The Incidence of Public Spending on Healthcare: Comparative Evidence from Asia

The article compares the incidence of public healthcare across11 Asian countries and provinces, testing the dominance of healthcareconcentration curves against an equal distribution and Lorenzcurves and across countries. The analysis reveals that the distributionof public healthcare is prorich in most developing countries.That distribution is avoidable, but a propoor incidence is easierto realize at higher national incomes. The experiences of Malaysia,Sri Lanka, and Thailand suggest that increasing the incidenceof propoor healthcare requires limiting the use of user fees,or protecting the poor effectively from them, and building awide network of health facilities. Economic growth may not onlyrelax the government budget constraint on propoor policies butalso increase propoor incidence indirectly by raising richerindividuals' demand for private sector alternatives.     

Profits and politics: Coordinating technology adoption in agriculture

This paper examines the political economy of government-led coordination of economic activity in a simple two-sector model in which individuals' choice of agricultural technology affects industrialization. We demonstrate the existence of multiple equilibria; the economy is either characterized by the use of a traditional agricultural technology and a low level of industrialization or the use of a mechanized technology and a high level of industrialization. Relative to the traditional technology, use of the mechanized technology increases output but leaves some population groups worse off. We show that the distributional implications of choosing the mechanized technology restrict the possibility of Pareto-improving coordination by an elected policy-maker, even when we allow for income redistribution.     

Consumer Acceptance of Genetically Modified (GM)—Cowpeas in Sub-Sahara Africa

ABSTRACT

Cowpea (known as black-eyed peas in America) is the most important indigenous African grain legume for both home use and as a cash crop. Because of its tolerance to drought, it is especially important for the Sahel. Genetic transformation of cowpea with Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) genes to control pod-boring insects has many advantages, but little is known of the potential consumer response. This article analyzes and reports the results of a survey of 200 consumers in northern Nigeria concerning consumer awareness of and acceptance of biotechnology. Ninety percent of the respondents were aware of genetically modified (GM) products. Those respondents who were most concerned about the ethics of genetic transformation were likely to disapprove of such products, while those individuals who identified international radio as an information source were more likely to approve of GM technology.     

Water valuation at basin scale with application to western India

A parsimonious hydro-economic model for a data scarce dryland area is presented. It features a basin level decentralized water allocation mechanism which is adapted to incorporate sustainable water use and to deal with the externalities from upstream-downstream linkages. We formulate the profit maximization problem of various agents in a basin, each identifying a sub-basin, who operate within the boundaries of a spatially explicit model that describes the dominant hydrological processes. We address issues of non-convexities and non-steady state conditions and elicit the dependence of a decentralized water allocation on geophysical properties of the basin. In particular, the approach describes how the competition between the drying and drainage functions of sub-basins in dryland areas manifests itself in the optimal valuation of water. The application to an area of over 500,000 km² and 34 sub-basins in western India indicates that intra-basin cooperation could be beneficial; valuation of inter basin flows as a percentage of respective sub-basin income is on an average around 30% when each sub-basin includes downstream valuation as well.     

Riding the Energy Transition: Oil beyond 2040

Recent technological developments and past technology transitions suggest that the world could be on the verge of a profound shift in transportation technology. The return of the electric car and its adoption, like that of the motor vehicle in place of horses in early 20th century, could cut oil consumption substantially in the coming decades. Our analysis suggests that oil as the main fuel for transportation could have a much shorter life span left than commonly assumed. In the fast adoption scenario, oil prices could converge to the level of coal prices, about $15 per barrel in 2015 prices by the early 2040s. In this possible future, oil could become the new coal.     

Coordinating development: Can income-based incentive schemes eliminate Pareto inferior equilibria?

Individuals' inability to coordinate investment may significantly constrain economic development. In this paper we study a simple investment game characterized by multiple equilibria and ask whether an income-based incentive scheme can uniquely implement the high-investment outcome. A general property of this game is the presence of a crossover-investment point at which an individual's incomes from investment and non-investment are equal. We show that arbitrarily small errors in the government's knowledge of this crossover point can prevent unique implementation of the high-investment outcome. We conclude that informational requirements are likely to severely limit a government's ability to use income-based incentive schemes as a coordination device.     

Fixed endpoint optimal control

Summary. Properness has been introduced in the expected utility framework and it recently has been transfered to mean-variance utility functions. Here, we show that properness implies the slope of the mean-standard deviation indifference curve being convex in the standard deviation. This indifference curve property allows us to characterize the comparative static effects of changing the background risk and dependency structure in a simple portfolio choice model.Received: 8 December 2003, Revised: 16 February 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D81.