Ownership and control of Maori land: Some lessons for South Africa

New Zealand replaced customary tenure of Maori land with titles. Some issues are relevant to South Africa. Massive redistribution of Maori land is accounted for by inadequate property rights conferred fay colonial legislation. Institutions emerged to deal with problems of landlessness and low farm incomes created by titling, among which private incorporations and trusts were particularly successful Such institutions may under certain conditions be useful to smallholders in the former homelands and to groups of farmers who acquire freehold land in South Africa.     

Homeownership, committed expenditure risk, and the stockholding puzzle

Kimball (1991) showed that consumers who face an unavoidablerisk will display 'temperance', meaning that they will increasetheir holdings of safe assets. In principle, temperance couldprovide an explanation for the stockholding puzzle, which isthe microeconomic manifestation of the equity premium puzzle.Previous work has shown that the temperance effect induced bylabor income uncertainty is too small to explain the stockholdingpuzzle. This paper finds that committed expenditure risk associatedwith homeownership induces enough additional temperance to explainthe puzzle.     

Applying hedging strategies to estimate model risk and provision calculation

We present an empirical study of the intertwined behaviour of members in a financial market. Exploiting a database where the broker that initiates an order book event can be identified, we decompose the correlation and response functions into contributions coming from different market participants and study how their behaviour is interconnected. We find evidence for the following. (1) Brokers are very heterogeneous in liquidity provision—some appear to be primarily liquidity providers while others are primarily liquidity takers. (2) The behaviour of brokers is strongly conditioned on the actions of other brokers. In contrast, brokers are only weakly influenced by the impact of their own previous orders. (3) The total impact of market orders is the result of a subtle compensation between the same broker pushing the price in one direction and the liquidity provision of other brokers pushing it in the opposite direction. These results enforce the picture of market dynamics being the result of the competition between heterogeneous participants, interacting to form a complex market ecology.     

Uzbekistan: the silk road to nowhere?

The Central Asian country of Uzbekistan has adopted a unique transition strategy of gradual, state-guided development in which stability and equality are principal objectives and in which growth is sought for now by exporting staple raw materials and importing capital equipment to assure energy independence and to invest in backward-linkages into cotton fabricating, chemicals, and other manufacturing branches. Sharp criticisms of the'Uzbek Road'by multinational agencies unfairly neglect positive aspects of the transition record to date in comparison with other post-Soviet states of the area.     

Bibliometry and nanotechnology: A meta-analysis

As in other fields of science, bibliometry has become the primary method of gaging progress in nanotechnology. In the United States in the late 1990s, a period when policy makers were preparing the groundwork for what would become the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), bibliometry largely replaced expert interviews, then the standard method of assessing nanotechnology. However, such analyses of this sector have tended not to account for productivity. We hope to correct this oversight by integrating economic input and output measurements calculating academic publications divided by the number of researchers, and accounting for government investment in nanotechnology. When nanotechnology journal publication is measured in these ways, the U.S. is not the leader, as has been widely assumed. Rather, it lags behind Germany, the United Kingdom, and France.     

Broadening access to land markets: Financing emerging farmers in South Africa

This article reports on a pilot survey of commercial farms acquired by disadvantaged people in the province of Kwazulu‐Natal, and describes a recent financial strategy to improve access to land. The survey tested a sampling technique to gather information about the rate of land redistribution, the source of terms and conditions of loans used to finance land, and the nature of property rights, managerial arrangements and land use patterns on farms acquired by disadvantaged people. It was estimated that only 0,09 per cent of the farmland available for redistribution was transferred to disadvantaged people during 1995. This low rate of transfer was attributed largely to legislation regulating the subdivision of farmland, and liquidity problems created by traditional mortgage loans. Recent experiments involving mortgage loans with graduated repayment schedules have helped to address the cashflow problem. However, these financial innovations, funded largely by the private sector, are not widely available and their impact is constrained by the Subdivision of Agricultural Land Act. It is recommended that the government amend or scrap this Act, and include financial strategies used by the private sector in its own range of land redistribution programmes.     

Population-dynamics focussed rapid rural mapping and characterisation of the peri-urban interface of Kampala, Uganda

In developing countries, cities are rapidly expanding and urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) has an important role in feeding these growing urban populations; however such agriculture also carries public health risks such as zoonotic disease transmission. It is important to assess the role of UPA in food security and public health risks to make evidence-based decisions on policies. Describing and mapping the peri-urban interface (PUI) are the essential first steps for such an assessment. Kampala, the capital city of Uganda is a rapidly expanding city where the PUI has not previously been mapped or properly described. In this paper we provide a spatial representation of the entire PUI of Kampala economic zone and determine the socio-economic factors related with peri-urbanicity using a population-dynamics focussed rapid rural mapping. This fills a technical gap of rapid rural mapping and offers a simple and rapid methodology for describing the PUI which can be applied in any city in developing countries for wide range of studies.     

Gylany: the balanced future

Futurist projections indicate that androcracy is rapidly taking us to an evolutionary dead-end. But the two projected androcratic futures—a totalitarian future or no future at all—are not our only alternatives. There is the third alternative, the humanistic future to which the concept of gylany, both the balanced core and the logical requirement of our cultural evolution, provides the key.