic, social control, geographic, and political factors. Logistic regression results indicate the per capita gross state product, political ideology, black male disenfranchisement, and mandatory sentencing laws predict economic development subsidies to private prison corporations.     

蒙古国经济理论体系的发展与创新

自20世纪90年代初，伴随蒙古经济转型，西方经济学的一些新兴理论模式和分析方法日益为蒙古的经济学界所接受和推崇，并被应用于蒙古的经济改革实践，对促进其经济学理论体系的发展产生了一定影响。与此同时，如何加强对本民族经济发展史和思想史的研究，对本国经济运行做出自己的解释，解决经济学的“本土化”问题，成为蒙古的经济学界面临的一项新课题。