Double Dividend with Involuntary Unemployment: Efficiency and Intergenerational Equity

This paper analyzes the double dividend and distributional issues within an overlapping generations model framework with involuntary unemployment. We characterize the necessary conditions needed to obtain a double dividend, when the revenue of the environmental tax is recycled by a variation of the labor tax rate. We show that an employment dividend may occur without any efficiency dividend and that the young generation is not always harmed by the fiscal reform, even without any intergenerational transfers. Therefore, three dividends (environmental, efficiency and intergenerational equity) can occur simultaneously.     

Financial Flows to Eastern Europe: Determinants,Volatility and Sustainability Issues

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

Fair and Fast Convergence on Islands of Agreement in Multicriteria Group Decision Making by Logical Navigation

Reasoning on multiple criteria is a key issue in group decision to take into account the multidimensional nature of real-world decision-making problems. In order to reduce the induced information overload, in multicriteria decision analysis, criteria are in general aggregated, in many cases by a simple discriminant function of the form of a weighted sum. It requires to, a priori and completely, elicit preferences of decision makers. That can be quite arbitrary. In everyday life, to reduce information overload people often use a heuristic, called “Take-the-best”: they take criteria in a predefined order, the first criterion which discriminates the alternatives at stake is used to make the decision. Although useful, the heuristic can be biased. This article proposes the Logical Multicriteria Sort process to support multicriteria sorting within islands of agreement. It therefore does not require a complete and consistent a priori set of preferences, but rather supports groups to quickly identify the criteria for which an agreement exists. The process can be seen as a generalization of Take-the-best. It also proposes to consider one criterion at a time but once a criterion has been found discriminating it is recorded, the process is iterated and relevant criteria are logically combined. Hence, the biases of Take-the-best are reduced. The process is supported by a GDSS, based on Logical Information Systems, which gives instantaneous feedbacks of each small decision and keeps tracks of all of the decisions taken so far. The process is incremental, each step involves low information load. It guarantees some fairness because all considered alternatives are systematically analyzed along the selected criteria. A successful case study is reported.     

Governance, Democracy and Poverty Reduction: Lessons Drawn from Household Surveys in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America

Public statistics face quite a challenge when it comes to measuring new dimensions of development (institutions, governance, and social and political participation). To take up this challenge, modules on Governance, Democracy and Multiple Dimensions of Poverty have been appended to household surveys by National Statistics Institutes in twelve African and Latin American developing countries. This paper presents the issues addressed and the methodological lessons learnt along with a selection of findings to illustrate this innovative approach and demonstrate its analytic potential. We investigate, for instance, the population's support for democratic principles, the respect for civil and political rights and the trust in the political class; the ‘need for the State’, particularly of the poorest; the extent of petty corruption; the reliability of expert surveys on governance; the perception of decentralization policies at local level; the level and vitality of social and political participation, etc. The conclusive appraisal made opens up prospects for the national statistical information systems in the developing countries. The measurement and tracking of this new set of objective and subjective public policy monitoring indicators would benefit from being made systematic.     

Merchants of doubt: Corporate political action when NGO credibility is uncertain

The literature on special interest groups emphasizes two main influence channels: campaign contributions and informational lobbying. We introduce a third channel: providing information about the credibility of political rivals. In particular, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) often aim to communicate scientific knowledge to policymakers, but industry‐backed groups often attempt to undermine their credibility. We extend a standard signaling model of interest‐group lobbying to include fixed costs of policymaker action and show that these costs make possible two mechanisms for creating doubt about the value of policy action. The first uses Bayesian persuasion to suggest the NGO may be a noncredible radical. The second involves creating an opposition think tank (TT) that acts as a possible radical, not a credible moderate. We show that the TT cannot always implement the Bayesian persuasion benchmark, and we characterize how optimal TT design varies with exogenous parameters.     

Crop management,labour organization,and marketing: three key issues for improving sustainability in organic vegetable farming

Most market-garden farms that have converted to organic farming (OF) in the last few decades in France are small and diversified. Larger farms usually specialize in a few vegetable species and frequently face technical and economic problems when they convert to organics. Diversifying production may be a means of increasing sustainability due to larger crop rotations and varied marketing outlets, but it has various implications on farm management, especially labour organization and marketing. In the present study, we examined how an acceptable degree of species diversification can act as a lever to develop organic vegetable production by combining sociologist and agronomist points of view. Multidisciplinary surveys of 30 market-garden farms varying in usable surface area and degrees of crop diversification were carried out. Consequences on crop management, labour organization and skills, and marketing implications were described, and farm sustainability was assessed. Specialized farms of the sample had a rather industrial organization of labour and marketing and benefited from economy of scale to produce vegetables. But in the long term, they may suffer from low agronomical sustainability because of narrow crop rotations and intensive crop management. Diversified farms were more sustainable according the criteria studied, but they suffered from the extremely complex management of cropping systems. These results are discussed on both the farm and territorial levels. Collective marketing initiatives and social networks might help reach an acceptable degree of species diversification at the farm level. Potential innovative organizations are identified, which could facilitate the transition to OF.     

Intensification of cocoa agroforestry systems as a REDD+ strategy in Cameroon: hurdles,motivations, and challenges

Tree planting and the use of inputs within cocoa agroforestry systems are key intensification pathways for enhancing the contribution of these systems to REDD+. However, scholarship on the hurdles, motivations, and challenges pertaining to intensification of these systems remains surprisingly scanty. A questionnaire addressing these knowledge gaps was administered to 461 cocoa farmers randomly selected from 10 communities in the South Region of Cameroon. The lack of technical support was identified as one of the main obstacles to tree planting and the use of inputs. The least motivating factor behind tree planting and the use of inputs was inadequate technical assistance. Limited access to credit facilities was observed as of the most important challenges to tree planting and the use of inputs. Addressing the various hurdles and challenges and promoting the least motivation factor through proper incentive mechanisms could advance REDD+ since intensification pathways within these systems increase agricultural productivity thereby enabling farmers to stay on the same land. This results in less forest being cleared and allows for the recovery of forests degaraded for the creation of these systems. In closing, we proffer incentive mechansims for promoting intensification pathways within these cocoa agroforestry systems.     

Model misspecification analysis for bond options and Markovian hedging strategies

In this paper, we analyse the model misspecification risk of Markovian hedging strategies for discount bond options. We show how to decompose the Profit and Loss that results from model misspecification, and emphasize the importance of the position’s gamma in order to control it. We further provide mathematical results on the distribution of the forward Profit and Loss function for specific univariate term structure models. Finally, we run numerical simulations for options’ hedging strategies in order to examine the sensitivity of the forward Profit and Loss function with respect to the volatility of the forward rate curve, the frequency of the position rebalancing and the characteristics of the position being hedged.      

Development of academic entrepreneurship in a non-mature context: the role of the university as a hub-organisation

This paper focuses on how the evolving roles of a university and its Technology Transfer Office (TTO) are stimulating academic entrepreneurship in a non-mature entrepreneurial ecosystem. A more mature entrepreneurial ecosystem was built gradually by these actors through their progressive creation of innovation intermediaries and coordination among the local players involved in the creation of start-ups. We analyse how the university became a hub organisation. We use the case of the University of Strasbourg to show that the university contributed to the development of the entrepreneurial ecosystem by acting as a boundary spanner and by building and orchestrating the network of the stakeholders in the local system of innovation. This ‘hub’ university became a leading regional organisation at the political level. The TTO played a central role in supporting academic entrepreneurship at the operational level based on its evolution from a revenue maximising model to a model that takes account of social and economic regional development. The progressive adoption of a more selective model of start-up creation requires good coordination among the local actors. Over time, the TTO’s boundary spanning function increased to encompass the development of operational network building and orchestrating functions.