THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF BLACK AMERICANS TO AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION AND RESEARCH

Labor and Human Capital,

What role for safety net transfers in very low income countries?

The authors consider the question of what role safety net transfers should play in very low income countries where a large population live in absolute poverty, and the state has limited resources to fund transfers. The number of people living below minimum acceptable consumption levels will remain so high that some form of safety net intervention is justified. For pure transfers, governments should be selective of very specific groups such as orphans, to limit costs and engender political support. To improve the impact per dollar spent on transfers, programs should be selected to have a multiplier effect on incomes such as vouchers for small fertilizers packs for the poor, or to leverage by using small amounts of cash to help households reduce risk or diversify economic activity. Selection of programs that are self-targeting, such as public works at a low wage rate or subsidized food goods. The judicious timing of transfers is important. Programs should also be kept as simple as possible to fit with the limited administrative capacity, avoiding multiple overlapping donor programs in favor of one or two simple nationwide programs that are easily implemented, cost-effective, and fiscally sustainable.Safety Nets and Transfers,Services&Transfers to Poor,Rural Poverty Reduction,Poverty Assessment,Achieving Shared Growth

Financial Conditions on U.S. Cotton Farms

For the last three years, U.S. cotton producers have been heavily dependent on ad hoc emergency disaster and market loss assistance to cash flow their operations. They have not been alone. Wheat, feed grains, oilseeds and rice producers have also been faced with low commodity prices, adverse weather and the need for substantial government assistance. Price support and direct payments by CCC for fiscal years 1998-2000 averaged $17.5 billion per year (USDA Ag Outlook). Has U.S. program crop agriculture turned the corner or will additional government payments likely be needed to sustain a vulnerable sector? This paper will focus on the outlook for the Agricultural and Food Policy Center’s (AFPC’s) representative cotton farms over the period 2001-2005. The results reported herein are drawn from AFPC Working Paper 00-4 which goes into greater depth on all 82 representative farms and ranches modeled by AFPC.Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Crop Production/Industries,

Identifying the New Keynesian Phillips curve

Phillips curves are central to discussions of inflation dynamics and monetary policy. New Keynesian Phillips curves describe how past inflation, expected future inflation, and a measure of real marginal cost or an output gap drive the current inflation rate. This paper studies the (potential) weak identification of these curves under generalized methods of moments (GMM) and traces this syndrome to a lack of persistence in either exogenous variables or shocks. The authors employ analytic methods to understand the identification problem in several statistical environments: under strict exogeneity, in a vector autoregression, and in the canonical three-equation, New Keynesian model. Given U.S., U.K., and Canadian data, they revisit the empirical evidence and construct tests and confidence intervals based on exact and pivotal Anderson-Rubin statistics that are robust to weak identification. These tests find little evidence of forward-looking inflation dynamics.

The New Keynesian Phillips curve : lessons from single-equation econometric estimation

We review single-equation methods for estimating the hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) and then apply those methods to U.S. quarterly data for 1955?2007. Estimating the hybrid NKPC by the generalized method of moments yields stable coefficients with a large role for expected future inflation. Measures of marginal costs better explain U.S. inflation than does a range of measures of the output gap. But estimates of the slope of the NKPC are imprecise and confidence intervals that are robust to weak identification are wide. Further research on measuring marginal costs may reconcile these mixed findings. A reconciliation is important if the NKPC is to remain a fundamental component of models of the monetary transmission mechanism.Inflation (Finance) ; Phillips curve