Agricultural Growth, Employment and Poverty: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations with Indian data (1970-1993)

There is a rapidly growing literature on the dual concern of promoting agricultural growth and reducing the incidence of rural poverty. However the analysis of the interaction of growth and poverty is an under researched area of economic policy. This paper attempts to further analyse these dual concerns in an integrated manner. A basic endogenous growth model is developed which explicitly includes poor households and a government that has to decide how to allocate resources to the provision of infrastructure and to the public distribution of food grains. The intertemporal maximisation clearly shows the trade-off the government is facing and the indeterminate outcome. The model derives five key relationships: an agricultural metaproduction function (which allows differing temporal and spatial technical progress), rural employment and wage functions, and relationships for the public distribution of food grains and for rural poverty. These structural equations are estimated in a simultaneous setting for fifteen Indian states using eleven years of data for the period 1970 to 1993. Care is taken in the treatment of missing values, the non-stationarity of many of the state variables, the high level of dependencies between the variables (in the form of extreme multicollinearity and endogeneity) and the presence of structural change. We believe that insufficient care has been taken with these important complications in some studies. Robust structural form, net average elasticities and reduced form impact elasticity multipliers are derived. These estimates give valuable insights into the complicated interdependencies of the policy and endogenous variables. Whilst our broad conclusions tend to reinforce the findings of recent studies there are major differences in our estimates and methodology, which includes the conceptualisation, analytic specification and application of appropriate estimation techniques.Agricultural growth, poverty, public food distribution, rural and social infrastructure, net average elasticities, impact elasticity multipliers

A Multivariate Analysis of Savings, Investment, and Growth in India

This paper considers per worker household, private corporate and public sector savings and investment, foreign capital inflows and economic growth for India in a multivariate setting for the period 1950-2001. The analysis, uses FIML to estimate the long run cointegrating equilibriums and short run Granger causing dynamics for the non-stationary time series data, which includes endogenously detected structural breaks in 1989 and 1993, consistent with the recent period of financial reforms in India. The estimates do not support the commonly accepted Solow and endogenous models of economic growth. The popular view that increases in savings are a necessary condition for economic growth is supported with the detected strong direct links from per worker household and private corporate savings to output in the long run and sectoral per worker savings to investment links in both the short and long run. This implies the need to encourage savings, which is being realised with the estimated significantly higher growth rates in household and private corporate per worker savings during deregulation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, the link from investment to output is missing. Despite extensive analysis, per worker private corporate and household sector investment are not found to affect output in the short run or long run as required by the Solow and endogenous growth models. Indeed household investment, being the largest sector for gross domestic capital formation, does not appear to have any influence on other variables. Per worker public investment is found to adversely affect output per worker in the short and long run, contradicting Barro’s hypothesis of the benefits of the public provision of capital. These findings, plus the estimated reductions in the rates of growth in sectoral per worker investment during the 1990s, are worrying. The lack of empirical validation of commonly accepted growth theories is p roblematic for policy formulation and further research on the role of investment in the post-reform Indian economy is required.Savings, investment, economic growth

The Challenge of Child Labour in Rural India: A Multi-Dimensional Problem in Need of an Orchestrated Policy Response.

This paper is an attempt to provide a tentative framework for an objective, factual and systematic look at important dimensions of the child labour problem in rural India.CHILDREN ; LABOUR MARKET ; CULTURE

Endogeneity, Knowledge and Dynamics of Long Run Capitalist Economic Growth.

The revival of interest in economic growth and technological leadership issues has resulted in the re-examination of the theoretical foundations of the economics of growth. The neoclassical concerns with steady state paths and neo-Keynesian focus on short-term issues have remained intact in this process. However the 'new economics of growth' extensions proposed by Lucas (1988) and Romer (1986) and attempts by Scott (1989) to explain technological progress, do not address Arrow's (1962) concerns or explain Kuznet's (1957) and Maddison's (1991) empirical telescoping of the economic growth experience of the last two hundred years. This paper attempts to address some of these issues by developing a model which adopts Aghion and Howitt's (1992) suggestion to examine endogenous growth in the form of technological innovation in monopolistic capital goods production.ECONOMIC GROWTH ; ECONOMIC THEORY ; TECHNOLOGY

Structural Changes in the Middle East Stock Markets: The case of Israel and Arab Countries

This paper tests for structural changes in the price indices of four stock markets in the Middle East region, namely, Egypt, Turkey Jordan, Morocco and Israel. The Innovational Outlier (IO) model and Additive Outlier (AO) model indicate that all variables show evidence of non-stationarity, I(1), even with structural change. Moreover, the coefficients for all dummy variables such as intercept, slope and time of the break are found to be significant and all have the right signs. The endogenously determined times of the breaks for all variables coincides with observed real events for each country, like Asian crises, fluctuation in oil prices and the political conflict in the Middle East.Structural changes, Middle East stock markets, Israel, Arab countries

WinEcon Fiscal Pathways: A Computer Based Learning Module for the Subject Macroeconomic Theory and Policy

trade reforms, manufacturing performance, Australia

Determinants of Child Labour in Indian States: Some Empirical Explorations (1961-1991)

child labour ; India

Ecological and evolutionary processes at expanding range margins

Many animals are regarded as relatively sedentary and specialized in marginal parts of their geographical distributions. They are expected to be slow at colonizing new habitats. Despite this, the cool margins of many species' distributions have expanded rapidly in association with recent climate warming. We examined four insect species that have expanded their geographical ranges in Britain over the past 20 years. Here we report that two butterfly species have increased the variety of habitat types that they can colonize, and that two bush cricket species show increased fractions of longer-winged (dispersive) individuals in recently founded populations. Both ecological and evolutionary processes are probably responsible for these changes. Increased habitat breadth and dispersal tendencies have resulted in about 3- to 15-fold increases in expansion rates, allowing these insects to cross habitat disjunctions that would have represented major or complete barriers to dispersal before the expansions started. The emergence of dispersive phenotypes will increase the speed at which species invade new environments, and probably underlies the responses of many species to both past and future climate change

Sodium Atoms in the Lunar Exotail: Observed Velocity and Spatial Distributions

The lunar sodium tail extends long distances due to radiation pressure on sodium atoms in the lunar exosphere. Our earlier observations measured the average radial velocity of sodium atoms moving down the lunar tail beyond Earth (i.e., near the anti-lunar point) to be ~ 12.5 km/s. Here we use the Wisconsin H-alpha Mapper to obtain the first kinematically resolved maps of the intensity and velocity distribution of this emission over a 15 x 15 deg region on the sky near the anti-lunar point. We present both spatially and spectrally resolved observations obtained over four nights bracketing new Moon in October 2007. The spatial distribution of the sodium atoms is elongated along the ecliptic with the location of the peak intensity drifting 3 deg east along the ecliptic per night. Preliminary modeling results suggest the spatial and velocity distributions in the sodium exotail are sensitive to the near surface lunar sodium velocity distribution. Future observations of this sort along with detailed modeling offer new opportunities to describe the time history of lunar surface sputtering over several days

Restoration of peatlands and greenhouse gas balances

In this chapter the impact of peatland restoration on greenhouse gas fluxes is discussed based on a literature review. Casestudies are presented covering different peatland types, different regions and different starting conditions