Economic impacts of developing a biofuel industry in Mozambique

ABSTRACT

Mozambique is one of the most promising African countries for producing biofuels and the national biofuel policy of 2009 identifies measures to incentivize biofuel production. Demand for biofuels in the Southern African Development Community is expected to increase over the next few years as 7 of its 15 member states have implemented or proposed the implementation of blending mandates by 2020. South Africa is one of these countries. Using a dynamic recursive computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, we estimate the impacts of expanding biofuel production in Mozambique under both commercial and smallholder-type farming models, including and excluding bagasse cogeneration.     

Internationalisation strategies of technology-driven small- and medium-sized enterprises

SMEs are increasingly active in international markets. Absence of sufficient resources limits the strategic options available to SMEs. This study examines SMEs’ use of the cooperation strategy to internationalise, both from a cross-sectional and longitudinal perspective. An analysis of data collected in 54 multinational SMEs operating in technology-driven industries suggests an inverted U-shaped relationship between SMEs’ size and their tendency to cooperate with partners to internationalise. In addition, SMEs’ internationalisation strategies are relatively inert. The results of the paper suggest that SMEs can make more effective use of different internationalisation strategies by acquiring knowledge of the pros and cons of the different strategies and by evaluating their choices on a periodical, structural basis, using their resource position as a guiding parameter.     

Entrepreneurial Signaling via Education: A Success Factor in Innovative Start-Ups

Unlike traditional start-ups, innovative start-ups and their respective market partners are faced with severe problems of asymmetric information due to their lack of prior production history and reputation. Here, we study whether and how entrepreneurial signaling via education can help innovative entrepreneurs signal their abilities to banks and prospective employees. We argue that innovative entrepreneurs signal their quality by means of certain characteristics of their educational history. In particular, we expect potential employees to use an entrepreneur’s university degree as a quality signal when deciding whether to accept a job at an innovative start-up, and we expect banks to use a more precise indicator, namely the actual length of study in relation to a standard length, as a signal when deciding to extend credit to an innovative founder. By contrast, traditional start-ups are not faced with the same problems of asymmetric information, so we do not expect employees or banks to require the same signals from them. We empirically test our hypotheses using a dataset of more than 700 German start-ups collected in 1998/99. All hypotheses are borne out by the data.     

Structural Characteristics of the Economy of Mozambique: A SAM-based Analysis

Key features of the Mozambican economy are synthesized in this paper based on a new 1995 social accounting matrix. Particular attention is paid to the critical role of home consumption and large marketing margins. The fundamental importance of agricultural development emerges clearly from the analysis in which the multiplier for value added by capital is re-examined. Agriculture has large sectoral multipliers and is generally more effective in the use of scarce capital than industry and services. Commodities with attractive features for the promotion of agriculture in the short to medium term include maize, rice, as well as small-scale livestock and forestry.     

Consistent poverty comparisons and inference

Building upon the cost of basic needs (CBN) approach, an integrated approach to making consumption-based poverty comparisons is presented. This approach contains two principal modifications to the standard CBN approach. The first permits the development of multiple poverty bundles that are utility consistent. The second recognizes that the poverty line itself is a random variable whose variation influences the degree of confidence in poverty measures. We illustrate the empirical importance of these two methodological changes for the case of Mozambique. With utility consistency imposed, estimated poverty rates tend to be systematically higher in rural areas and lower in urban areas. We also find that the true confidence intervals on the poverty estimates—those incorporating poverty line variance—tend to be considerably larger than those that ignore poverty line variance. Finally, we show that these two methodological changes interact. Specifically, we find that imposing utility consistency on poverty bundles tends to tighten confidence intervals, sometimes dramatically, on provincial poverty estimates. We conclude that this revised approach represents an important advance in poverty analysis. The revised approach is straightforward and directly applicable in empirical work.