Adoption of green revolution services and poverty reduction in Ghana

In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) the technological advances of the Green Revolution (GR) have not been very successful. However, the efforts being made to re-introduce the revolution call for more socio-economic research into the adoption and the effects of the new technologies. The paper discusses an investigation on the effects of GR technology adoption on poverty among households in Ghana. Maximum likelihood estimation of a poverty model within the framework of Heckman's two stage method of correcting for sample selection was employed. Technology adoption was found to have positive effects in reducing poverty. Other factors that reduce poverty include education, credit, durable assets, living in the forest belt and in the south of the country. Technology adoption itself was also facilitated by education, credit, non-farm income and household labour supply as well as living in urban centres. Inarguably, technology adoption can be taken seriously by increasing the levels of complementary inputs such as credit, extension services and infrastructure. Above all, the fundamental problems of illiteracy, inequality and lack of effective markets must be addressed through increasing the levels of formal and non-formal education, equitable distribution of the 'national cake' and a more pragmatic management of the ongoing Structural Adjustment Programme.

Segmenting the Italian coffee market: marketing opportunities for economic agents working along the international coffee chain

Globalization, either directly or indirectly (e.g. through structural adjustment reforms), has called for profound changes in the previously existing institutional order. Some changes adversely impacted the production and market environment of many coffee producers in developing countries resulting in more risky and less remunerative coffee transactions. This paper focuses on customization of a tropical commodity, fair-trade coffee, as an approach to mitigating the effects of worsened market conditions for small-scale coffee producers in less developed countries. fair-trade labeling is viewed as a form of “de-commodification” of coffee through product differentiation on ethical grounds. This is significant not only as a solution to the market failure caused by pervasive information asymmetries along the supply chain, but also as a means of revitalizing the agricultural-commodity-based trade of less developed countries (LDCs) that has been languishing under globalization. More specifically, fair-trade is an example of how the same strategy adopted by developed countries’ producers/ processors (i.e. the sequence product differentiation - institutional certification - advertisement) can be used by LDC producers to increase the reputation content of their outputs by transforming them from mere commodities into “decommodified” (i.e. customized and more reputed) goods. The resulting segmentation of the world coffee market makes possible to meet the demand by consumers with preference for this “(ethically) customized” coffee and to transfer a share of the accruing economic rents backward to the Fair-trade coffee producers in LDCs. It should however be stressed that this outcome cannot be taken for granted since investments are needed to promote the required institutional innovations. In Italy FTC is a niche market with very few private brands selling this product. However, an increase of FTC market share could be a big commercial opportunity for farmers in LDCs and other economic agents involved along the international coffee chain. Hence, this research explores consumers’ knowledge of labels promoting quality products, consumption coffee habits, brand loyalty, willingness to pay and market segmentation according to the heterogeneity of preferences for coffee products. The latter was assessed developing a D-efficient design where stimuli refinement was tested during two focus groups.

Migration, unemployment and trade

Migration, Unemployment and Trade focuses on the issues of migration, welfare and unemployment in a trade and development framework. Several chapters of the book analyze the implications of internal labor mobility in a model designed to highlight its implications for regional welfare, urban unemployment, rural-urban dichotomy and structural adjustment. An important innovation in this work is the disaggregation of the economy and the use of separate utility functions to highlight non-homogeneity of preferences. The book also deals with international mobility of factors in different frameworks. In particular it concentrates on the highly emotive issue of legal and illegal migration. Thus this work incorporates interesting and important features of labor economics and factor mobility into trade and distortion theory.

Restructuring educational leadership in changing contexts: a local/global account of restructuring in Australia

The 1990s saw considerable structural reform in school education in many Anglophone nation states, marked by trends towards school-based, site-based, self-managing and self-governing schools. This article illustrates through a case study of educational restructuring in Victoria, Australia, how leadership, as a discursive practice, is redefined in the context of spatial and cultural restructuring. Restructuring produced a spatial redistribution of educational provision and individual opportunities as a result of structural adjustment reforms. These same policy moves towards post-welfarism also produced cultural shifts in attitudes to education with the rise of the new instrumentalism and entrepeneurialism. For school principals at the forefront of self managing schools, this meant shifts in resource distribution through new policy mechanisms of managerial and market accountability, and also new priorities impacting on leadership practices with a move from dialogic to decisional modes of management. The question is how recent policy moves towards learning networks and reinventing systematic support with a focus on locational disadvantage are addressing what were increased educational disparities between schools and students. Does this provide scope for more equity-driven leadership practices?

Healthy markets - healthy people/ : reforming health care in Cambodia

Health care reform has been described as a global epidemic. This thesis deals with nature and experience of health care reform in developing countries. Increasing privatisation, economic transition, and structural adjustment have provided the context for health system changes. Different approaches to reform have been developed by international organisations such as the World Bank, WHO and UNICEF. What has driven national health care reforms? Are such policies really appropriate to developing countries? Has a consensus now emerged in relation to international health policy? Has a new health care ‘model’ appeared? The study of health care reform in Cambodia is a timely opportunity to investigate the implementation of health care reform under extreme conditions. These conditions include a legacy of genocide, long-term conflict, political isolation, and economic transition. This case study uses both qualitative and quantitative methods and multiple sources of data to analyse the reform program. The study reinforces the conclusion that, under conditions of extreme poverty, market based reforms are likely to have limited positive impact. Rather, understanding the cultural conditions that determine demand, delivering health care of a satisfactory quality, providing appropriate incentives for health practitioners, and supporting services with adequate public funding are the prerequisites for improved service delivery and utilisation. Cambodia's strategy of integrated district health service development and universal population coverage may provide an instructive example of reform. Emerging policy issues identified by this case study include the fundamental role of equity in service provision, the influence of the social determinants of health and illness and interest in the appropriate use of evidence in international health policy-making.

The contribution of human capital towards economic growth in China

The major theme is the structural transformational growth of China's economy. Aggregate measures of human capital has had no effect on either provincial output levels or growth rates. When human capital has been disaggregated, vocational education is the only category of human capital which has a positive effect.

Aid, economic reform, and public sector fiscal behaviour in developing countries

This paper looks at interactions between foreign development aid, economic reform, and public sector fiscal behavior. It proposes a model of the public sector fiscal response to aid inflows, which allows for changes in structural relationships due to an exogenously imposed program of economic reform. This model is applied to 1960–99 time series data for the Philippines, which embarked on an IMF- and World Bank-funded structural adjustment program in 1980. Estimates of structural and reduced-form equations paint a dismal picture of the effectiveness of foreign aid to, and the structural adjustment program in, the Philippines so far as fiscal impacts are concerned. Both bilateral and multilateral aid inflows, and the presence of an economic reform program, are associated with decreases in public fixed capital expenditure, decreases in taxation and other recurrent revenue, and decreases in public sector saving. Multilateral aid also appears to be highly fungible.

Barbados: public-private sector partnership

Includes bibliography

Apertura y cambio estructural de la economía brasileña

Incluye Bibliografía

New directions for development banking in the Caribbean: financing to take advantage of unlimited supplies of labour skills and entrepreneurship

Includes bibliography

Growth, distributive justice and social policy

Includes bibliography

Job-seeking strategies in Trinidad and Tobago

Includes bibliography

Trade and investment flows between the Caribbean and the rest of the hemisphere in the context of the FTAA

Includes bibliography

The Netherlands Antilles: trade and integration with CARICOM

Introduction The Netherlands Antilles is an autonomous entity within the Kingdom of the Netherlands and comprises a federation of five Caribbean islands: Bonaire and Curacao (the Leeward islands) which comprise 80 per cent of the population of 211,000 and Saba, St. Eustatius and the southern part of St. Maarten (the Windward islands). Like the other countries in the Kingdom, it enjoys full autonomy in internal matters as, for example, education, public health, justice and customs. It has a per capita income of about US$ 12,000. The Leeward Islands and the Windward Islands account for about 75 per cent (Curacao (70 per cent) and Bonaire (5 per cent)) and 25 percent respectively of the economy of the Netherlands Antilles. The Netherlands Antilles has its own currency, the Netherlands guilder, which is pegged to the United States dollar at a fixed rate since 1971. The economy has some unique features that stem from its close relations with the Netherlands, its undiversified nature and heavy dependence on tourism, offshore finance, oil refining and shipping, the high share of trade (exports of goods and services of about 75 per cent of GDP), its geographical characteristics, its common border with the French Republic on St. Maarten, its duty-free access for imports from Aruba, its de facto free trade zone (FTZ), partial dollarization, especially for the Windward Islands, and its highly regulated labor market (1). Adverse economic shocks in the last two decades affected particularly the offshore financial sector and the oil refinery and, to a lesser extent, tourism. The repeal of withholding taxes in the United States in the 1980s indirectly caused the collapse of a number of highly profitable offshore financial activities in Curacao, leading to significant drops in government revenue and contributions to foreign exchange earnings. The withdrawal of Shell from Curacao in 1986 and the (temporary) closure of the oil refinery which had been a mainstay of the Curacao economy for almost three quarters of a century was the second major shock. It was subsequently leased to the Venezuelan State Company, Petroleos de Venezuela Sociedad Anonima (PDVSA), which resumed operations and preserved employment. In the 1990s, the Windward Islands were bit by several devastating hurricanes, which destroyed much of the economic infrastructure on the islands, including about half of the number of available hotel rooms in St Maarten. Further negative shocks were related to the discontinuation of certain trade privileges on European markets for Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs), the withdrawal by the Netherlands of certain tax privileges for Dutch pensioners residing in the Netherlands Antilles and disruptions in the availability of Solidarity Fund resources for the smaller islands. National income has been on the decline since 1997. GDP declined by about 6 per cent between 1997 and 1999. Underlying fiscal imbalances and structural weaknesses have also impacted negatively on the economy. In recent years, with recession high unemployment and migration have been experienced (2). The Netherlands Antilles has been able to survive thanks to additional aid from the Netherlands, large-scale spontaneous emigration (mostly to the Netherlands), some drop in international reserves, an increase in domestic debt and arrears and reduced outlays for the maintenance of public assets. From 1986 onwards, successive efforts at restoring macroeconomic balance, particularly with regard to public finance, were made, but were unsuccessful. Adjustment was also attempted in 1996 and 1997, but failed to meet the desired targets. In 1999, the government launched a new National Recovery Plan" (NRP). The NRP contains important medium-term structural adjustment measures aimed at restoring macroeconomic balance and conditions for revitalizing the economy. The NRP subsequently served as an important input into a comprehensive adjustment plan drawn up with the assistance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and reflected in the government's Memorandum of Economic Policies dated 15 September 2000. Beyond restoring macroeconomic balance and reforming the economic incentive framework, the government aims at establishing a Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF) for the formulation and implementation of a sustainable long-term growth strategy. It is against the above background that this study is undertaken. Its main objective is to assess the integration options facing the Netherlands Antilles (3) vis-a-vis the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). A secondary objective is to examine the above taking into account, inter alia, the level of trade between the Netherlands Antilles and CARICOM, the barriers to trade between the two groups of countries and the requirements for increasing trade between the two groups of countries. The Consultant was given an initial Draft Terms of Reference (Annex 1) with the intention of modifying it in the course of the interviews with all the stakeholders. The main idea that emerged from these interviews was a concern with some possible form of association with CARICOM. The Consultant was asked to exam the costs and benefits of various forms of association and to recommend an option. This adjustment of the Terms of Reference (TOR) was substantial and involved the Consultant having to do some interviews and collect documentation in CARICOM. The study essentially revolves around the search for a road map for the Netherlands Antilles. It is tackled in the first instance by describing the existing system of trade of the Netherlands Antilles with a view to determining the import and export structures and the specific nature and extent of trade in goods and services between the Netherlands Antilles and CARICOM. 1 Netherlands Antilles: Elements of a Strategy for Economic Recovery and Sustainable Growth. Interim Report of the World Bank Mission, 5-20 December 2000. 2 IMF, IMF Country Report No. 01/73 Kingdom of the Netherlands-Netherlands Antilles-Recent Development, Selected Issues and Statistical Appendix. May 2001 3 The Netherlands Antilles is a country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It contains five islands. Curacao and Bonaire (Leewards) and St Eustatius, Saba and St Maarten (The Windwards)"

Políticas macroeconómicas, distribución y pobreza en el Ecuador

Incluye Bibliografía