Development and the Upland Resource Base: Economic and Policy Context, and Lessons from a Philippine Watershed

Economic growth and environmental damage are associated, but the relationship is neither linear nor even monotonic. The nature of the growth-environment link depends on the changing composition of production and consumption and on growth-related changes in techniques and environmental policies. The definition and enforcement of property rights over natural resources and environmental quality is another important element. Moreover, environmental and economic policies interact: in effect, every economic policy that affects resource allocation is a de facto environmental measure. In increasingly commercialized and decentralized economies, the responsibility for environmental management and the design and implementation of environmental policy are shifting from central government to communities and local administrations. This is especially true of Asia's uplands, where market-driven pressures for agricultural expansion and intensification collide with an increasingly urgent need to manage the natural resource base and minimize local and external environmental damages associated with growth. This paper provides a brief survey of these issues as a way of introducing the papers in this special issue of the Philippine Journal of Development on the local management of agricultural and natural resources and the environment. It concludes with some remarks on the experience of the SANREM-CRSP/Southeat Asia, a research and outreach project aimed at enabling better resource and environmental management decisions by upland communities in the Philippines, and the sponsor of these papers.natural resources and environment, environmental management, uplands, economy-environment linkage

An Incentive-Compatible Smart Contract for Decentralized Commerce

We propose a smart contract that allows two mutually distrusting parties to transact any non-digital good or service by deploying a smart contract on a blockchain to act as escrow. The contract settles disputes by letting parties wager that they can convince an arbiter that they were the honest party. We analyse the contract as an extensive-form game and prove that the honest strategy is secure in a strong game-theoretic sense if and only if the arbiter is biased in favor of honest parties. By relaxing the security notion, we can replace the arbiter by a random coin toss. Finally, we show how to generalize the contract to multiparty transactions in a way that amortizes the transaction fees.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

Contracts Ex Machina

Smart contracts are self-executing digital transactions using decentralized cryptographic mechanisms for enforcement. They were theorized more than twenty years ago, but the recent development of Bitcoin and blockchain technologies has rekindled excitement about their potential among technologists and industry. Startup companies and major enterprises alike are now developing smart contract solutions for an array of markets, purporting to offer a digital bypass around traditional contract law. For legal scholars, smart contracts pose a significant question: Do smart contracts offer a superior solution to the problems that contract law addresses? In this article, we aim to understand both the potential and the limitations of smart contracts. We conclude that smart contracts offer novel possibilities, may significantly alter the commercial world, and will demand new legal responses. But smart contracts will not displace contract law. Understanding why not brings into focus the essential role of contract law as a remedial institution. In this way, smart contracts actually illuminate the role of contract law more than they obviate it

The Case against Tax Subsidies in Innovation Policy

Until recently, intellectual property (IP) scholars agreed that patents were the prime innovation tool to aggregate decentralized information. This case for the property approach, which argues patents are appropriate when information about possible inventions and the social value of inventions are hidden, is now also under pressure in the literature. IP scholars argue that tax subsidies for firms that invest in research and development (R&D) replicate many of the merits of the patent system under conditions of asymmetric information. Based on developments in institutional economics, this Article shows that tax subsidies are not market-set incentives and are not optimal tools for aggregating decentralized information. Tax subsidies target specific investments ex ante in relation to the market process when there is little information on the costs of specific projects or their social value. Governments lack the knowledge required to decide which projects to support and to calibrate the subsidies according to their social value. Comparatively, a patent system is better equipped for the decentralized nature of information. Moreover, it relies on entrepreneurs and inventors to decide which new projects to pursue and on consumers within the marketplace to evaluate the value of these innovations. Based on public choice theory, the Article also argues tax subsidies for innovation are particularly vulnerable to rent-seeking, leading tax dollars to be captured by the politically powerful-not by disruptive newcomers. From an institutional perspective, a more sensible innovation policy lies in simplifying, stabilizing, and generalizing the rules of property and contract that set the market process in motion

Dimpled-Hanging-Pregnant-Chad.com: the impact of Internet technology on democratic legitimacy

Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht den Einfluss der Internet-Technologie auf die demokratische Legitimität. Die Autorin stellt zwei Positionen gegenüber - eine geht davon aus, dass das Internet eine Wohltat für die Demokratie ist, die andere, dass es die Demokratie zerstört - und zeigt, dass keine der beiden Positionen ganz richtig ist, da es sich bei der aktuellen Entwicklung nämlich um einen Prozess der politischen Illegitimität handelt, der über das Internet verbreitet wird. Da die Technologie bestimmend dafür ist, wie Regierungen mit Bürgern und diese miteinander kommunizieren, ändert sich zwangsläufig die demokratische Qualität der staatlichen Institutionen, wenn sich die Technologie verändert. Aus drei Gründen wird diese neue Technologie als Bedrohung für die Demokratie und die Legitimität angesehen: (1) Die globale Netzwerktechnologie respektiert keine staatlichen Grenzen und unterminiert deshalb die Legitimität und Durchsetzung nationaler Gesetze. (2) Da das Internet durch englischsprachige Webseiten aus den USA dominiert wird, werden dadurch kulturelle und lokale Unterschiede verwischt und es entsteht ein neues globales kommerzielles und konsumbezogenes Wertesystem. (3) Das private Umfeld des Internet trägt dazu bei, öffentliche Demokratie und öffentliche Räume zu zerstören. Die Autorin definiert zunächst den Begriff 'Legitimität' und charakterisiert die speziellen Wesenszüge der neuen Technologie. Danach beleuchtet sie den Zusammenhang zwischen Internet und politischem Wandel unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der oben erwähnten Punkte. Abschließend werden Möglichkeiten diskutiert, die demokratische Qualität des Internets zu verbessern und die Technologie zu nutzen, um die politische Kultur zu erhalten. (ICD

Theoretical Analysis and Evaluation of NoCs with Weighted Round-Robin Arbitration

Fast and accurate performance analysis techniques are essential in early design space exploration and pre-silicon evaluations, including software eco-system development. In particular, on-chip communication continues to play an increasingly important role as the many-core processors scale up. This paper presents the first performance analysis technique that targets networks-on-chip (NoCs) that employ weighted round-robin (WRR) arbitration. Besides fairness, WRR arbitration provides flexibility in allocating bandwidth proportionally to the importance of the traffic classes, unlike basic round-robin and priority-based arbitration. The proposed approach first estimates the effective service time of the packets in the queue due to WRR arbitration. Then, it uses the effective service time to compute the average waiting time of the packets. Next, we incorporate a decomposition technique to extend the analytical model to handle NoC of any size. The proposed approach achieves less than 5% error while executing real applications and 10% error under challenging synthetic traffic with different burstiness levels.Comment: This paper is accepted in International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD), 202

The Political Economy of International Sales Law

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, or CISG, has been adopted by more than 60 countries in an effort to harmonize the law that applies to international sales contracts. In this paper, we argue that the effort to create uniform international sales law (ISL) fails to supply contracting parties with the default terms they prefer, thus violating the normative criterion that justifies the law-making process for commercial actors in the first instance. Our argument rests on three claims. First, we contend that the process by which uniform ISL is drafted will dictate the form that many provisions take. Second, we contend that the legal form dictated by the drafting process has significant substantive consequences, particularly for the policy objectives of uniform ISL. That leads to our third claim. We predict that in order to achieve uniform ISL that is widely adopted, those involved in the drafting process will systematically promulgate many vague standards that contracting parties would not choose for themselves. These defaults cannot be justified as the inevitable cost of achieving an optimal level of uniformity. If the products of a uniform ISL are default terms that parties do not want, then the underlying justification for the law-making function – reduction of contracting costs – vanishes. We find significant correspondence between our predictions about the drafting of uniform international sales law and the CISG. The CISG was drafted by parties whose objectives did not necessarily coincide with those of the commercial actors whose conduct the treaty was intended to regulate. The result is a variety of vague standards and compromises that appear inconsistent with commercial interests. We also illustrate the ways in which the CISG avoided potential correctives to these problems. We conclude by suggesting that commercial actors involved in international sales would prefer to choose governing law from among legal regimes that compete to supply parties with more desirable substantive terms