Macro and Micro Perspectives of Growth and Poverty in Africa

This article reviews trends in poverty, economic policies, andgrowth in a sample of African countries during the 1990s, drawingon the better household data now available. Experiences havevaried. Some countries have seen sharp drops in income poverty,whereas others have witnessed marked increases. In some countriesoverall economic growth has been pro-poor and in others not.But the aggregate numbers hide systematic distributional effects.Taking both macro and micro perspectives of growth and povertyin Africa, the article draws four key conclusions. First, economicpolicy reforms (improving macroeconomic balances and liberalizingmarkets) appear conducive to reducing poverty. Second, marketconnectedness is crucial to enable participation in the gainsfrom economic growth. Some regions and households by virtueof their remoteness were left behind when growth picked up.Third, education and access to land emerge as key private endowmentsto help households benefit from new economic opportunities.Finally, rainfall variations and ill health have profound effectson poverty outcomes, underscoring the significance of socialrisk management in poverty reduction strategies in Africa.     

Firm-network characteristics and economic robustness to natural disasters

This article proposes a theoretical framework to investigate economic robustness to exogenous shocks such as natural disasters. It is based on a dynamic model that represents a regional economy as a network of production units through the disaggregation of sector-scale input-output tables. Results suggest that disaster-related output losses depend on direct losses heterogeneity and on the economic network structure. Two aggregate indexes - concentration and clustering - appear as important drivers of economic robustness, offering opportunities for robustness-enhancing strategies. Modern industrial organization seems to reduce short-term robustness in a trade-off against higher efficiency in normal times.     

The impact of medical complications on optimal hospital payment

This paper studies the optimal payment policy offered by a regulator to a partially altruistic hospital when the latter privately observes the severity of illness of patients and chooses a hidden quality that influences the probability of medical complications occurring. We analyze how the level of altruism of the hospital affects the conditions under which the payment, for a given diagnosis-related group, should be refined according to the severity of illness and the occurrence of complications.     

No-arbitrage Equilibria with Differential Information: An Existence Proof

On the example of a pure exchange financial economy with two periods incomplete nominal-asset markets and differential information of the adverse selection’s type, Cornet-De Boisdeffre (J Math Econ 38:393-410, 2002) introduced refined concepts of no-arbitrage prices and equilibria, which extended to the asymmetric information setting the classical concepts of the symmetric information literature. We now assess existence issues and extend a standard property of symmetric information models. Namely, we prove that a no-arbitrage equilibrium always exists, as long as financial markets preclude arbitrage, under the same standard conditions, whether agents have symmetric or asymmetric information.     

Arbitrage and price revelation with asymmetric information and incomplete markets

This paper deals with the issue of arbitrage with differential information and incomplete financial markets, with a focus on information that no-arbitrage asset prices can reveal. Time and uncertainty are represented by two periods and a finite set S of states of nature, one of which will prevail at the second period. Agents may operate limited financial transfers across periods and states via finitely many nominal assets. Each agent i has a private information about which state will prevail at the second period; this information is represented by a subset S_i of S. Agents receive no wrong information in the sense that the “true state” belongs to the “pooled information” set ∩_iS_i, hence assumed to be non-empty.Our analysis is two-fold. We first extend the classical symmetric information analysis to the asymmetric setting, via a concept of no-arbitrage price. Second, we study how such no-arbitrage prices convey information to agents in a decentralized way. The main difference between the symmetric and the asymmetric settings stems from the fact that a classical no-arbitrage asset price (common to every agent) always exists in the first case, but no longer in the asymmetric one, thus allowing arbitrage opportunities. This is the main reason why agents may need to refine their information up to an information structure which precludes arbitrage.     

On farmland prices and rents in Japan

Historically, the Japanese farmland market has been strongly regulated, although fundamental changes in policy were introduced in 1967 and 1980. This article examines the relationship between farmland prices and rents in Japan for 1955–2000 using the cointegration procedure of Johansen et al. (2000) , which admits structural breaks. Results show the presence of a cointegrating relationship with a significant break in 1980. There is Granger‐causality from prices to rents, which suggests that rents are determined within an institutional setting according to farmland prices. The rent–price elasticity is unity, which supports the notion of efficiency in the farmland market.     

Cattle Farmers’ Preferences for Disease‐Free Zones in Kenya: An application of the Choice Experiment Method

Management of livestock diseases is important in ensuring food safety to consumers in both domestic and export markets. Various measures are prescribed under the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (SPS) agreement of the World Trade Organization. In order to prevent the spread of trans‐boundary cattle diseases, the SPS agreement recommends the establishment of Disease‐Free Zones (DFZs). These have been implemented successfully in some major beef‐exporting countries, but in Kenya are still at a pilot stage. To understand Kenyan farmers’ preferences on the type of DFZ that would be readily acceptable to them, a choice experiment was conducted using a D‐optimal design. Results show that farmers would be willing to pay to participate in a DFZ where: adequate training is provided on pasture development, record keeping and disease monitoring; market information is provided and sales contract opportunities are guaranteed; cattle are properly labelled for ease of identification; and some monetary compensation is provided in the event that cattle die due to severe disease outbreaks. Preferences for the DFZ attributes are shown to be heterogeneous across three cattle production systems. We also derive farmers’ preferences for various DFZ policy scenarios. The findings have important implications for policy on the design of DFZ programmes in Kenya and other countries that face similar cattle disease challenges.     

Global economic effects of the EU Common Agricultural Policy

Among distortions in international agricultural trade, those imposed by the European Union (EU) are the most disruptive. Under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the EU has switched from being a large net importer of agricultural products to a large exporter. This has greatly altered world agricultural markets, imposing substantial costs on the EU itself and efficient agricultural exporters in the rest of the world. We show how the CAP has affected world agricultural markets and present estimates of the associated costs. First we assess the aggregate costs broken down by various product categories. Next we provide a specific example of one product, sugar.