泉州市2005～2010年农业资源区划发展规划

在分析福建省泉州市农业资源区划发展现状的基础上，提出了泉州市2005～2010年农业资源区划工作的指导思想、发展目标、工作重点和保障措施，以期促进泉州市农业资源区划工作在服务手段、服务对象和服务水平上有较大转变和提高。     

Aggregation of multiple prior opinions

Experts are asked to provide their advice in a situation of uncertainty. They adopt the decision maker?s utility function, but each has a potentially different set of prior probabilities, and so does the decision maker. The decision maker and the experts maximize the minimal expected utility with respect to their sets of priors. We show that a natural Pareto condition is equivalent to the existence of a set Λ of probability vectors over the experts, interpreted as possible allocations of weights to the experts, such that (i) the decision maker?s set of priors is precisely all the weighted-averages of priors, where an expert?s prior is taken from her set and the weight vector is taken from Λ; (ii) the decision maker?s valuation of an act is the minimal weighted valuation, over all weight vectors in Λ, of the experts? valuations.     

Sex and environmental policy in the U.S. House of Representatives

Using LCV score data, we find that female legislators favor stricter environmental policies than do their male counterparts. Moreover, gender-corrected estimates suggest that voters do not push environmental policy towards the middle, but rather select the ideologically closest candidate.     

Do formula-based intergovernmental transfer mechanisms eliminate politically motivated targeting? Evidence from Ghana

Various countries have adopted formulas for determining intergovernmental transfers as a strategy to limit the role of political considerations in resource allocation. In this paper, we investigate a formula-based system of allocating resources from a central government to local governments to determine whether the political characteristics of recipient areas have any bearing on their allocation. Specifically, we study the sharing of resources of the District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF) in Ghana amongst the country's district governments over the period 1994 to 2005. We find evidence that the mechanism does not eliminate politically motivated targeting of the grants. Per capita DACF grants were higher in districts where vote margins in the previous presidential election were lower, suggesting that swing districts were targeted. We find evidence that DACF formula indicators and their weighting were chosen and amended to produce politically desired patterns of transfers.     

Trembling-hand myopia and trembling-hand perfection

In 1975 Selten introduced trembling-hand perfection, however it was implicitly assumed that specific values of rationality imperfections are common knowledge. Relaxing this assumption, we develop the notion of trembling-hand myopia, and completely characterize equilibria which are robust in this setting.     

The long-run impact of bombing Vietnam

We investigate the impact of U.S. bombing on later economic development in Vietnam. The Vietnam War featured the most intense bombing campaign in military history and had massive humanitarian costs. We use a unique U.S. military dataset containing bombing intensity at the district level (N = 584) to assess whether the war damage led to persistent local poverty traps. We compare the heavily bombed districts to other districts controlling for district demographic and geographic characteristics, and use an instrumental variable approach exploiting distance to the 17th parallel demilitarized zone. U.S. bombing does not have negative impacts on local poverty rates, consumption levels, infrastructure, literacy or population density through 2002. This finding indicates that even the most intense bombing in human history did not generate local poverty traps in Vietnam.     

Corruption and local democratization in Indonesia: The role of Islamic parties

Indonesia has a tradition of corruption among local officials who harass and collect bribes from firms. This paper examines whether corruption is affected by local democratization and by the party composition of local assemblies. Democratization occurred in 1999 and decentralization in 2001. We have firm-level data for 2001 and 2004. The 2001 data benchmark corruption at the time of decentralization. We find that corruption declines between 2001 and 2004 overall, but much less so in districts with more secular party as opposed to Islamic party representatives in district assemblies. For a larger sample of districts, correspondingly, we find that corruption in 2004 is more in districts which voted more in favor of secular party representatives in the first elections in 1999. We argue that the effects seem to be causal, over above any effects of changing religiosity and economic circumstances across districts.     

Choosing and sharing

Implementing a project, like a nationwide nuclear waste disposal, which benefits all involved agents but brings major costs only to the host is often problematic. In practice, revelation issues and redistributional concerns are significant obstacles to achieving stable agreements. We address these issues by proposing the first mechanism to select the efficient site (the host with the lowest cost) while simultaneously allowing for the implementation of any individually rational division of the whole hosting cost. The subgame perfect Nash equilibria of our simple mechanism are efficient, budget-balanced and individually rational. Moreover, the truthful equilibrium is immune to coalitional deviations.     

Trade booms, trade busts, and trade costs

What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past and present? We employ a micro-founded measure of trade frictions consistent with leading trade theories to gauge the importance of bilateral trade costs in determining international trade flows. We construct a new balanced sample of bilateral trade flows for 130 country pairs across the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania for the period from 1870 to 2000 and demonstrate an overriding role for declining trade costs in the pre-World War I trade boom. In contrast, for the post-World War II trade boom we identify changes in output as the dominant force. Finally, the entirety of the interwar trade bust is explained by increases in trade costs.     

Convergence of greenhouse gas emissions among G7 countries

The convergence of air pollutants is a major concern for policymakers since all the countries pursue the goal of allocating the emissions equally internationally in the future. Hence, the examination of the existence of convergence is important for the climate change protection of the earth. In this article, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions convergence among the G7 countries for the period between 1990 and 2011 is examined using the pairwise testing technique proposed by that aims to analyse probabilistic convergence across a large number of cross-sectional units. Next, we proceed with multivariate tests for stability and the existence of unit roots. Finally, the analysis is complemented by the use of the panel stationarity test accounting for structural changes as proposed by Carrion-i-Silvestre et al. (2005) test. Overall, the results do not confirm the hypothesis of convergence for the countries in question, although, more recently, the countries have shown a small decline in their GHG emissions.