Does Agricultural Productivity Actually Matter for Food Security in a Landlocked Sub‐Saharan African Country? The Case of Burkina Faso

This paper makes use of a Computable General Equilibrium model to analyze the impact of two agricultural productivity trends on poor households’ food security in Burkina Faso: a negative trend that could arise from many different factors, including land degradation, climate change, and harmful agricultural practices; and a positive trend which may result from enhanced public investment in agriculture, notably in research and development, extension, irrigation, rural roads, rural electrification, and rural education. The results point to a high sensitivity of the poor's consumption to agricultural productivity as well as to stronger impacts on the urban poor than on the rural poor. The current situation is already characterized by severe food insecurity, such that a decline in agricultural productivity is likely to further plunge the urban poor into a deep food crisis. By contrast, positive agricultural productivity trends may help alleviate poverty and food insecurity. Agricultural productivity may indeed affect the poor's food consumption mainly through large changes in agricultural prices and real incomes. Cet article utilise un modèle d’Équilibre Général Calculable pour analyser l'impact des différentes tendances de la productivité agricole sur la sécurité alimentaire des ménages pauvres au Burkina Faso. D'une part, les tendances négatives peuvent résulter de plusieurs facteurs, y compris la dégradation des terres, le changement climatique, et les pratiques agricoles nuisibles. D'autre part, la tendance positive peut résulter de l'investissement public accru dans l'agriculture, notamment dans la recherche et développement, la vulgarisation, l'irrigation, les routes rurales, l′électrification rurale et l′éducation rurale. Les résultats montrent une sensibilité élevée de la consommation des pauvres à la productivité agricole, ainsi que des impacts plus forts sur les populations urbaines pauvres. La situation actuelle est déjà caractérisée par une insécurité alimentaire grave de sorte qu'une baisse de la productivité agricole est susceptible de plonger davantage les pauvres en milieu urbain dans une crise alimentaire profonde. En revanche, la tendance positive sur la productivité agricole peut contribuer à atténuer la pauvreté et l'insécurité alimentaire. La productivité agricole peut en effet affecter la consommation alimentaire des pauvres principalement par le biais de grandes variations des prix agricoles et des revenus réels.     

Limits to agri-environmental schemes uptake to mitigate human–wildlife conflict: lessons learned from Flamingos in the Camargue,southern France

Agri-environment schemes (AES) favouring the maintenance of hedges were implemented in the Camargue (southern France) as it has previously been proven to reduce the risk of damage caused by Greater Flamingo incursions into rice fields. Given the persistent incursions, we estimated the economic cost of damage from 2007 to 2009, the uptake rate of hedge-related AES and explored the limits of these schemes as a mitigation effort. Semi-structured and key informant interviews, site mapping and field visits were made to verify claims and estimate damage. Number of plants/m² and fertile stems/plant were estimated on 1,498 and 312 grids, respectively, spread over 26 rice fields. Damaged areas of rice fields forayed by flamingos presented from 1.35 to 3.06 t/ha lower yield than undamaged areas. We estimated 228€/ha average loss in forayed fields for a total of 400,000€ in yield loss in 2008. Administrative constraints limited AES and free seedlings distribution, preventing the problem from being addressed at an appropriate scale. The trivial financial support for hedge management relative to more lucrative AES with lower constraints resulted in low uptake rate. We propose that modifications of AES take into account landscape factors over administrative boundaries and that the financial support for AES be scaled up relative to other subsidies in order to address the efforts necessary to achieve landscape changes to reduce human–wildlife conflict.     

Price impact and bursts in liquidity provision

This paper analyses brief episodes of high-intensity quote turnover and revision—‘bursts’ in quotes—in the US equity market. Such events occur very frequently, several hundred times a day for actively traded stocks. We find significant price impact associated with these market maker initiated events, about five times higher than during non-burst periods. Bursts in quotes are concurrent with short-lived structural breaks in the informational relationship between market makers and market takers. During bursts, market makers no longer passively impound information from order flow into quotes—a departure from the traditional market microstructure paradigm. Rather, market makers significantly impact prices during bursts in quotes. Further analysis shows that there is asymmetry in adverse selection between the bid and ask sides of the limit order book and only a sub-population of market makers enjoys an informational advantage during bursts. Market makers on the side opposite the burst suffer elevated adverse selection costs, while market makers on the side of the burst realize positive spread, irrespective of the order flow direction. Our results call attention to the need for a new microstructure perspective in understanding modern high-frequency limit order book markets and the quote manipulation strategies at the disposal of the fast market makers.     

Non‐additivity in Accounting Valuation: Theory and Applications

This paper has three objectives. First, to introduce a theoretical solution to the issue of non‐additivity between assets in place, relying on an accounting‐based valuation approach. Second, to explain how such an approach can be implemented empirically by measuring synergies between assets. Third, to present the properties of this non‐additive valuation technique. We use Choquet capacities, that is, non‐additive aggregation operators, to measure the interactions between assets and apply our methodology to a sample of US firms from the capital goods industry. To operationalize our approach we examine the relationships between synergies—captured by Choquet capacities—and the market‐to‐book ratio (proxying for growth options), and show how interactions between assets are consistently linked to a firm’s market‐to‐book ratio. We also measure firm‐specific productive efficiency relative to the industry and firm size. For large firms, efficiency, as defined by our approach, is positively associated with higher future operating cash flows. For small firms, efficiency is positively associated with higher future sales growth. We document that the non‐additive approach appears to be better able to identify expected relationships between efficiency and future performance than a simpler approach based on the market‐to‐book ratio.     

Resilience to the financial crisis in customer-supplier networks

Inspired by the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) beta, we construct customer and supplier betas to separately investigate potentially different properties of downstream and upstream linkages. With the adjacency matrix acting as a ‘filter’ to extract each company's return covariances with its trading partners, the cross-sectional dependence contained in the customer-supplier network is summarized by our betas. We explore how these two betas are related to a company's resilience to the financial crisis of 2008–2009. We observe that a higher customer beta is generally associated with more resilience during the crisis. Therefore, investors could construct the customer beta to gain insights into the relative negative impact of a potential crisis on a stock's performance.     

Understanding strategic bidding in multi‐unit auctions: a case study of the Texas electricity spot market

We examine the bidding behavior of firms in the Texas electricity spot market, where bidders submit hourly supply schedules to sell power. We characterize an equilibrium model of bidding and use detailed firm‐level data on bids and marginal costs to compare actual bidding behavior to theoretical benchmarks. Firms with large stakes in the market performed close to the theoretical benchmark of static profit maximization. However, smaller firms utilized excessively steep bid schedules significantly deviating from this benchmark. Further analysis suggests that payoff scale has an important effect on firms' willingness and ability to participate in complex, strategic market environments.     

Post-growth in the Tropics? Contestations over Tri Hita Karana and a tourism megaproject in Bali

Abstract

This study looks at a socio-environmental conflict over a tourism megaproject in the Benoa Bay in Bali, Indonesia. This conflict is interesting because it crystallizes key questions about the future of the island. Intriguingly, all the conflicting groups of actors mobilize the same philosophy of Tri Hita Karana (THK), which can be translated as the “three causes of well-being” and which is said to guide the development policies of the island. Our objective is to investigate how THK relates to the conflict and to what extent some of its interpretations are growth-critical. Using political ecology as a theoretical lens and qualitative methods, we find that the conflicting groups do not oppose each other through different languages of valuation, but within them. Likewise, THK is only superficially “one” idiom of valuation. In reality, THK covers different visions of development, depending on the actors involved. We identify three broad ways of interpreting THK in this conflict: (i) a marketable way, (ii) an equity-oriented way, and (iii) a radical-integral way, which bears similarities with post-growth views. This article is a contribution to the emerging debates on post-growth thinking from the “global South” and to the radical critique of tourism industry in developing regions.     

The resurrection of earlier imprints post mortem: Explaining the Turkish agricultural cooperative movement with an imprinting theory lens, 1888–1937

This study aims to extend the cooperative lifecycle theory, which builds on consecutive degeneration and regeneration of ideal cooperative values such as democracy, self-help, and solidarity by offering a new regenerative mechanism. In this respect, the study imports multilevel imprinting theory from the organizational ecology domain to explicate the punctuated evolutionary pattern of Turkish agricultural credit cooperatives, which displayed significantly different characteristics from Raiffeisen cooperatives that cooperative discourse in Türkiye used for a long as a benchmark. The archival research undertaken in the study asserts that the imprints of Ottoman Memleket Sandiks (OMS) have stamped agricultural credit cooperatives of the Republican era long after their erosion. The resurrection of imprints was enabled by Ziraat Bank, which acted as an intermediary organization and took over the remnants of OMSs. Our analyses also suggest that the State's polity and policy transformations culminate in selective activation of past imprints within the Ziraat Bank, which, in turn, shaped the Turkish agricultural cooperative field.     

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