Assessing the Value of Climate Forecast Information for Pastoralists: Evidence from Southern Ethiopia and Northern Kenya

Climatic variability exerts tremendous influence on the livelihoods and well-being of pastoralists in the Horn of Africa. Recent advances in climate forecasting technologies have raised the intriguing prospect of reasonably accurate forecasts of coming seasons’ rainfall patterns. We explore the value of such external climate forecast information to pastoralists in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya using data collected using both open-ended, qualitative methods to identify and understand indigenous climate forecasting methods and quantitative data collected using survey instruments. On balance, climate forecast information does not seem a limiting factor at present in pastoralist communities in the Horn of Africa.     

Health and Productivity: Panel Data Evidence from Ethiopia

Abstract: Neoclassical growth models and endogenous growth theories show the positive contribution of human capital to growth. Using household panel data (1994–2000) on individuals who reported their wages in urban Ethiopia, we estimated a relationship between health measures (i.e. proxied by height and BMI) and wages (which proxies productivity/growth). Our findings from the IV quantile regression estimates indicate that productivity is positively and significantly affected by education, height and BMI. The return to BMI is important both at the lower and upper end of the wage distribution. The return to height is significant only at the end of the wage distribution. The substantive content of the results (i.e. the high‐nutrition and high‐productivity equilibrium story) does not change even if we did not control for endogeneity of schooling. Non‐parametric evidence also supports the strong and positive relationship between productivity and our indicators of human capital.     

非认知能力对家庭风险金融市场有限参与的解释——来自CGSS的证据

利用2017年中国综合社会调查数据,引入新人力资本理论中非认知能力对家庭风险金融市场参与的影响因素进行研究.研究发现,认知与非认知能力对不同收入家庭影响存在异质性.开放性和严谨性人格特征的下降与缺乏制约已婚家庭参与风险金融市场,这在一定程度上解释了有限参与之谜.     

Inflation and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Southern African Development Community

In this paper, we investigate the role of inflation rates in determining economic growth in 15 sub‐Saharan African countries, which are all members of the Southern African Development Community, between 1980 and 2009. The results, based on panel time‐series data and analysis (we use the fixed effects and fixed effects with instrumental variables estimators to account for heterogeneity and endogeneity in thin panels), suggest that inflation has had a detrimental effect to growth in the community. We highlight that inflation has offset the Mundell–Tobin effect and consequently reduced the much needed economic activity in the community, and also the importance of an institutional framework conducive to a stable macroeconomic environment as a precondition for development and prosperity in the community.     

Pacific Economic Co-operation:

The rapid growth of East Asian exports in the 1980s led to rising trade tensions. Trading partners, especially in the USA and Europe, tended to overlook the substantial growth of East Asia's imports (especially raw materials and capital equipment), focusing only on its capture of market shares in products for which US and EC manufacturers no longer held a comparative advantage. There is considerable interest in economic regionalism, raising concern about the division of the world economy into discriminatory trade blocs. In most economies around the Pacific, there is wide appreciation of the region's overwhelming interest in the maintenance of an open world trading system based on the non-discrimination principle of the GATT. Among initiatives for bilateral and regional trade liberalization in recent years, the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum offers perhaps the best prospect of co-operative promotion of these objectives. APEC, established in 1989, already includes fifteen economies from both sides of the Pacific accounting for over half of world production. APEC's guiding principles stipulate that co-operation should be outward-looking, building consensus on a gradually broader range of economic issues. This paper proposes four pragmatic options in areas for useful co-operation:

• ? Improving market access by reducing barriers to trade, such as the heavy protection of some parts of Northeast Asian agriculture, and of textiles and some other manufactures in major OECD countries.
• ? Reducing uncertainty about future market access: for example, agreement to streamline dispute settlement procedures could reduce resort to arbitrary or discriminatory measures to deal with trade tensions.
• ? Reducing physical bottlenecks , such as shortfalls in infrastructure, ranging from harbours to telecommunications, which impede trade in goods and also in services such as tourism.
• ? Harmonizing domestic legislation and rules , such as those relating to safety, quality and environmental standards.

It will not be easy to realize the economic gains from nondiscriminatory trade liberalization. But progress should be possible in some sectors where complementarity among APEC economies is obvious, as in mineral processing, where original reasons for protection have been weakened by changing circumstances, and where natural resource endowments and transport costs limit effective competition from outside the region. Regional initiatives will need to be non-discriminatory in order to avoid creating needless divisions in the world trading system. Preferential or discriminatory trading arrangements that fragment the multilateral world trading system constitute a threat to the Pacific region's economic prosperity. In contrast, this paper recommends an evolutionary approach: seeks early consensus on less contentious issues in order to build the sense of trust required for more effective future co-operation among economies on both sides of the Pacific, without discrimination against economies outside the region.     

International trade and agricultural production: Evidence from the Southern African Development Community sub-region

Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries have undertaken substantial reforms in market liberalisation policies and regional integration initiatives. Theory suggests that trade can affect output through the exploitation of comparative advantage, increasing return to scale, liberalisation policies and technology. This work investigates the impact of agricultural exports to, machinery and chemical imports from and tariffs on agricultural products by total partners to the Southern African Customs' Union, SADC, sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world on agricultural production. Following Hausman tests, three panel fixed-effect models are estimated. The first is for aggregate machinery imports, chemicals imports and agricultural exports. The second is for disaggregated exports and imports according to the respective destination and source regions above. The third is for aggregate imports and disaggregated tariffs implemented by the various export destination regions toward the SADC. The results agree with the theory that international trade is good for development. Agricultural market expansion through export opportunities and access to inputs are significant sources of agricultural production enhancement in the SADC region. Tariffs barriers to agricultural exports are found to be significant impediments to agricultural production. However, the disparity of effects by export destination and the insignificance of the impact of trade with the rest of Africa are worth emphasising.     

Local and Personal Networks in Employment and the Development of Labor Markets: Evidence from the Cut Flower Industry in Ethiopia

We examine the roles of local and personal networks in the employment process and the emergence and development of the labor market in Ethiopia’s growing cut flower industry. Using primary survey data of 320 workers randomly sampled from all 64 farms, we find that workers who were recruited informally using the social ties were paid less than the formally-recruited workers at hiring. However, these workers quickly increased their productivity, and the effect of social ties on wages disappeared over time. Further, we find that the development of labor market for this newly-emerged industry took place particularly within the industrial cluster.     

Healthcare Utilization and Healthy Lifestyles among Elderly People Living in Southern Europe: Recent Evidence from the SHARE

Recent demographic and economic research has analyzed the expected increase in the proportion of the population who are elderly. One consequence of an increasing elderly population is expansion in health care utilization, hence funding problems may arise.. European institutions encourage member states to promote good health among their citizens to mitigate the ageing effects on the health care system. Our objective was to examine the effect of healthy lifestyles among Southern European older adults on health care utilization by focusing on the number of outpatient doctor visits (ODV) and nights hospitalized (NH). Negative binominal regressions were conducted using a panel data set consisting of five waves (2004–2015) of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Our results add new empirical evidence on the effect of Southern European older adults’ lifestyles on their health care utilization. Engaging in vigorous physical activities reduces the number of ODV visits and NH by 7.8% and 28.25%, respectively. Moreover, smoking increases NH by 14.22%. Member states should establish policies to promote healthy lifestyles, with vigorous physical activities playing a key role, to reduce health services utilization.

     

Joint-Liability in Microcredit: Evidence from Bangladesh

The joint-liability lending model in microcredit predicts social ties between groups of borrowers to incentivise repayment. However, it also promotes free riding behaviour. Repeated experimental games conducted in Bangladesh are used to empirically analyse key theoretical hypotheses predicted under joint-liability (repeated experimental games are conducted by the author on the field in Manikganj, Dhaka, Bangladesh in December 2014); treated groups of microcredit borrowers are compared to control groups of non-microcredit borrowers alongside questionnaire findings. Treated individuals forego short-run gains from non-repayment and benefit from higher long-run gains from progressing on to further rounds. The paper also finds that treated individuals are significantly less likely to free ride and more likely to shoulder for their partner compared to control individuals. Optimal individual and group characteristics to maximise repayment under joint-liability are then identified.