Gender inequalities in ownership and control of land in Africa: myth and reality

Lack of clarity behind measurement and interpretation of statistics on gender and land leads to an inability to clearly articulate a policy response to the potential inequalities faced by women and men. This article sets out to explore, conceptually and empirically, the levels and relative inequalities in land rights between women and men in African countries. The first section of the article engages in a conceptual discussion of how to measure gendered‐land outcomes, what ownership and control mean in different contexts, and why attention to these factors is important for the development of gender and land statistics. The second section of the article systematically reviews existing evidence from microlevel large sample studies to summarize recent trends in land access, ownership, and control by sex. The third section presents new statistics from a variety of nationally representative and large‐scale unpublished data on gender and land in Africa. Results provide not only a nuanced understanding of the importance of measuring land indicators for gendered development in Africa and globally but also new statistics on a variety of land outcomes to aid stakeholders in the discussion of gender‐land inequalities.     

Marketing and business intelligence with help of ant colony algorithm

Recently, there is increasing need of banks for targeting and acquiring new customers, for fraud detection in real time and for segmentation products through analysis of the customers. Doing it, they can serve their customers better, and can increase the effectiveness of the company. For this purpose, various data mining methods are used which enable extraction of interesting, nontrivial, implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful patterns or knowledge from huge amounts of data. Traditional data mining methods include classification rule tasks, for their solution there are a number of methods. Among them can be mentioned, for example, Random forest algorithm or C4.5 algorithm. However, accuracy of these methods significantly reduces in the event that some data in databases is missing. These methods are always not optimal for very large databases. The aim of our work is to verify a possible solution of these problems by using the algorithm based on artificial ant colonies. This algorithm was successful in other areas. Therefore, we tested its applicability and accuracy in marketing and business intelligence and compared it with so far used methods. The experimental results showed that the presented algorithm is very effective, robust, and suitable for processing of very large files. It was also found that this algorithm overcomes the previously used algorithms in accuracy. Algorithm is easily implementable on different platforms and can be recommended for using in banking and business intelligence.     

Monetary Policy in Low Income Countries in the Face of The Global Crisis: A Structural Analysis

We develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with a banking sector to analyse the impact of the financial crisis in developing countries and the role of the monetary policy response, with an application to Zambia. We view the crisis as a combination of three related shocks: a worsening in the terms of the trade, an increase in the country's risk premium and a decrease in the risk appetite of local banks. Model simulations broadly match the path of the economy during this period. We derive policy implications for central banks, and for dynamic stochastic general equilibrium modelling of monetary policy, in low‐income countries.     

Fixed price plus rationing: an experiment

This paper theoretically and experimentally explores a fixed price mechanism in which, if aggregate demand exceeds supply, bidders are proportionally rationed. If demand is uncertain, in equilibrium bidders overstate their true demand in order to alleviate the effects of being rationed. This effect is the more intense the lower the price, and bids reach their upper limit for sufficiently low prices. In the experiment we observe a significant proportion of equilibrium play. However, subjects tend to overbid the equilibrium strategy when prices are high and underbid when prices are low. We explain the experimental evidence by a simple model in which the probability of a deviation is decreasing in the expected loss associated with it.

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