A Gendered Model of the Peasant Household: Time poverty and Farm Production in Rural Mozambique

Using insights from a case study on the allocation of labor in subsistence households in Mozambique, this study develops a conceptual framework for examining linkages between time poverty and farm production. An unexpected event such as a health crisis increases the demand for labor provided by women, thus making them more time poor. The model and numerical simulations show that a deterioration in a woman's time constraint will have an adverse effect on agricultural output of the household. This occurs because most women respond to an increase in household work by reducing their work hours on the farm and by reducing their leisure time. The latter outcome is expected to have a negative effect on women's physical and mental health, which will then cause a decline in their productivity on the farm.     

Structural transformation in China and India: A note on macroeconomic policies

This paper explores macroeconomic policies that can sustain structural change in China and India. A two-sector open-economy model with endogenous productivity growth, demand driven output and income distribution as an important determinant of economic activity is calibrated to a 2000 SAM for China and a 1999/2000 SAM for India. Short-run analysis concerns temporary equilibria for output, productivity and employment growth rates in the formal sector. In the long-run, the model allows for multiple equilibria which can describe cases of (a) underdevelopment and structural heterogeneity or (b) sustained growth and development. Several simulation exercises are conducted. Specifically, we consider how changes in investment, wages, labor productivity trend and a depreciation of currency affect the macroeconomy and job creation in the formal sector.     

Evaluating research and education performance in Indian agricultural development

India's agricultural research spending has long been regionally uneven. Regional research intensity ratios, which account for size differences, indicate research spending has consistently favored southern and western states over northern, central, and eastern ones. Farm production patterns have, however, changed in recent years and regional output growth is being driven by new commodity mixes. In this article, we ask which region had the highest factor productivity growth and rate of return to investments in public agricultural research and higher education. Our analysis relies on a 1980–2008 Indian agricultural production and policy data set together with a dual heteroscedastic production frontier to decompose total factor productivity (TFP) growth into formal technical progress and efficiency elements. The model's regional flexibility affords region‐to‐region comparison of multiple research return rates, TFP growth, and the elements influencing them. Regardless of return‐rate measure or allocation scenario evaluated, the North has enjoyed the highest return to research spending, and the Central and East the lowest. Factor productivity growth has however been strongest in the South, primarily on account of efficiency gains. Overall, though, the technical progress and productivity growth easily attributable to government‐supported research has accounted for about one‐quarter of the sector's TFP growth.     

CAN THE POOR COUNTRIES CATCH UP? MIXED RESULTS FROM EXTENDED SOURCES OF GROWTH PROJECTIONS FOR THE EARLY 21st CENTURY

Illustrative projections of per capita income gaps between two groups of developing economies and the rich economies for the period 1998–2030 are made on the basis of an extended sources of growth equation which accounts for interactions between trends in capital and labor productivity. The equation takes into consideration Kaldor–Verdoorn effects, possible impacts on labor productivity of trade liberalization and/or astute industrial policy, human and physical capital accumulation, employment and population growth, shifting shares of labor in income and traded goods in output, shifts in capital productivity, productivity growth retardation due to convergence and specific regional effects. Under optimistic assumptions about all these factors and in the historically unprecedented absence of adverse macroeconomic shocks over three decades, relative and absolute convergence of both regions to the rich countries may be possible.     

SOCIAL SECURITY TAX AND ENDOGENOUS TECHNICAL CHANGE IN AN ECONOMY WITH AN AGING POPULATION

This paper presents a classical model of economic growth which incorporates class conflict and induced technological change to show how demographic changes can affect future income distribution and production relations in industrialized countries. Specifically, I use an extended real wage Phillips curve to account for the effects of a social security tax on income distribution and therefore on capital accumulation and employment. In this framework output growth is determined from the supply side by available savings. Analytical and simulation results indicate that the sustainability of an economy with fast population aging over transient paths hinges upon improvements in labor productivity, hence, the specific mechanism of technical progress in place.     

Mail survey abroad with an alternative web survey

The large decline in cooperation in surveys experienced in the first decade of the twenty first century has placed representative surveys in a veritable quagmire, although numerous researchers have shown that the decline in the total nonresponse has been much higher in administered surveys (face-to-face and telephone) than in self-administered (mail and web surveys). The move from the “traditional” mail survey to the internet survey has brought important changes, but, at the same time, new challenges have arisen related to the lower coverage and the reduced visibility, the need for certain skills to fill out a questionnaire, changes in response rates, etc. This is a self-administered survey that informs the addressees by mail that they have been selected to participate in a research survey to which they can respond either by using the paper questionnaire (in the letter there is a prepaid envelope), by means of a web questionnaire (accessing a link and using a password), or by telephone (the respondent provided a contact time telephone number via a prepaid envelope or by calling an answering machine). The respondents themselves, therefore, choose the mode of response. An analysis of the responses achieved by each modality shows that the majority of the questionnaires were received by ordinary mail (83.6 %), 359 by internet (14.4 %), and 51 were answered by telephone (2.0 %).     

Face-to-face versus telephone surveys on political attitudes: a comparative analysis

Several researchers declared that the telephone survey reaches more accurate voting tendencies than the face-to-face surveys. Telephone survey shows numerous advantages compared to a face-to-face one but, however, the telephone survey also has some inconveniences. Among these it is important to highlight the scant quality of the sampling frame; absence of a telephone in some homes and the wide expansion of the mobile phone; low response rate of certain collectives and the overrepresentation of others. There are also some new barrierswhich make access more difficult (e.g. the automatic answering phone) and the saturation of the telephone medium because of the large amount of publicity activities which generate a large number of “unsuccessful” calls and interruptedinterviews. The objective of this paper is evaluating the adaptation of the telephone surveys in the electoral forecasts; in an attempt to see if it shows substantial improvements when they are compared to face-to-face interviews.     

Agricultural policy and productivity: evidence from Brazilian censuses

Brazil's economic strategy has shifted hesitatingly during the last several decades from one of producer protection to trade competitiveness. Exploiting the variations these shifts have afforded, we use a sequence of decennial agricultural censuses to examine Brazilian policy implications for agricultural competitiveness and efficiency. Total factor productivity is decomposed into best‐technology and efficiency elements, each subject to policy influence. We find technology growth, at 4.5% per annum, to have been extraordinarily high, particularly in the south. But because productivity among average producers has fallen rapidly behind that on the technical frontier, total productivity growth has been a much more modest 2.6% per year. Public agricultural research programs most benefit the country's technological leaders, widening the gap between frontier and average producer. Credit, education, and road construction policies instead narrow that gap. Credit and road programs especially enhance efficiency in the south, where efficiency losses have been greatest.     

Evaluating Agricultural Productivity and Policy in Russia

Russia's transition to a market economy in the early 1990s shocked its agricultural sector, creating the potential for profit and gains from specialisation and productivity improvements. However, subsequent regional agricultural development has been highly uneven, and the sources of the sector's productivity improvement remain unclear. Drawing on a newly-assembled Russian regional farm production and policy dataset, we evaluate agricultural total factor productivity growth from 1994 to 2013, decomposing that growth into technical progress and efficiency gains, for the nation as a whole and for the major agricultural districts of the South and Central. We then test how investments in road and rail infrastructure and human capital have influenced those gains. The South substantially outperformed the Central district and the nation at large with respect to all three performance indicators. However, contrary to the literature, we find that these particular state policies provided no substantial growth advantages, there or elsewhere. Rather, the dominant force behind Russia's agricultural growth has been informal technical change.     

Gender norms and intrahousehold allocation of labor in Mozambique: A CGE application to household and agricultural economics

We model intrahousehold dynamics in two rural provinces of Mozambique through the lens of computable general equilibrium (CGE) methods. The main features of our modeling framework are as follows: (a) a household social accounting matrix that captures allocation of labor and resources, and transfers among household members; (b) the explicit use of social norms in labor allocation across gender; (c) a mechanism that links agricultural production to time poverty; (d) identification of leisure as a commodity that is being produced. Simulation results and sensitivity analyses show how social norms interact with the allocation of labor and resources at the household level to impact farm production or limit the gains from technological improvements.