Strategic intent and the strategic position of smallholders: a case study of a smallholders’ organization in the Ghanaian cocoa industry

Abstract

Despite their clear relevance in western business society, many strategic management literature insights are neglected in the development debate regarding smallholders in third world countries. This article explores if strategic intent may be a useful tool in the smallholder debate, by conducting a case study of a smallholders’ organization in the Ghanaian cocoa industry. The case study shows that the strategic intent of the smallholders’ organization and the commitment of its members are inadequate. Group goals are lacking, farmers are participating in side-selling, and do not actively engage in the cooperative. These problems may be resolved by propositions provided by the strategic management literature, such as the introduction of an entrance fee to participate in the cooperative.     

Whatever Inconsistencies and Effects? Explaining the Resilience of the Policy Reforms Applied to Developing Countries

Why is ‘neoliberalism’ still a predominant framework within economics and policy-making? This paper considers the mix of theoretical assumptions, causalities and policies known as the ‘Washington consensus’, focusing on developing countries. First, it analyses their main elements, resilience and effects (the ‘lost decades in spite of policy reform’). Second, it examines the reasons of this resilience and argues that a reason is their adaptive capacity via constant exchanges between facts and conceptual assumptions, because this mix is constituted of heterogeneous elements (from neoclassical theory, ad hoc models or empirics-based policy-making): inconsistency is a core feature and as such its correction is irrelevant. These ‘adaptive inconsistencies’ are consolidated by the simultaneous theoretical/policy dimension of the mix. Its cognitive resilience is reinforced by the irrefutability of causations and the cause/effect time lag (‘after current costs, there will be gains’, e.g. growth), and is not challenged by the social costs of policies.     

Are remittances good for economic growth? The role of political institutions

Within a sample of 109 developing countries for the period 1975–2014 and controlling for country and time-fixed effects, this article presents evidence that workers’ remittances are more effective in promoting growth in developing countries with strong democratic institutions. The evidence is robust to alternative samples and different measures of democratic institutions.     

战略贸易政策新进展与发展中国家贸易政策

通过对战略贸易政策在贸易的政治经济学、不确定性、不完全承诺和不完全信息等四个方面的新进展进行讨论,得出结论:新贸易理论的新进展使得脱胎于发达国家的战略贸易政策更加接近发展中国家市场经常失灵的现实,从而对发展中国家的贸易政策有重要的指导意义。     

Conceptualising environmental collective action: why gender matters

This paper demonstrates how institutions for natural resourcemanagement (such as community forestry groups), which appearto be participative, equitable and efficient, can be found lackingon all three counts from a gender perspective. It also examinespossible gender differences in social networks, values and motivations.Although there is little to suggest that women are inherentlymore conservationist than men, the distinctness of women's socialnetworks embodying prior experience of successful cooperation,their higher dependence on these networks (as also on the commonsin general), and their potentially greater group homogeneityrelative to men, could provide an important (and largely ignored)basis for organising sustainable environmental collective action.The paper also outlines the factors that can constrain or facilitatewomen's participation in formal environmental management groups.Illustrative examples are drawn from rural South Asia.     

An exploration of the positive effect of inequality on common property forests

This paper analyzes the household level forces driving the positive impact of inequality on common property forest cover in Mexico. A game theoretic model demonstrates that when common property goods are complementary to private inputs in production, an increase in wealth inequality can lead to a decrease in exploitation of the commons. Data from 350 Mexican common properties show that as inequality increases, those on the lower end of the land distribution are less likely to use the commons. The data also show a negative correlation between inequality and poverty. Alternative hypotheses for these results are considered.     

The challenge of understanding decisions in experimental studies of common pool resource governance

Common pool resource experiments in the laboratory and the field have provided insights that have contrasted to those derived from conventional non-cooperative game theory. Contrary to predictions from non-cooperative game theory, participants are sometimes willing to restrain voluntarily from over extracting resources and use costly punishment to sanction other participants. Something as simple as face-to-face communication has been shown to increase average earnings significantly. In the next generation of experiments, both in the laboratory and in the field, we need to extract more information that provides insight concerning why people make the decisions they make. More information is needed concerning attributes of individuals as well as the social and social-ecological context in which they interact that may give rise to such deviations from theoretical predictions. In the process of extracting more information from participants and the contexts in which they interact, we face several methodological and ethical challenges which we address in this paper.     

Common pool resources and contextual factors: Evolution of a fishermen's cooperative in Calcutta

The CPR school has successfully rebutted Hardin's pessimistic Tragedy of the Commons model. However, in recent years, critics have focussed on the inward orientation and lack of contextual analysis characterising the writings of the CPR school.Oakerson [A Model for the analysis of common property problems. Working Paper R86-13. Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, 1986] and Ostrom [Governing the Commons. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990] have detailed the list of variables that have to be studied to understand the mechanics of collective action. However, these factors are internal to the community. Recent critics' point out that the actions of individual agents are also influenced by the alternatives embedded outside the system. These variables are collectively labelled contextual factors.In our paper, we have analysed the case of a fishermen's cooperative in the Calcutta Metropolitan District to show how the historic and economic context shapes targets of resource users and affects the feasibility of alternative courses to achieve the target by determining opportunity and transaction costs of actions. This indicates the importance of contextual factors in explaining the formation and evolution of the resource regime.     

The Characteristics and Countermeasures of Technology Innovation in LDCs

There are two significant characteristics of LDCs＇ technology innovation： one is original innovation substituted by imitation and adaptive innovation, and the other is government guiding innovation. From the experiences of LDCs after World War Two, the key to achieve effective technology innovation exits in two facts： technological capability of innovation and reaction mechanism of innovation induction~     

Output sharing in partnerships as a common pool resource management instrument

Many economic environments are susceptible to either free-riding or overuse. Common pool resources (CPRs) fall in the latter category. Equally sharing the output of a CPR in partnerships introduces a free-riding incentive that may offset overuse. Socially optimal harvesting can be induced by dividing the set of resource users into a number of partnerships in such a way that each resource users’ tendency to over-harvest from the resource is exactly offset by his or her tendency to free-ride on the contributions of others. We conduct a laboratory experiment to assess the performance of this partnership solution by introducing equal-sharing subgroups of size one, four and six into a twelve-person CPR environment. Group assignment is either unchanging throughout a 15 period session or randomly mixed each decision round. Group size significantly affects aggregate effort, while group assignment makes no significant difference. The distribution of total payoffs is more equitable for randomly mixed groups. Implications of our results for voluntary and centralized implementations of the partnership solution are discussed.

发展中国家金融化与中国的抵御探索

本文尝试在发展模式与外部经济依赖性相互作用的分析框架内来分析中国经济从抵御金融化到出现金融化趋势的过程。本文认为发展中国家金融化和频繁的债务金融危机源自本国发展模式与外部经济依赖性相互作用下金融扩张与生产性积累的背离。对于中国而言,在政府有效的产业政策和渐进的金融政策引导下形成的工业化主导的发展模式,能够不断解决经济发展矛盾,同时完备的工业体系和谨慎的金融开放政策减轻了中国对世界经济体系的依赖,使其得以抵御金融化和危机。但2008年全球金融危机后,中国发展模式面临新的矛盾并且对外部经济依赖性逐渐增强,出现了经济金融化的趋势,将对中国经济和金融体系的稳定性带来巨大的挑战。中国政府已经意识到金融化风险,在近年来出台了一系列政策,以期引导资金“脱虚向实”,并取得了一些成效,但金融化风险尚未根除,中国经济未来的发展仍需要政府制定行之有效的政策积极引导金融和实体经济的协调发展。     

国际直接投资对发展中国家的经济影响

20世纪90年代以来,经济全球化的迅猛发展使国际直接投资产生了很多重要变化。在这种新的环境和条件下,这些变化使得国际直接投资对发展中国家产生了新的经济影响。认识到这种变化,对于发展中国家吸引外资,以及最大程度地利用外资,同时限制其不利影响,都是有积极意义的。