Three Essays in Public Finance

This dissertation comprises three essays in public finance. The first essay is a research of a theory of trading of club goods and its application to jurisdiction. The essay establishes a model of trading of club goods among clubs, and illustrates its effects on the process and outcome of club formation. Cost function as well as disutility of crowdedness is emphasized and integrated into the process of club formation, after allowing for exchanging club good among clubs. In the process, the essay develops a market for club goods. Then the model is revised and applied to the formation of jurisdictions. The second essay comes out of an interest regarding household demand, poverty and public goods in developing countries. The essay explores household food consumption in Jamaica and estimates the effects of related variables. With Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions 2001 data, the essay estimates an Engel curve which reflects the relation between household food consumption and related variables. What’s more, to investigate the possible neighborhood effect on food consumption, the essay tests and estimates the spatial correlation among neighborhood food consumption. The estimated results can be applied to poverty reduction policy. The third essay extends the theme of poverty, consumption, and government programs by analyzing one other public program—education. Education is closely linked to poverty alleviation. Determining the demand for education and the return to education will help government focus programs aimed at reducing drop-out rates and in the long run, poverty in the country. The essay applies discrete time survival analysis techniques to analyze education duration in Jamaica. Based on Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions 2002, the essay estimates the effects of household, individual and other related covariates on dropout risks of students. The essay compares discrete time Cox model and discrete time logit model and concludes that the two estimations are consistent. The estimation results could be used to predict the effects of changes in the covariates, or be used to predict the dropout risks of particular students in each grade, both of which could provide useful policy implications to improve education in Jamaica

Poverty, policy, and industrialization : lessons from the distant past

Pessimists say industrialization increased poverty; optimists say it did not. The authors argue that how much industrialization eradicates poverty depends on the form industrialization takes. It is not economic growth by itself, but the processes and policies associated with different growth regimes which make the poor poorer. The authors address two questions : 1) what happened to the proportionate share of the population living in poverty, and to the living standards of the poor, during nineteenth century industrial revolutions?; and 2) why did poverty statistics behave the way they did? Modern economic growth may erode traditional entitlements that serve as safety nets in preindustrial societies. It may be convenient to think otherwise, but typically the poor in preindustrial European and North American societies were not supported by the family and private institutions. Much of the responsibility for the poor lay with the state and other formal, statelike institutions that intervened in food markets. Where laissez-faire policies were adopted during the Industrial Revolution, as in America and England, many of the poor (especially the extremely poor) became more vulnerable to adverse conditions.Environmental Economics&Policies,Services&Transfers to Poor,Rural Poverty Reduction,Safety Nets and Transfers,Governance Indicators

The Effects of British Colonialism in India on Indo-Caribbean Communities

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

The Level of Managerial Functions Practiced by the Head of household and Family Economic Status in Kerman, Iran

ABSTRACT: Household management is a process of using the required resources to attain the families' goals through planning and taking the necessary steps to meet these goals. The aim of this article is to determine, the level of managerial functions practiced by the families, and the relationship between the levels of managerial functions practiced and family economic status. Management functions include five dimensions (planning, coordinating

Aspects of inequality and poverty in Greece, 1974, 1982

This study attempts to document the state and nature of inequality and poverty in Greece using the primary consumption expenditure data of two Household Expenditure Surveys conducted in 1974 and 1982. Chapter 1 provides an outline of recent developments in the Greek economy, a survey of the literature on inequality and poverty in Greece and a comparison of the above data with data from other sources. In Chapter 2 it is argued that the distribution of consumption expenditure per equivalent adult is a fairly good approximation to the (unobservable) distribution of economic welfare, and three models of equivalence scales for the cost of children are estimated. Based on these results, the distributions of consumption expenditure per equivalent adult are constructed for both survey years. Chapter 3 provides the results of measurement and decomposition of inequality. One-way decomposition is carried out when the population is grouped according to ten factors, of which five are used to subdivide the population into small homogeneous socioeconomic groups for the purposes of the multivariate decomposition of inequality. The main finding of the one-way decompositions is that disparities "between groups" play a far less important role in determining aggregate inequality than disparities "within-groups". Even in the multivariate decomposition, variations "between-groups" account for only one third of aggregate inequality in 1974 and for even less in 1982. The results of measuremenat nd decompositiono f poverty, reportedi n Chapter4 , suggest that poverty is closely associated with certain occupational characteristics of the household head. These characteristics are employment in the agricultural sector or no employment. Households headed by farmers and retired persons account for around two thirds of aggregate poverty in both survey years. Intertemporal changesi n inequality and poverty are examined in Chapter5 . It is demonstrated that inequality and relative poverty declined substantially between 1974 and 1982, while the decline in absolute poverty was spectacular. The impact on inequality of changes in the structure of the population was negligible, but the improvement in the educational level of HH heads had a strong negative effect on poverty. Further, the results of some cross-country inequality and welfare comparisons presented in this chapter show that inequality is higher, and welfare lower, in Greece than in most of the other EEC countries. Finally, Chapter 6 summarizes the principal findings and discusses briefly their policy implication

POLICY REFORM, MARKET STABILITY, AND FOOD SECURITY; PROCEEDINGS OF A CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL AGRICULTURAL TRADE RESEARCH CONSORTIUM

Contact for this paper: Laura Bipes, Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota, 1994 Buford Avenue, 232 ClaOff, St. Paul, MN 55108. This volume contains the main papers that were presented at an IATRC symposium which focused on Policy Reform, Market Stability, and Food Security. It was held June 26-27, 1998 in Alexandria, Virginia and was co-sponsored by the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy, Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota. Papers included are: Asian Economic Crisis and the Long-Term Global Food Situation, by Mark Rosegrant and Claudia Ringler; The New Policy Environment for Food Aid: The Challenge of Sub-Saharan Africa, by Cheryl Christensen; Poverty and Undernutrition in South Asia, by T.N. Srinivasan; The Macro Dimensions of Food Security: Economic Growth, Equitable Distribution, and Food Price Stability, by Peter Timmer; World Food Markets and Food Security: Uncertain Connections, by Robert Paarlberg; International Price Instability in Cereals Markets and a Market Based Scheme for Developing Country Cereal Imports, by Alexander Sarris; On Reform, Food Prices, and Poverty in India, by Martin Ravallion; The Contribution of Food Aid to Stable Food Consumption, by Christopher Barrett; A Role of Capital Markets in Natural Disasters: A Piece of the Food Security Puzzle, by Jerry SkeesAgricultural and Food Policy, Food Security and Poverty, International Relations/Trade,