Food Insecurity,Soil Degradation and Agricultural Markets in West Africa: Why Current Policy Approaches Fail

The agricultural sector in West Africa is not at present capable of meeting the growing demand for food for its population and of reversing unfavourable trends in soil degradation. We argue that integrated soil management is an essential condition for sustainable agricultural development in the many regions in West Africa where population pressure forces an intensification of land use. Such an approach combines improved soil-moisture storage measures, and the use of organic and inorganic fertilizers and soil amendments. The synergetic effects which could result from this combination are indispensable for achieving the productivity increases needed to cope with the pressure of population. Current (neo-liberal and ecological-participationist) policy approaches are unable to realize the transition towards integrated soil management technologies. The time lags involved in learning to use new technologies, in the adaptation of technologies to local circumstances, and in reaping the benefits of soil fertility investments call for (at least temporary) support of agricultural incomes.     

Published stock recommendations as investor sentiment in the near-term stock market

This paper investigates the role of published stock recommendations in print and online media as investor sentiment in the near-term German stock market. In line with extant literature on other sentiment measures, vector autoregressions reveal that past stock returns drive today’s sentiment, but not the other way around, and that sentiment is a powerful predictor of itself. In particular, sentiment based on printed analyst recommendations follows reversals, that is, when analysts face a stock market downturn, they see a buying opportunity and become optimistic.     

The Predictive Power of Anisotropic Spatial Correlation Modeling in Housing Prices

This paper develops a method to capture anisotropic spatial autocorrelation in the context of the simultaneous autoregressive model. Standard isotropic models assume that spatial correlation is a homogeneous function of distance. This assumption, however, is oversimplified if spatial dependence changes with direction. We thus propose a local anisotropic approach based on non-linear scale-space image processing. We illustrate the methodology by using data on single-family house transactions in Lucas County, Ohio. The empirical results suggest that the anisotropic modeling technique can reduce both in-sample and out-of-sample forecast errors. Moreover, it can easily be applied to other spatial econometric functional and kernel forms.     

The Pursuit of Significance

The results of a large scale research project among top public managers in The Netherlands are presented. On the basis of Likert-scaling the degree of Change Orientation is measured. Change Orientation consists of five components: commitment to values; serving the public; empowerment and shared leadership; pragmatic incremen-talism and dedication to public service.     

Empirical validation of Metcalfe’s law: How Internet usage patterns have changed over time

Few doubt that Digital Information Networks (DINs) such as the Internet constitute the basis of a new technology-driven economic era. A large body of literature tries to understand and quantify the value of DINs to help policy makers justify investments in new or improved infrastructures. The prevailing methodological approach is to depict DINs as an observable production input changing the uncertainty regarding the performance of an economic system. In such context, the value of DINs is typically measured with regression techniques between the penetration rate of DINs and economic growth. This approach provides too little insight on the actual causality between DINs and economic value. We recently developed a framework that identified 13 different ways (“capabilities”) how users convert information into economic value. In this article, we show how a simple quadratic relation (Metcalfe’s law) can be used to quantify how adequate these capabilities are in converting the ability to access information into economic value. To our knowledge, this is the first time that Metcalfe’s law is empirically validated as such.     

Affiliates’ Bank Debt Policy: Does Parent Firm Nationality Matter?

This paper examines whether and how bank debt is affected by foreign group affiliation. Ceteris paribus, affiliates of foreign business groups only use about half as much bank debt compared to affiliates of domestic groups. Further, the results indicate that geographical and cultural distance between parent and affiliate countries raise barriers when accessing bank financing. The bank debt usage decreases even further if affiliates and parent firms depend on different legal systems or the degree of legal enforcement in the parent firm's country is low.     

China's One‐Child Policy and ‘the Mystery of Missing Women’: Ethnic Minorities and Male‐Biased Sex Ratios*

Recent estimates suggest that as many as 40 million women are ‘missing’ in China. We exploit a special provision in the Chinese one‐child policy (OCP; allowing for preferential treatment of ethnic minority groups) to revisit the mystery of these missing women, and in particular to explore the contribution of China's OCP in distorting sex ratios. Our results imply that preference for boys is the main driver of the gender gap, and that the OCP is responsible for about half of it. This is true even before ultrasound technologies for prenatal gender determination were available. Not surprisingly, interaction between the OCP and ultrasound technologies has contributed to the gender gap.     

Towards a sustainable and efficient use of manure in agriculture: The Dutch case

Rapid increases in livestock production in the Netherlands have changed manure from a valuable input into a mere waste product. This is especially true for the southern and eastern parts of the country, where specialized pig and poultry farms have concentrated on sandy soils. As these farms generally own very little land, they largely depend on imported feedstuffs. As a consequence, manure is applied to the land in such large quantities that serious environmental problems have resulted: (1) eutrophication of surface water by phosphate emissions; (2) pollution of groundwater by nitrate emissions; and (3) acidification by ammonia emissions.In the last few years the Dutch government has developed a manure policy to counteract these effects. Our analysis of that policy has revealed at least three fundamental defects, which render the manure policy ineffective and inefficient. In this paper proposals are made to remove the defects in current manure policy. Much attention is paid to the problem of designing a mixture of policy instruments which is both effective as well as efficient in limiting the environmental problems caused by manure. It is shown that the use of financial incentives in regulation can substantially improve the efficiency of the manure policy. Finally, the main economic consequences of the proposed policy are examined for the public sector as well as for the agricultural sector.