An analysis of factors affecting access to credit in Lesotho's smallholder agricultural sector

The agricultural sector in Lesotho is underperforming mainly due to the inability of smallholders to move from traditional agriculture to a more scientific and technology-based one. Among the challenges inhibiting the ability of smallholders to make the step up is access to financial services, especially credit. The purpose of this study was to examine the factors that may influence the ability of smallholders to access finance by making use of a logistic regression model within the principle component regression framework. The results revealed that the ability of smallholders to access finance, and the potential to make the transition towards a more scientific and technology-based agriculture sector, is influenced by the level of farm and non-farm income, remittances and pension, farm size, availability of family labour, land ownership, savings and repayment ability. The results present important information in terms of guiding institutional arrangements needed to improve credit availability in Lesotho.     

Inequality and Union Membership: The Influence of Relative Earnings and Inequality Attitudes

Using surveys from the International Social Survey Programme covering the period 1985–2002 for seven European countries (West and East Germany, Sweden, Norway, Italy, the Netherlands and Great Britain), we examine the effect of relative earnings on union membership and show that union density is higher among workers in the intermediate earnings group than among low or high earners. Next, we examine the association of inequality attitudes with union membership and demonstrate that union membership is not only motivated by instrumental considerations related to relative earnings, but also by normative concerns about inequality. We interpret our findings suggesting that rising earnings inequality is in itself a source of union decline.     

Consistent selection of explanatory variables

We consider a linear regression model where some explanatory variables are unknown members of sets of alternative explanatory variables. It will be shown that under weak conditions the minimum residual variance criterion for selecting these explanatory variables has the property that the probability of selecting wrong explanatory variables vanishes if the number of observations increases to infmity. Moreover, the O.L.S. estimator of the resulting "specified" model turns out to be consistent, while in the case that all the parameters are nonzero it can be shown that this O.L.S. estimator has the same limiting distribution as the O.L.S. estimator of the true model.     

Forecasting recreation demand in the upper Savannah River Basin

Saunders, Paul R., Herman F. Senter, and James P. Jarvis, Forecasting Recreation Demand in the Upper Savannah River Basin. Annals of Tourism Research 1981, VIII(2):236–256. The Upper Savannah River Basin in Georgia and South Carolina, USA, offers opportunities for a variety of recreation activities. Four major reservoirs, and a fifth one under construction, are available for recreation use. Most users live within 80 to 160 kilometers of the two principal reservoirs, Hartwell Lake and Clark Hill Lake. A recreation demand model was developed for these two reservoirs and the soon to be completed Russell Lake, basing total demand on projected population and participation rates for fourteen selected activities. Total demand, consisting of met and unmet demand, was predicted for 1976, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010. The model is a relatively simple tool which can be used by state, local, and regional planners to predict both demand for facilities, and the supply of facilities needed to meet future demand.     

Regional relationships between inherent coffee quality and growing environment for denomination of origin labels in Nariño and Cauca,Colombia

International markets are increasingly signaling demand for quality-differentiated coffee, which the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC) proposed to exploit to identify those regional coffees that would fulfill the requirements to be classified as denomination of origin. The objective of this study was to develop and implement a sound, robust and repeatable approach with and for the FNC to identify regional causal relationships between coffee quality and environmental characteristics as bases for labels of denomination of origin. Environmental differences between coffee-growing areas in the departments of Cauca and Nariño were statistically significant for several characteristics, including the number of dry months, annual precipitation and diurnal temperature range. The dominant varieties (Caturra and Colombia) did not show major differences in quality attributes, and were pooled for the analyses with the environmental data. There are significant differences in biochemical and sensorial product characteristics between the two departments. The spatial patterns in product characteristics exhibit a non-random, regionally-changing structure that is related to those in the environmental data. The generated results provided ample evidence to support the application for regionally-based denominations of origin. Recommendations were derived to help mainstreaming the developed approach and thereby facilitate policy decisions for its use in other geographies and with other crops. Furthermore, the importance of systematic interdisciplinary institutional collaboration for large-scale denomination of origin projects was corroborated for food policy dialogue and decision making. It seems plausible that producers of high-quality products within other commodities are likely to follow the FNC in seeking denomination of origin for their goods. The presented approach is crucial to facilitate policy.