Fresh News; The Farmers' Market Newsletter, Summer 2006

Newsletter produced by Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship

Fresh News; The Farmers' Market Newsletter, Fall 2004

Newsletter produced by Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship

Fresh News; The Farmers' Market Newsletter, Fall 2005

Newsletter produced by Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship

Fresh News; The Farmers' Market Newsletter, Summer 2005

Newsletter produced by Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship

Fresh News; The Farmers' Market Newsletter, Spring 2005

Newsletter produced by Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship

Fresh News; The Farmers' Market Newsletter, Winter 2006

Newsletter produced by Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship

Fresh News; The Farmers' Market Newsletter, Spring 2006

Newsletter produced by Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship

STRATEGIES TO SURPASS THE VULNERABILITY OF THE SMALL ISLAND STATES WITH FEW RESOURCES: THE CASE OF CAPE VERDE

The problem of small Island Developing States (SIDS) is quite recent, end of the 80s and 90s, still looking for a theoretical consolidation. SIDS, as small states in development, formed by one or several islands geographically dispersed, present reduced population, market, territory, natural resources, including drinkable water, and, in great number of the cases, low level of economic activity, factors that together, hinder the gathering of scale economies. To these diseconomies they come to join the more elevated costs in transports and communications which, allies to lower productivities, to a smaller quality and diversification of its productions, which difficult its integration in the world economy. In some SIDS these factors are not dissociating of the few investments in infrastructures, in the formation of human resources and in productive investments, just as it happens in most of the developing countries. In ecological terms, many of them with shortage of natural resources, but integrating important ecosystems in national and world terms, but with great fragility relatively to the pollution action, of excessive fishing, of uncontrolled development of tourism, factors that, conjugated and associated to the stove effect, condition the climate and the slope of the medium level of the sea water and therefore could put in cause the own survival of some of them. The drive to the awareness of the international community towards its problems summed up with the accomplishment by the United Nations in the Barbados’s Conference, 1994 where the right to the development was emphasized, through the going up the appropriate strategies and the Programme of Action for the Sustainable Development of the SIDS. The orientation of the regional and international cooperation in that sense, sharing technology (namely clean technology and control and administration environmental technology), information and creation of capacity-building, supplying means, including financial resources, creating non discriminatory and just trade rules, it would drive to the establishment of a world system economically more equal, in which the production, the consumption, the pollution levels, the demographic politics were guided towards the sustainability. It constituted an important step for the recognition for the international community on the specificities of those states and it allowed the definition of a group of norms and politics to implement at the national, regional and international level and it was important that they continued in the sense of the sustainable development. But this Conference had in its origin previous summits: the Summit of Rio de Janeiro about Environment and Development, accomplished in 1992, which left an important document - the Agenda 21, in the Conference of Stockholm at 1972 and even in the Conference of Ramsar, 1971 about “Wetlands.” CENTRO DE ESTUDOS AFRICANOS Occasional Papers © CEA - Centro de Estudos Africanos 4 Later, the Valletta Declaration, Malta, 1998, the Forum of Small States, 2002, get the international community's attention for the problems of SIDS again, in the sense that they act to increase its resilience. If the definition of “vulnerability” was the inability of the countries to resist economical, ecological and socially to the external shocks and “resilience” as the potential for them to absorb and minimize the impact of those shocks, presenting a structure that allows them to be little affected by them, a part of the available studies, dated of the 90s, indicate that the SIDS are more vulnerable than the other developing countries. The vulnerability of SIDS results from the fact the they present an assemblage of characteristics that turns them less capable of resisting or they advance strategies that allow a larger resilience to the external shocks, either anthropogenic (economical, financial, environmental) or even natural, connected with the vicissitudes of the nature. If these vulnerability factors were grouped with the expansion of the economic capitalist system at world level, the economic and financial globalisation, the incessant search of growing profits on the part of the multinational enterprises, the technological accelerated evolution drives to a situation of disfavour of the more poor. The creation of the resilience to the external shocks, to the process of globalisation, demands from SIDS and of many other developing countries the endogen definition of strategies and solid but flexible programs of integrated development. These must be assumed by the instituted power, but also by the other stakeholders, including companies and organizations of the civil society and for the population in general. But that demands strong investment in the formation of human resources, in infrastructures, in investigation centres; it demands the creation capacity not only to produce, but also to produce differently and do international marketing. It demands institutional capacity. Cape Verde is on its way to this stage.

After the Ban: The Japanese Market for U.S. Beef, April 2007

In the months following the reopening of the Japanese market to imports of U.S. beef on July 26, 2006, Japanese importers were unable to procure adequate supplies. This paper discusses reasons for early supply shortages and some of the policy and trade issues that will affect demand for U.S. beef in the short to medium term. The paper also discusses current marketing efforts for domestic and imported beef, new marketing technologies, and general consumer trends. The information presented in this paper includes on-site observations and data from meetings with Japanese importers and retailers and industry experts during market research in Tokyo and Osaka in November 2006.

Attribution and reciprocity in a simulated labor market: An experimental investigation

While papers such as Akerlof and Yellen (1990) and Rabin (1993) argue that psychological considerations such as fairness and reciprocity are important in individual decision-making, there is little explicit empirical evidence of reciprocal altruism in economic environments. This paper tests whether attribution of volition in choosing a wage has a significant effect on subsequent costly effort provision. An experiment was conducted in which subjects are first randomly divided into groups of employers and employees. Wages were selected and employees asked to choose an effort level, where increased effort is costly to the employee, but highly beneficial to the employer. The wage-determination process was common knowledge and wages were chosen either by the employer or by an external process. There is evidence for both distributional concerns and reciprocal altruism. The slope of the effort/wage profile is clearly positive in all cases, but is significantly higher when wages are chosen by the employer, offering support for the hypothesis of reciprocity. There are implications for models of utility and a critique of some current models is presented.

Common law and civil law as pro-market adaptations

We argue that in the development of the Western legal system, cognitive departures are themain determinant of the optimal degree of judicial rule-making. Judicial discretion, seen here as the main distinguishing feature between both legal systems, is introduced in civil law jurisdictions to protect, rather than to limit, freedom of contract against potential judicial backlash. Such protection was unnecessary in common law countries, where free-market relations enjoyed safer judicial ground mainly due to their relatively gradual evolution, their reliance on practitioners as judges, and the earlier development of institutional checks and balances that supported private property rights. In our framework, differences in costs and benefits associated with self-interest and lack of information require a cognitive failure to be active.

Interbank market integration under asymmetric information

We argue that the main barrier to an integrated international interbankmarket is the existence of asymmetric information between differentcountries, which may prevail in spite of monetary integration or successfulcurrency pegging. In order to address this issue, we study the scope forinternational interbank market integration with unsecured lending whencross-country information is noisy. We find not only that an equilibriumwith integrated markets need not always exist, but also that when it does,the integrated equilibrium may coexist with one of interbank marketsegmentation. Therefore, market deregulation, per se, does not guaranteethe emergence of an integrated interbank market. The effect of a repo marketwhich, a priori, was supposed to improve efficiency happens to be morecomplex: it reduces interest rate spreads and improves upon the segmentationequilibrium, but\ it may destroy the unsecured integrated equilibrium, sincethe repo market will attract the best borrowers. The introduction of othertransnational institutional arrangements, such as multinational banking,correspondent banking and the existence of "too-big-to-fail" banks mayreduce cross country interest spreads and provide more insurance againstcountry wide liquidity shocks. Still, multinational banking, as theintroduction of repos, may threaten the integrated interbank marketequilibrium.

Market and institutional determinants in the regulation of conveyancers

Demand for law professionals in the conveyancing of property is decreasing because of market and institutional changes. On the market side, many transactions feature large, well-known parties and standardized transactions, which make professionals less effective or necessary for protecting the parties to private contracts. On the institutional side, public titling makes it possible to dispense with a broadening set of their former functions. Recording of deeds made professionals redundant as depositories of deeds and reduced demand for them to design title guarantees. Effective registration of rights increasingly substitutes professionals for detecting title conflicts with third parties and gathering their consent. Market changes undermine the information asymmetry rationale for regulating conveyancing, while institutional changes facilitate liberalizing not only conduct but also license regulations. These arguments are supported here by disentangling the logic of titling systems and presenting empirical evidence from the European and USA markets.

A subsampling approach to estimating the distribution of diversing statistics with application to assessing financial market risks

In this paper we propose a subsampling estimator for the distribution ofstatistics diverging at either known rates when the underlying timeseries in strictly stationary abd strong mixing. Based on our results weprovide a detailed discussion how to estimate extreme order statisticswith dependent data and present two applications to assessing financialmarket risk. Our method performs well in estimating Value at Risk andprovides a superior alternative to Hill's estimator in operationalizingSafety First portofolio selection.

Toward a theory of labor market institutions

Standard economic analysis holds that labor market rigidities are harmfulfor job creation and typically increase unemployment. But many orthodoxreforms of the labor market have proved difficult to implement because ofpolitical opposition. For these reasons it is important to explain why weobserve such regulations. In this paper I outline a theory of how they may arise and why they fit together. This theory is fully developed in aforthcoming book (Saint-Paul (2000)), to which the reader is referred forfurther details.