Land and contract farming: Changes in the distribution and meanings of land in Kilombero,Tanzania

In the context of contract farming of sugarcane in an outgrower scheme in Tanzania, this paper explores how the scheme has fundamentally altered people's relationships with the land over the last 50 years, in particular, since 1999, when, after three decades, the sugar parastatal was privatized. The paper reviews the literature on the mutual relationship between contract farming and land ownership and examines the scheme with a focus on long-term changes in the forms of land acquisitions and land use. We argue that the meaning and importance of landownership in contract farming schemes needs to be reassessed if participation in contract farming entails a departure from previous forms of acquiring land, generates new spatial patterns of agricultural production, and necessitates additional economic and social resources in order to transform land into an economic asset.     

Strategic Environmental Policy Under Incomplete Information

This paper introduces incomplete information into recent analyses of strategic environmental policy. It is shown how asymmetric information between planners and producers affects national incentives to impose strategic environmental standards on domestic industries in international oligopolistic competition. Relative to the full-information case, incomplete information is likely to mitigate allocative distortions originating from strategic behaviour. A countervailing effect, tending to raise distortion, is however revealed from the analysis. This effect is absent when governments intervene in free trade through direct production subsidies. The results suggest that incentives to capture foreign rents are less reduced due to private information, when environmental standards, rather than direct production subsidies, are the strategic instrument.     

Worse than others but better than before: Integrating social and temporal comparison perspectives to explain executive turnover via pay standing and pay growth

Organizations often pay greater salaries to higher‐ranking executives compared to lower‐ranking executives. While this method can be useful for retaining those at the organization's apex, it may also incline executives at the bottom of the pay pyramid to see themselves at a disadvantage and thus exit the firm. Naturally, organizations often want to retain some of their lower‐paid, but highly valuable executives; the question, then, is how organizations can reduce the turnover of lower‐ranking executives. By integrating social with temporal comparison theory, we argue that, when executives earn relatively less than their peers, more pay growth (i.e., individual pay increases over time) leads to less turnover. The results of our analysis, which covered almost 20 years of objective data on a large sample of U.S. top executives, provide support for our theory.     

Why Did Europe Decide to Move to a Single Currency 25 Years Ago?

Many Europeans today ask why the European Community chose the bold strategy of pursuing an Economic and Monetary Union at a time when a number of political and economic issues had not yet been resolved. Many economists like to think that the economic case for EMU was weak and that the decision was taken strictly on political grounds. As someone who had the privilege of being involved in the early preparatory efforts, I would argue that this is a misreading of history. I believe there was both a strong economic case for moving towards a single currency and a rare political opportunity for implementing it around 1990.     

Stochastic stable population theory with continuous time. I

Abstract

This paper contains a systematic presentation of time-continuous stable population theory in modern probabilistic dress. The life-time births of an individual are represented by an inhomogeneous Poisson process stopped at death, and an aggregate of such processes on the individual level constitutes the population process. Forward and backward renewal relations are established for the first moments of the main functionals of the process and for their densities. Their asymptotic convergence to a stable form is studied, and the stable age distribution is given some attention. It is a distinguishing feature of the present paper that rigorous proofs are given for results usually set up by intuitive reasoning only.