Why isn't there more Financial Intermediation in Developing Countries?

Financial intermediation, Mutual insurance , Safety nets , Microfinance , Microcredit

Public Works and Employment Programmes: Towards a Long-Term Development Approach

Public works and employment programmes have long been considered a staple of social assistance. For the most part, though, they have been designed as short-term ?safety nets?. While, in some cases, the focus has also been on reducing poverty or addressing structural unemployment challenges, their implementation has seldom been on a scale that would make a dent in structural poverty. The fact that large scale programmes such as India?s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which was initiated prior to the recent economic crisis, could also be effective in responding speedily to and mitigating the effects of the crisis has elicited interest in such policies as a component of inclusive growth paths. In making the case for a longer-term development approach, the paper points out that such an approach would not only allow these programmes to act as shock absorbers without being ?too little, too late? but would also enable the state to strengthen its capacities to provide support to livelihood strategies of the poor through addressing critical public goods and service deficits while creating jobs. In this context, the paper assesses the desirability and feasibility of adopting a universal or a partial Employment Guarantee (EG) to make such programmes a more stable complement to market-driven employment creation in situations where levels of poverty, in particular, working poverty, and underemployment are high. The paper also explores the complementarities and interactions with various social assistance and cash transfer programmes with a view to fostering a more comprehensive approach to social protection for the poor. The paper concludes with a section on implementation issues with a view to strengthening learning on how to plan, design and implement long-term and Employment Guarantee types of public employment programmes. (?)Public Works and Employment Programmes: Towards a Long-Term Development Approach

Rural Financial Markets in Developing Countries

This review examines portions of the vast literature on rural financial markets and household behavior in the face of risk and uncertainty. We place particular emphasis on studying the important role of financial intermediaries, competition and regulation in shaping the changing structure and organization of rural markets, rather than on household strategies and bilateral contracting. Our goal is to provide a framework within which the evolution of financial intermediation in rural economies can be understood.Rural Finance, Financial Intermediation, Agricultural Credit

Scenarios for the development of smart grids in the UK: literature review

Smart grids are expected to play a central role in any transition to a low-carbon energy future, and much research is currently underway on practically every area of smart grids. However, it is evident that even basic aspects such as theoretical and operational definitions, are yet to be agreed upon and be clearly defined. Some aspects (efficient management of supply, including intermittent supply, two-way communication between the producer and user of electricity, use of IT technology to respond to and manage demand, and ensuring safe and secure electricity distribution) are more commonly accepted than others (such as smart meters) in defining what comprises a smart grid. It is clear that smart grid developments enjoy political and financial support both at UK and EU levels, and from the majority of related industries. The reasons for this vary and include the hope that smart grids will facilitate the achievement of carbon reduction targets, create new employment opportunities, and reduce costs relevant to energy generation (fewer power stations) and distribution (fewer losses and better stability). However, smart grid development depends on additional factors, beyond the energy industry. These relate to issues of public acceptability of relevant technologies and associated risks (e.g. data safety, privacy, cyber security), pricing, competition, and regulation; implying the involvement of a wide range of players such as the industry, regulators and consumers. The above constitute a complex set of variables and actors, and interactions between them. In order to best explore ways of possible deployment of smart grids, the use of scenarios is most adequate, as they can incorporate several parameters and variables into a coherent storyline. Scenarios have been previously used in the context of smart grids, but have traditionally focused on factors such as economic growth or policy evolution. Important additional socio-technical aspects of smart grids emerge from the literature review in this report and therefore need to be incorporated in our scenarios. These can be grouped into four (interlinked) main categories: supply side aspects, demand side aspects, policy and regulation, and technical aspects.

SchedMail: Sender-Assisted Message Delivery Scheduling to Reduce Time-Fragmentation

Although early efforts aimed at dealing with large amounts of emails focused on filtering out spam, there is growing interest in prioritizing non-spam emails, with the objective of reducing information overload and time fragmentation experienced by recipients. However, most existing approaches place the burden of classifying emails exclusively on the recipients' side, either directly or through recipients' email service mechanisms. This disregards the fact that senders typically know more about the nature of the contents of outgoing messages before the messages are read by recipients. This thesis presents mechanisms collectively called SchedMail which can be added to popular email clients, to shift a part of the user efforts and computational resources required for email prioritization to the senders' side. Particularly, senders declare the urgency of their messages, and recipients specify policies about when different types of messages should be delivered. Recipients also judge the accuracy of sender-side urgency, which becomes the basis for learned reputations of senders; these reputations are then used to interpret urgency declarations from the recipients' perspectives. In order to experimentally evaluate the proposed mechanisms, a proof-of-concept prototype was implemented based on a popular open source email client K-9 Mail. By comparing the amount of email interruptions experienced by recipients, with and without SchedMail, the thesis concludes that SchedMail can effectively reduce recipients' time fragmentation, without placing demands on email protocols or adding significant computational overhead

Challenges to the Integration of Renewable Resources at High System Penetration

Successfully integrating renewable resources into the electric grid at penetration levels to meet a 33 percent Renewables Portfolio Standard for California presents diverse technical and organizational challenges. This report characterizes these challenges by coordinating problems in time and space, balancing electric power on a range of scales from microseconds to decades and from individual homes to hundreds of miles. Crucial research needs were identified related to grid operation, standards and procedures, system design and analysis, and incentives, and public engagement in each scale of analysis. Performing this coordination on more refined scales of time and space independent of any particular technology, is defined as a “smart grid.” “Smart” coordination of the grid should mitigate technical difficulties associated with intermittent and distributed generation, support grid stability and reliability, and maximize benefits to California ratepayers by using the most economic technologies, design and operating approaches

Energy Subsidies in the Arab World

The policy of maintaining tight control of domestic energy prices has characterized the political and economic environment in most Arab countries, together with many other parts of the world, for decades. The objectives behind such a policy range from overall welfare objectives such as expanding energy access and protecting poor households’ incomes; to economic development objectives such as fostering industrial growth and smoothing domestic consumption; and to politi- cal considerations, including the distribution of oil and natural gas rents in resource-rich countries. While energy subsidies may be seen as achieving some of a country’s objectives, this paper argues they are a costly and inefficient way of doing so. Energy subsidies distort price signals, with serious implications on efficiency and the optimal allocation of resources. Energy subsidies also tend to be regressive, with high-income households and industries benefiting proportionately most from low energy prices. However, despite such adverse effects, energy subsidies constitute an important social safety net for the poor in many parts of the Arab world, and any attempts to reduce or eliminate them in the absence of compensatory programmes would lead to a decline in households’ welfare and erode the competitiveness of certain industries. Therefore, a critical factor for successful reforms will be the ability of governments to compensate their populations for the reduction or removal of subsidies through carefully designed mitigation measures that protect the poorest and assist the economy in its long-term adaptation. We argue that a reform of energy pric- ing mechanisms in the Arab world may be seen as beneficial from more than one perspective, and as offering potential paths for reform. Nevertheless, this paper recognizes that the current political climate in the region will render the reform of domestic energy prices difficult in practice, such that reform may indeed be a medium- to long-term endeavour

Why Isn\u27t There More Financial Intermediation in Developing Countries?

This paper proposes to organize thinking about the opportunities for improving and extending financial markets and safety nets for the poor, by focusing on factors that may explain why the linkage of local financial networks and safety nets with the larger economy often fails or is incomplete. Understanding the nature of these impediments is the first step in proposing policies to help promote more effective linkage and intermediation. We propose four explanations for the slowness of adoption of intermediation (high costs of delegated monitoring aggravated by limited intermediary capital; lock-in and crowding out effects from local insurance arrangements, social norms against cooperation with intermediaries; and political resistance to new institutions that shift the balance of power in local polities). Of course, financial repression and weak legal systems remains important as cause of lack of intermediation. We conclude with a review of public policy for more effective intermediatio

Strengthening public safety nets

Helping to reduce vulnerability poses a new set of challenges for public policy. The most immediate challenge is to determine the appropriate role for public action if there should be a role at all. A starting point is the ways that communities and extended families try to cope with difficullties in the absence of government interventions. Coping mechanisms range from the informal exchange of transfers and loans within families and commmunitieis to more structured institutions that enable an entire community to provides protections to their neediest members. The existence of this web of private and nonformal mechanisms pompts a series of questions: Will building public safety nets displace existing mechanisms and offer limited net gain to households? Would it be more effective to strengthen existing mechanisms than creating new ones? Can the private sector and NGOs play larger roles? This paper provides some speculative answers and describes places for public action, as well as its limits.Social institutions. ,Public institutions. ,