After the famine: food aid policy and management issues in sub-Saharan Africa

The large amount of food aid that was required to meet Africa's emergency food situation resulted in the postponement of some fundamental decisions that were being taken about food aid use in sub-Saharan Africa. Now the donor community and recipient governments are again giving priority to integrating food aid with other available resources in order to meet longer-term food policy and wider development objectives. This paper looks at some of the policy and management issues which need to be addressed if the effectiveness of food aid assistance is to be improved in the current African context. Shortages of locally qualified personnel to administer project food aid have proven to be a major bottleneck in most sub-Saharan countries. Most sub-Saharan states receive food aid from a variety of sources: multilateral, bilateral and a few private-voluntary organizations. As a result, countervailing priorities are set by the donors themselves and give rise to conflicts. The recent drought and famine conditions have compounded an image problem in which food aid is narrowly identified by recipient governments as a project resource to be used primarily for nutrition interventions and for the rural sector. The image problem often limits project selection and overlooks innovative uses of food aid. Many sub-Saharan countries are starting to acquire considerable amounts of counterpart funds from program food aid. However, their use is not coherently integrated with the total aid flow. Multi-year programming has emerged as a management issue which has unnecessarily divided the food aid donor community. The fundamental issue is flexibility in programming, not multi-year programming. The major policy objective now facing the food aid donor community and recipient countries is how to lower emergency allocations while simultaneously increasing project and program aid. Most nonfood-aid donor agencies and their constituent bodies do not treat food aid as a valid economic resource, thereby undermining its effectiveness. The eventual success of food aid use in Africa may be a function of the recipient governments and other major donor and financial organizations.     

Multifamily Housing Demand: 1980–2000

Using Annual Housing Survey data on multifamily structure occupancy by household type for 1975, together with number of household projections from the Department of Agriculture, a gross level of multifamily housing demand is projected. Allowance is made for a 2 percent replacement rate of the total stock as well as a 5 percent vacancy figure for new household demand. Assuming that: (1) there is no massive shift away from one-family ownership to multifamily units, and (2) the present level of conversions from one-family units to multiple occupancy continues to offset the trend of conversion from rental multifamily units to condominium status, then total future demand for multifamily rental units is well within current construction levels.

• We are presently building one and one-half times the demand of 416,000 units per year projected for 1975–80.

• The demand from 1980 to 1990 decreases to 367,000 new units annually.

• This is further reduced to 335,000 units annually for the period 1990–2000.

The major determinants of future demand will focus on the scrap-page rate of extant facilities and the regional shifts of population.
The future supply of multifamily structures depends on an abatement of construction costs and interest rates, and/or massive levels of Government subsidy.
There is evidence that operating cost rises are challenging the financial integrity of multifamily structures. This is manifested by the HUD and private market mortgage delinquency and foreclosure rates.
Policy focus for the future should emphasize the minimization of both construction and operating costs rather than augmented delivery rates.     

The Consumer Life Cycle

The field of consumer education needs conceptual frameworks to organize the growing body of existing knowledge and to point to needed research. The use of the familiar life cycle variable for this purpose is proposed. Generalizations, based upon a review of the literature, are offered about the characteristics, typical product and service purchases, marketplace concepts and knowledge, marketplace skills, typical marketplace problems and level of resources of different life cycle stage categories.     

Variety,Globalization, and Social Efficiency

The standard formal presentation of the Dixit‐Stiglitz‐Krugman (DSK) model of monopolistic competition with a constant‐elasticity‐of‐substitution (CES) utility function supposes a sufficient number of firms so that the elasticity of demand facing each variety is approximated by a constant elasticity of substitution. Such a formulation forces economies of scale to be frozen so that firm size never changes. We use a Bertrand‐Nash interpretation of the equilibrium that allows the elasticity of demand facing each variety to depend on the number of varieties, thus allowing the gains from globalization to reflect both the increase in variety and the exploitation of economies of scale. We also develop a precise expression for per capita real income with any number of sectors and examine the age‐old question of the socially optimal number of varieties.     

Lessons from My School

This article presents analyses of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) data and data on other indicators that are made available through the My School website. There are large differences across states and types of schools (independent, Catholic and government) in the Year 3 NAPLAN outcomes, though the differences across states tend to diminish as outcomes for later years of study are examined. Some schools are shown to consistently have academic outcomes better than their characteristics would otherwise indicate; conversely, other schools are shown to consistently have academic outcomes below the levels their characteristics would otherwise indicate. Few of these differences are statistically significant.     

Too-Big-To-Fail: Why Megabanks Have Not Become Smaller Since the Global Financial Crisis?

ABSTRACT

More than ten years after the global financial crisis, what has happened to the ‘too-big-to-fail’ (TBTF) banks whose reckless behavior was among its preconditions, but which received public support and guarantees in the midst of that crisis? Insofar as this too-big-to-fail status helped create the crisis and then imposed costs on the rest of society, we would expect these banks to have shrunk. We investigate the evolution of 31 global-TBTF banks and find that their overall size has hardly recorded any substantial change. However, there is no sense of urgency in the flourishing post-crisis literature on TBTF banks about the need to contain their size; the prevalent view therein is that if properly regulated, the risks that arise from a financial system dominated by TBTF banks are manageable. This view rests on the same overly narrow theoretical underpinnings whose flaws were exposed in the crisis. We argue that too-big-to-fail banking is embedded in a set of self-reinforcing policies—consolidation, balance-sheet support through quantitative easing, favorable regulations, bank lobbying, and geo-economic and geo-political considerations—which explain why these banks have not shrunk and why they remain a threat to financial stability, well after the lessons of the crisis should have been learned.     

AN ANALYSIS OF SUPPLY CHAIN COLLABORATIONS AND THEIR EFFECT ON PERFORMANCE OUTCOMES

This research examined how operational outcomes, relational outcomes and business performance are affected by a collaboration project between buyers and suppliers in a supply chain. It is hypothesized that interdependence of knowledge and process, supply chain partner insight, and the level of collaboration between the firms affect the outcomes of a collaboration project. Survey data from buyers and suppliers from a wide range of industries and organizations were used in this analysis. Among these participants, higher levels of collaboration led to improvements in operational and relational outcomes, which together led to improvements in asset utilization, competitive position, organizational performance, and profitability.