Farming systems and Conservation Agriculture: Technology,structures and agency in Malawi

Conservation Agriculture (CA) is advocated as an agricultural innovation that will improve smallholder famer resilience to future climate change. Under the conditions presented by the El Niño event of 2015/16, the implementation of CA was examined in southern Malawi at household, district and national institutional levels. Agricultural system constraints experienced by farming households are identified, and in response the technologies, structures and agency associated with CA are evaluated. The most significant constraints were linked to household health, with associated labour and monetary impacts, in addition to the availability of external inputs of fertiliser and improved seed varieties. Our findings show that such constraints are not adequately addressed through current agricultural system support structures, with the institutions surrounding CA (in both Government extension services and NGO agricultural projects) focusing attention predominantly at field level practice, rather than on broader system constraints such as education and health support systems. Limited capacity within local institutions undermines long term efforts to implement new technologies such as CA. It is vitally important that the flexibility of farmers to adapt new technologies in a locally-appropriate manner is not closed down through national and institutional aims to build consensus around narrow technical definitions of a climate-smart technology such as CA. To enable farmers to fully utilise CA programmes, interventions must take a more holistic, cross-sectoral approach, understanding and adapting to address locally experienced constraints. Building capacity within households to adopt new agricultural practices is critical, and integrating healthcare support into agricultural policy is a vital step towards increasing smallholder resilience to future climate change.     

El Niño,La Niña,and world coffee price dynamics

Coffee is produced in equatorial and subequatorial regions of the world, which are also most affected by El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). ENSO events have a tendency to amplify weather conditions such as droughts or excess precipitation in the affected regions, resulting in production shortage or excess supply, subsequently impacting agricultural commodity prices. In this research we assess effects of ENSO events on world coffee price dynamics using the monthly data between March 1989 and December 2010. We employ smooth transition autoregression framework to examine nonlinear dynamics of ENSO and coffee prices, and illustrate the results of this research using generalized impulse‐response functions. We find that ENSO events indeed have short‐term impacts on coffee prices. The research findings are of interest to coffee producers and intermediaries in the coffee markets as well as researchers in the fields of environmental and development economics.     

Post-Conflict Reconstruction and the Challenge to International Organizations: The Case of El Salvador

Countries in post-conflict transitions have to reconcile the development challenge with the additional burden of reconstruction and national reconciliation. This paper first describes the peculiarities of these countries which make them clearly different from those pursuing normal development. Second is a discussion of the challenges that these transitions pose on the countries involved and on the international organizations that support them. Third, the paper illustrates through a discussion of El Salvador—by all standards a success story—how the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations had to adapt to meet the challenges of post-conflict reconstruction. The paper concludes with some policy recommendations.     

Are there ENSO signals in the macroeconomy?

Whether ENSO has affected U.S. macroeconomic performance has been a matter of dispute. To address the issue we explore whether there has been any co-cyclicality of ENSO fluctuations and the rates of inflation and economic growth over the 1894-1999 timespan and, failing this, whether aperiodic ENSO shocks have had any impact on these variables. Neither co-cyclicality nor aperiodic shocks are discernible. While ENSO may briefly influence the performance of particular sectors of the economy in particular regions, as documented by the previous literature, such locally-important effects vanish into the noise surrounding macroeconomic trends in an economy as large and complex as that of the U.S.     

Is there adaptation to predictable climate change along the temperature-conflict nexus? Evidence from the El Niño Southern Oscillation

A growing body of research connects short-run deviations in weather with violence. Less well understood is the scope for agents to adapt to medium and longer-run climate fluctuations. We follow existing research and use the existing climactic forces of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) to analyse climate change – exploiting the fact that in 1989 published forecasts of these fluctuations became available. In a generalized differences framework, we contrast the impact of ENSO in affected areas of the globe relative to unaffected areas before and after 1989, finding no robust evidence that adaptation efforts are successfully mitigating conflict or civil unrest occurring as a result of these fluctuations.     

Climate change implications for the catastrophe bonds market: An empirical analysis

Since their introduction in the mid-1990s, the return per unit of risk or multiple on catastrophe (cat) bonds has steadily declined. This paper investigates whether this pattern is consistent with the historical evolution of natural disaster risk, using average multiple figures over the period 1997–2017. Assessing the accuracy of cat bond pricing is important, since about 50% of outstanding risk capital in the cat bonds market is currently exposed to Atlantic hurricanes -a risk that global warming, among other disruptions, is found to enhance- and pension and mutual funds in European and other OECD countries currently own about 30% of the market. In this respect, while our findings suggest that falling multiples are primarily related to the Fed's expansionary monetary stance and to portfolio shift effects, we do also find evidence of significant undervaluation of global warming risk in the cat bonds market. This finding, also in light of the unfailing appetite of institutional investors for such securities, casts doubts over the sanity of the market and over cat bonds as suitable investment products for risk averse investors. Sounder investment opportunities might be found in the green bonds market, which allows for the funding of immediate investment in climate change mitigation too.     

Urban heritage,gentrification, and tourism in Riverwest and El Abasto

Heritage has played a pivotal role in configuring the sustainable economies of many communities. However, if the process is not duly planned, serious problems may surface. Although the adoption of a new heritage and heritage tourism has been broadly examined by tourism-related scholars, less attention has been given to the notion of gentrification as formulated in social geography. What would be interesting to debate here, beyond the Marxist logic, is to what extent heritage is not only an invented construction, but also how it regulates conflicts or subordinates other more reactionary social movements as art. Comparing two neighbourhoods, Riverwest and Abasto, shows two alternative effects of heritage construction. One refers to the fact that art does not always preserve the structure of economic forces; the other conceptualizes patrimony and heritage as justifying material asymmetries.     

Climate Variability in the Origin Countries as a “Push” Factor on Tourist Arrivals in the Philippines

The objective of this paper is to test the impact of climate variability in origin countries as a “push factor” on tourist arrivals, specifically in the Philippines, and to select a suitable proxy to measure climate variability. This paper uses the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) constructed by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Climate variability is strongly linked to the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and this link is used by meteorologists to forecast changes in weather globally. SOI is a widely used indicator of the ENSO and its best known extremes are the El Niño (warm phase) and La Niña (cold phase) effects. The study proves to some extent that there is a significant increase in US tourist arrivals in the Philippines when La Niña-like weather conditions prevail in the USA. More importantly, the SOI proved to be a good measure of climate variability.     

Government Performance and Chief Executives’ Intangible Assets: Motives,Networking, and/or Capacity?

This study explores the impact of chief executives’ intangible assets – motives, capacity and networks – on government performance. Three main hypotheses suggesting a direct relationship between these assets and performance are tested using data from municipalities in El Salvador, where the chief executive is the elected mayor. The research involved an in-field survey of 135 Salvadorian mayors (out of 262) and data collected from national agencies, focusing on two dimensions of municipal performance: service delivery (electricity and running water) and expansion of revenue (with national grants). After controlling for municipal and constituent-level factors, findings indicate that the chief executive’s capacity (specifically mayoral expertise) is positively correlated to municipal delivery of electricity and running water; intrinsic motivation is linked to expansion of water services; and municipalities whose chief executives are nationally networked tend to receive more grant monies. This study contributes to the literature on government performance by assessing the role of chief executives’ intangible assets in the developing context of a relatively newly established democracy in Latin America.