Structure and Dynamics of Livestock Marketing in Rural Uganda: Constraints and Prospects for Research and Development

ABSTRACT

The projected global expansion in consumption of meat and other livestock products potentially offers sub-Saharan African small-holder farmers opportunities to escape from the poverty trap. A necessary condition for exploiting this potential is the establishment of marketing systems that provide farmers with reasonable incentives to participate in the market. In this study, the functioning of livestock markets in rural Uganda is analyzed based on a survey of 401 livestock keepers, complimented with focus group discussions with livestock traders and policy planners. The first part is dedicated to the empirical analysis of key organizational and institutional arrangements. Constraints along the marketing chain as well as potential institutional solutions are illuminated. The second part is dedicated to propositions of new areas where more work and new results are needed to improve the functioning of the livestock marketing chain. Empirical findings indicated the following institutional constraints: a poor market information system, lack of grades and standards, lack of trade finance, poor contract enforcement and dispute settlement, disorganized actors, high transaction risks, and poorly developed marketing infrastructure. The study recommends a structured approach to livestock marketing, market infrastructure development, and emphasis on arbitration systems as specific ways of improving the efficiency of livestock marketing in Uganda and other developing countries.     

‘Don't Waste a Crisis’: Opening up the City Yet Again for Neoliberal Experimentation

This essay calls for a systematic investigation of the financial‐economic crisis as a source of new urban governance rationalities across Europe. We propose combining an understanding of neoliberalization as a variegated social phenomenon with a cultural political economy approach sensitive to the discursive dimension of variegation and the evolutionary mechanisms through which discursive variation is translated into geo‐institutional differentiation. We illustrate how this theoretical framework may help to analyse the impact of the crisis on urban governmental rationalities. Rather than offering a complete cultural political economy account of the responses of European cities to the financial‐economic crisis, we analyse how the crisis and the responses to it have been represented in discourses on urban policies and development by focusing on two discursive sites that are of strategic importance, namely OECD LEED and URBACT. Our preliminary findings suggest a re‐assemblage of existing discourses rather than the emergence of a new post‐neoliberal urban government rationality.     

The remote work revolution: Impact on real estate values and the urban environment: 2023 AREUEA Presidential Address

The covid-19 pandemic induced a major shift in the prevalence of remote and hybrid work arrangements. This review article studies the effects of this remote work revolution for residential and commercial real estate values and for the future of cities. It also discusses consequences for productivity, innovation, local public finance, and the climate. The last part of the article discusses policy interventions.     

The global financial crisis: How similar? How different? How costly?

This paper provides a brief analysis of three major questions raised in the context of the recent global financial crisis. First, how similar is the crisis to previous episodes? We argue that the crisis featured some close similarities to earlier ones, including the presence of credit and asset price booms fueled by rapid debt accumulation. Second, how different is it from earlier episodes? We show that, as much as it displayed some similarities with previous cases, it also featured some significant differences, such as the explosion of opaque and complex financial instruments in a context of highly integrated global financial markets. Third, how costly are recessions that followed these types of crises? Although the latest episode took a very heavy toll on the real economy, we argue that this was not a surprising outcome. In particular, historical comparisons indicate that recessions associated with periods of deep financial disruptions result in much larger declines in real economic activity. We discuss the implications of these findings for economic and financial sector policies and future research.     

Student employment and academic performance: an empirical exploration of the primary orientation theory

This study empirically assesses the thesis that student employment only hurts academic performance for students with a primary orientation towards work (versus school). To this end, we analyse unique data on tertiary education students’ intensity of and motivation for student employment by means of a state-of-the art moderation model. We find, indeed, only a negative association between hours of student work and the percentage of courses passed for work-oriented students. This finding may explain the contradictory results in the literature neglecting this factor.     

Contagion: Understanding How It Spreads

Much of the current debate on reforming the international financialarchitecture is aimed at reducing the risks of contagion—bestdefined as a significant increase in cross-market linkages aftera shock to an individual country (or group of countries). Thisdefinition highlights the importance of other links throughwhich shocks are normally transmitted, including trade and finance.During times of crisis, the ways in which shocks are transmitteddo seem to differ, and these differences appear to be important.Empirical work has helped to identify the types of links andother macroeconomic conditions that can make a country vulnerableto contagion during crisis periods, although less is known aboutthe importance of microeconomic considerations and institutionalfactors in propagating shocks. Empirical research has helpedto identify those countries that are at risk of contagion aswell as some, albeit quite general, policy interventions thatcan reduce risks.      

Make me special: Gender differences in consumers’ responses to loyalty programs

Current literature on loyalty programs emphasizes the importance of psychological rewards and special treatment. However, it is not clear if male and female customers respond to these incentives in a similar way. We explore the differential effect for female versus male consumers of two psychological rewards that are provided through a loyalty program (a) high status (e.g., Gold membership), and (b) personalization, at different levels of visibility to other consumers. Across three experiments and a field study, we find a coherent pattern of gender differences in the way customers respond to different types of psychological rewards in the context of loyalty programs. The results show that men respond more positively than women to loyalty programs that emphasize status, but only when their higher status is highly visible to others. In contrast, women respond more positively than men to loyalty programs that emphasize personalization, but only for personalization in private settings. We discuss managerial implications for the design of loyalty programs.     

A Comparison of State-of-the-Art Classification Techniques for Expert Automobile Insurance Claim Fraud Detection

Several state‐of‐the‐art binary classification techniques are experimentally evaluated in the context of expert automobile insurance claim fraud detection. The predictive power of logistic regression, C4.5 decision tree, k‐nearest neighbor, Bayesian learning multilayer perceptron neural network, least‐squares support vector machine, naive Bayes, and tree‐augmented naive Bayes classification is contrasted. For most of these algorithm types, we report on several operationalizations using alternative hyperparameter or design choices. We compare these in terms of mean percentage correctly classified (PCC) and mean area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curve using a stratified, blocked, ten‐fold cross‐validation experiment. We also contrast algorithm type performance visually by means of the convex hull of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves associated with the alternative operationalizations per algorithm type. The study is based on a data set of 1,399 personal injury protection claims from 1993 accidents collected by the Automobile Insurers Bureau of Massachusetts. To stay as close to real‐life operating conditions as possible, we consider only predictors that are known relatively early in the life of a claim. Furthermore, based on the qualification of each available claim by both a verbal expert assessment of suspicion of fraud and a ten‐point‐scale expert suspicion score, we can compare classification for different target/class encoding schemes. Finally, we also investigate the added value of systematically collecting nonflag predictors for suspicion of fraud modeling purposes. From the observed results, we may state that: (1) independent of the target encoding scheme and the algorithm type, the inclusion of nonflag predictors allows us to significantly boost predictive performance; (2) for all the evaluated scenarios, the performance difference in terms of mean PCC and mean AUROC between many algorithm type operationalizations turns out to be rather small; visual comparison of the algorithm type ROC curve convex hulls also shows limited difference in performance over the range of operating conditions; (3) relatively simple and efficient techniques such as linear logistic regression and linear kernel least‐squares support vector machine classification show excellent overall predictive capabilities, and (smoothed) naive Bayes also performs well; and (4) the C4.5 decision tree operationalization results are rather disappointing; none of the tree operationalizations are capable of attaining mean AUROC performance in line with the best. Visual inspection of the evaluated scenarios reveals that the C4.5 algorithm type ROC curve convex hull is often dominated in large part by most of the other algorithm type hulls.