"Outside" Cooperative Equity: Obligations, Tradeoffs, and Fundamental Cooperative Character

Agribusiness,

Factions and Political Competition

This paper presents a new model of political competition where candidates belong to factions. Before elections, factions compete to direct local public goods to their local constituencies. The model of factional competition delivers a rich set of implications relating the internal organization of the party to the allocation of resources. Several key theoretical predictions of the model find a counterpart in our empirical analysis of newly coded data on the provision of water services in Mexico.

The Political Economy of Pro-Poor Livestock Policy in Cambodia

This paper presents a case study of how livestock policies are made and implemented in a national context, and how they can be improved to better serve the interests of the poor in Cambodia. Opportunities exist for improving rural livelihoods in Cambodia through the export of livestock. While Cambodia claims little of the official export market for cattle, huge demand exists within the region and beyond. Three strategic entry points are recommended that can both improve the performance of the sector and the participation of the poor in productive activities.Livestock Production/Industries, Political Economy,

Informal Practices in Changing Societies: Comparing Chinese Guanxi and Russian Blat

The paper defines the key features of Chinese guanxi and Russian blat networks, explores similarities and differences in the use of these networks both in communist and post-communist economies, and discovers their ambiguous relationship with the formal institutions. Having compared guanxixue and blat in detail, one should conclude that people tend to develop similar responses (as well idioms) in order to survive in state centralised economies characterized by shortages, state distribution system and ideological predicaments. Guanxi and blat networks in pre-reform China and Russia played a similarly ambiguous role in these economies: on the one hand, they compensated for the defects of the formal rules thus enabling the declared principles of the economy to exist; on the other hand, they subverted them. There are also common trends in the transformation of informal practices in post-reform China and Russia. Before the reforms, both guanxixue and blat were often beneficial to ordinary people in allowing them to satisfy their personal needs and in organising their own lives, whereas now their shift into corruption benefits the official-business classes and hurts the bulk of society. Trust and social networks are vital components of both economies and will continue to exist (as elsewhere) but their implications for the transformation may differ. The post-Soviet reforms have changed the Soviet-type blat practices so much that blat has almost ceased to be a relevant term for the use of personal networks both in the state and in the new sectors of the economy. Being more culturally and historically grounded, the term guanxi has sustained and found its new use in contemporary China. There is much more discussion of guanxi and guanxi capitalism in China than ever has been on blat in Russia. The partiality of reforms in China and the communist rulership does not prevent foreign investment and economic success, and corruption is estimated as not as damaging in China as it is in Russia

Bangladesh: Partitions, Nationalisms and Legacies for State-Building

This is an evolving draft of a book on Bangladesh that is based on the application of the Political Settlements Framework to develop an analytical narrative on the evolution of the state in Banglades

Ambiguity of Social Networks in Post-Communist Contexts

The paper discusses three hypotheses. First, it introduces four ideal types of networks which are combined in the category of networks as used by social scientists. Four types result from the intersection of two implicit choices made about networks – networks are assumed to be either personal or impersonal, and are viewed either internally or externally. Thus, networks are understood in terms of sociability, access to resources, enabling structure, or social capital. Second, I argue that networks function in a fundamentally ambiguous way. They operate in their capacity of a safety net or survival kit, provide a ‘beating the system’ capacity or compensate for the system’s defects. At the same time networks provide constraints such as high costs of informal contract, limits on individual action, lock-in effects and the handicaps of social capital. Third, I illustrate differences between networks serving the economy of favors in Russia and networks serving the purposes of ‘network society.

Vulnerability of Household Consumption to Village-level Aggregate Shocks in a Developing Country

Village-level aggregate shocks such as droughts and floods cannot be perfectly insured by risk sharing within a village. Then, what type of households are more vulnerable in terms of a decline in consumption when a village is hit by such natural disasters? This question is investigated in this study by using two-period panel data for the years 2001 and 2004 from rural Pakistan. We propose a methodology to infer the theoretical mechanisms underlying the heterogeneity of households in terms of their vulnerability, and focus on the difference between the across-household-type difference in marginal response to aggregate shocks and that in marginal response to idiosyncratic shocks. The empirical results obtained indicate that the sensitivity of consumption changes to shocks differs across household types, depending on the type of natural disasters. Moreover, land and credit access are effective in mitigating the ill-effects of various types of shocks. Household heads who are educated or elderly and households with a greater number of working members bear a larger burden of the village-level shocks; however, they are not vulnerable to idiosyncratic health shocks. It is revealed that these patterns may be explained by the coexistence of unequal access to credit markets and risk sharing among heterogeneous households in terms of risk tolerance.natural disaster, consumption smoothing, risk sharing, self-insurance, Pakistan