Household Surveys,Consumption, and the Measurement of Poverty

Household surveys are playing an increasingly important role in the measurement of poverty and well-being around the world. The Living Standards Measurement Study, which was begun in the World Bank under the guidance of Graham Pyatt in 1979, has played an important role in this movement. Its surveys are widely used within the Bank to measure consumption-based poverty, and survey data are now the exclusive basis for the global poverty counts. This paper discusses a number of unresolved issues in using consumption-based surveys for measuring well-being, including the choice of a money-metric versus welfare-ratio approach, the collection of suitable price information, the effects of measurement error on estimation, and methods for correcting per capita consumption for the demographic structure of the household.     

Food Aid Disincentives: the Tunisian Experience

An econometric model is used to assess the short‐term (impact), interim, and cumulative effects of food aid on the economy of Tunisia for the period 1960–92. Food aid displaced neither domestic production nor commercial imports of food grains. Rather, food aid provided incentives to promote growth through its income and policy effects. Food aid provided increased public revenue that enabled the government to take an active role in domestic pricing, preventing disincentive prices and promoting domestic production. The results indicate a positive role for food aid when disincentive effects are managed through public policies.     

Accounting for Spatial Effects in Economic Models of Land Use: Recent Developments and Challenges Ahead

The marked increase in the availability of spatial data has forced researchers engaged in land use modeling to directly confront the question of space and the theoretical and methodological challenges involved in developing spatial models. Advances have come from multiple disciplines, most notably through the development and application of spatial theory and methods from regional science, geography, urban economics and more recently, theoretical and applied econometrics. The main goal of this paper is to summarize the econometric challenges of spatial data and to highlight spatial models and methods with a particular focus on models of land markets and land use change. We also discuss the data and modeling challenges associated with modeling the underlying spatial economic mechanisms that give rise to land use patterns and the complexities involved in modeling land use as a coupled economic-ecological system.     

Evaluating Consumer Preferences for Organic Food Production Standards

In 21st century agriculture, standards are increasingly used to define new food products, such as organic food and fair trade. In some cases these standards are privately determined but in other cases they have been established by governments. Indeed, the Government of Canada recently announced its organic food regulations. A key dimension of the policy process involves choosing which standards are to be used to govern the production of organic food. Unfortunately, decision makers faced with these choices know very little about how the public values the various standards that could be used to define organic. This study evaluates Canadian consumers' preferences for different organic standards. Standards pertaining to pesticide‐residue testing, product origin specifications, the standard setting agency, and standard monitoring agency are evaluated using a conjoint method. Key results suggest that consumers place a high value on a pesticide standard that involves regular testing of the end product and that they prefer an organic food standard to include a rule that limits where the good is produced. En agriculture en ce 21^e siècle, des normes sont de plus en plus utilisées pour définir de nouveaux produits alimentaires tels que les aliments biologiques et les aliments issus du commerce équitable. Dans certains cas, ces normes sont établies par des organismes privés, et dans d'autres cas, elles sont établies par les gouvernements. Dernièrement, le gouvernement du Canada a annoncé son Règlement sur les produits biologiques. Un élément clé du processus d'élaboration des politiques consiste à choisir les normes qui s'appliqueront à la production d'aliments biologiques. Malheureusement, les décideurs à qui reviennent ces choix en savent très peu sur les valeurs que le public accorde aux diverses normes qui pourraient être utilisées pour définir le terme «biologique». La présente étude évalue les préférences des consommateurs canadiens concernant les diverses normes sur les produits biologiques. Les normes sur l'analyse des résidus de pesticides, les spécifications sur l'origine du produit, les organismes de normalisation et les organismes de surveillance sont évaluées à l'aide d'une méthode conjointe. Les résultats fondamentaux montrent que les consommateurs accordent une grande importance à une norme sur les pesticides qui exige des analyses régulières du produit final et qu'ils préfèrent une norme sur les aliments biologiques qui inclut un règlement sur l'origine du produit.     

Renters,landlords, and farmland stewardship

Are farmers better stewards of the land they own than the land they rent from others? We answer this question using a data set that identifies Ontario farmers’ conservation practices on their own land as well as the land they rent. Using a fixed‐effects regression approach, we find that the role of tenure varies for different types of conservation practices. Farmers were found to be just as likely to adopt a machinery‐related practice such as conservation tillage on their rented land as that land which they own. On the other hand, farmers were found to be less likely to adopt site‐specific conservation practices such as planting cover crops on rented land. However, this effect diminishes as the expected length of the rental relationship increases when the landlord has a farming background.     

The financial crisis and the well-being of Americans

The Great Recession was associated with large changes in income, wealth, and unemployment, changes that affected many lives. Since January 2008, the Gallup Organization has been collecting daily data on 1,000 Americans each day, with a range of self-reported well-being (SWB) questions. I use these data to examine how the recession affected the emotional and evaluative lives of the population, as well as of subgroups within it. In the fall of 2008, around the time of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and lasting into the spring of 2009, at the bottom of the stock market, Americans reported sharp declines in their life evaluation, sharp increases in worry and stress, and declines in positive affect. By the end of 2010, in spite of continuing high unemployment, these measures had largely recovered, though worry remained higher and life evaluation lower than in January 2008. The SWB measures do a much better job of monitoring short-run levels of anxiety as the crisis unfolded than they do of reflecting the evolution of the economy over a year or two. Even large macroeconomic shocks to income and unemployment can be expected to produce only small and hard to detect effects on SWB measures. SWB, particularly evaluation of life as a whole, is sensitive to question order effects. Asking political questions before the life evaluation question reduces reported life evaluation by an amount that dwarfs the effects of even the worst of the crisis; these order effects persist deep into the interview, and condition the reporting of hedonic experience and of satisfaction with standard of living. Methods for controlling these effects need to be developed and tested if national measures are to be comparable over space and time.     

Household Welfare and the Pricing of Cocoa and Coffee in Cote d'Ivoire: Lessons from the Living Standards Surveys

Cocoa and coffee are the most important crops in Côted'Ivoire. Until recently, the difference between world and administeredproducer prices provided an important source of government revenue.As a result of a continued decline of world prices of both crops,however, the Ivoirien government was forced to cut producerprices in half. Because 40 percent of Ivoirien households groweither cocoa or coffee, this cut can be expected to have a considerableimpact on the welfare level of these households. We use the1985 Living Standards Measurement Survey to estimate the welfareeffects of producer price changes for Ivoirien households, permittingan evaluation of the probable consequences of the recent pricecut. Using nonparametric econometric techniques, we find that,although many households will suffer losses of income, the cutswill not have adverse distributional effects: cocoa and coffeefarmers are scattered throughout the income distribution, butmost are concentrated in the middle.     

Lining Up for Star-Wars Tickets: Some Ruminations On Ethics and Economics Based on An Internet Study of Behavior in Queues

Queues may represent business ethics in microcosm: they provide an opportunity to study in a smaller package the fundamental ethical tension in economic activity between self-interest and civility in the context of uncertainty and stress. In May 1999 people began forming lines to purchase tickets to the new Star Wars movie "The Phantom Menace." This paper reviews responses to a questionnaire on the internet regarding experiences in those lines. It focuses on two behaviors threatening queue discipline – the formation of cooperative groups and "pre-scalping." It concludes that although queues are complex phenomena, exhibiting important ethical, economic, social, and psychological elements, the general organizing principle of "first-come-first-served" still provides the foundation for queues while at the same time making room for a variety of legitimate modifications. Second, this paper concludes that, as with queues, the thought that self-interest is the exclusive guiding principle for business behavior is likewise too narrow, inducing participants to neglect opportunities for personal enrichment and satisfaction.