Market gardening, urban development and income generation on the Jos Plateau, NIgeria

Are their ways to improve small-scale market gardening in and around the city of Jos, Central Nigeria, in order to raise its productivity and income-generating capacity? This question, the relevance of which extends to many other urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa, runs as a common thread through this book. The study demonstrates that the Jos metropolitan area is well endowed with suitable gardening land, irrigation water, human resources and other conditions favourable to the market-oriented production of fruits and vegetables. Nevertheless, many constraints hinder the performance of the horticultural industry. To overcome problems like insecure tenure, inequitable marketing patterns, lack of managerial and technical skills, pollution and inadequate support, requires a multi-facetted and concurrent approach. The authors emphasize the need for small-scale gardeners to mobilize and organize in order to facilitate collective action and effective advocacy;and the need for considerable governmental and institutional support and social engineering. The experience of some Israeli Arabs has demonstrated, however, that under these conditions, achieving a successful transition is not easy

Radicalization as a reaction to failure: An economic model of Islamic extremism

This paper views Islamist radicals as self-interested political revolutionaries and builds on a general model of political extremism developed in a previous paper (Ferrero, 2002). Extremism is modelled as a production factor whose effect on expected revenue is initially positive and then turns negative, and whose level is optimally chosen by a revolutionary organization. The organization is bound by a free-access constraint and hence uses the degree of extremism as a means of indirectly controlling its level of membership with the aim of maximizing expected per capita income of its members, like a producer co-operative. The gist of the argument is that radicalization may be an optimal reaction to perceived failure (a widespread perception in the Muslim world) when political activists are, at the margin, relatively strongly averse to effort but not so averse to extremism. This configuration is at odds with secular, Western-style revolutionary politics but seems to capture well the essence of Islamic revolutionary politics, embedded as it is in a doctrinal framework. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005

Butter, Guns and Ice-Cream, Theory and evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper is intended to complement the existing literature on civil wars. First, it presents a simple theoretical model of conflict that defines a two-sector economy. In a contested sector, two agents struggle to appropriate the maximum possible fraction of a contestable output. In an uncontested sector, they hold secure property rights over the production of some goods. Agents split their resource endowment between 'butter', 'guns' and 'ice-cream'. Following the theoretical insights the empirical analysis focuses on the relationship between civil wars and different sectors of the economy. In particular, a panel probit specification shows that the incidence of a civil war decreases in the size of manufacturing sector