Why Might History Matter for Development Policy?

International Development, Political Economy,

Heterogeneity, distribution, and cooperation in common property resource management

The report considers the role of group heterogeneity in the success or failure of common property resource management. The author argues that cooperative agreements are less likely to come about when agents are highly heterogeneous along relevant dimensions - and existing agreements are more likely to break down as a group becomes more heterogeneous. The author crystallizes his argument in simple numerical examples and illustrates by reference to case studies on common property resource management, in particular, cases involving fisheries and irrigation systems. More work is needed to substantiate the author's argument, but his analysis so far supports the argument that equity and efficiency complement rather than oppose each other.Agricultural Research,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Poverty Assessment,Common Property Resource Development,Environmental Economics&Policies

Attacking Poverty: What is the Value Added of a Human Rights Approach?

Food Security and Poverty, International Development, Political Economy,

Welfare economics, political economy, and policy reform in Ghana

Welfare economics develops the logic of how the gains of the gainers and the losses of the losers should be weighed against each other, in a specific ethical framework. Political economy develops the logic of how they will be weighed against each other, in the context of sociopolitical institutions. The author applies the disciplines of both welfare economics and political economy in this evaluation of policy reform in Ghana. When considerations from both disciplines are aligned, he explains, policy reform not only should be enacted but is also likely to be enacted. Often, though, there is no such alignment, so reforms that might improve social welfare do not succeed. Analysts, says the author, should consider past reforms from both perspectives, and should learn from history, in evaluating proposed reform -- so they can assess both the desirability and the feasibility of reform. Policy makers, on the other hand, should work toward organizing and mobilizing the gainers from reform that would advance social welfare, so that resistance to such reform by the losers can be overcome. In an example from history, the author explains that Britain's debate over the Corn Laws -- basically a device for protecting domestic production of grain from cheap imports -- dominated for more than a decade in the nineteenth century. It eventually split the Tory party. Britain's transformation from an agrarian nation to a manufacturing one spelled the decline of the power of the landed aristocracy and the ascendance of manufacturing. In the end, the Corn Laws were repealed because of the growing power of the urban masses and their employers, and the debate soon turned to protection against imports from fast-industrializing France and Germany. Such episodes from history help us understand the protection of rice in Japan today, for example, and the focus of this paper -- the past decade of reform in Ghana, and the decade that awaits. The author argues that the political economy of policy reform in Ghana is likely to prove tougher in the second decade than in the first, for three reasons: 1) the economic situation in the second decade isno longer one of absolute disaster, with only one way to go; 2) in the second decade, policy reform will have to coincide with the transition from military to constitutional rule; and 3) the nature of the reforms to be undertaken in the second decade is different from that of those undertaken in the first.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Achieving Shared Growth,Inequality,Economic Policy, Institutions and Governance

Children and intra-household inequality : a theoretical analysis

Arguing that resources within the household are not allocated according to need, several researchers have tried to model intra-household allocative behavior. One group (1990) argued that as households become better off, intra-household inequality first increases then decreases. The behavior of intra-household inequality as household welfare improves is clearly important for policy, as interventions are often restricted to the household level - although the objective is to improve the welfare of the least-well-off individual. The author shows here that many of the tractable derivations of intra-household resource allocation are available in what might be called the"linear expenditure systems"framework. He analyzes the relationship between intra-household inequality and total household resources for models of intra-household allocation that lead to a linear expenditure reduced form. He then investigates three structural models : household welfare maximization; cooperative bargaining; and a noncooperative game with children as public goods. The author indicates how these models should be modified to produce reduced forms that are better represented in the evidence.Urban Housing,Poverty Lines,Environmental Economics&Policies,Inequality,Housing&Human Habitats

Intergenerationalities: Some Educational Questions on Quality, Quantity and Opportunity

This paper raises a number of issues in thinking about and addressing the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage. Starting with choice subject to constraints by parents as determining outcomes for children, the paper identifies sequences of interventions to relieve “binding constraints” in the expansion of education. But the fact that parents choose for children is shown to raise a number of questions on normative aspects of inequality measurement. The main conclusions are as follows: (i) A key analytical task is to identify whether education is supply constrained or demand constrained; (ii) The cost-benefit analysis of identifying the “most binding constraint” requires the estimation of an education quality production function; (iii) The recent focus on “quality as opposed to quantity” in education is not self-evidently pro-poor; (iv) The intergenerational links inherent in education between parental choice and children’s outcomes, raise serious conceptual and empirical questions on attempts to separate out inequality of opportunity from inequality of outcomes.Intergenerationalities, Health Economics and Policy, International Development, Political Economy, Public Economics,

INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC GOODS: OPERATIONAL IMPLICATIONS FOR THE WORLD BANK

The global International Financial Institutions (IFIs) increasingly justify their operations in terms of the provision of International Public Goods (IPGs). This is partly because there appears to be support among the rich countries of the North for expenditures on these IPGs, in contrast to the "aid fatigue" that afflicts the channelling of country specific assistance. But do the IFIs necessarily have to be involved in the provision of IPGs? If they do, what are the terms and conditions of that engagement? How does current practice compare to the ideal? And what reforms are needed to move us closer to the ideal? These are the questions that this paper attempts to ask, in the framework of the theory of International Public Goods, and in light of the practice of International Financial Institutions, the World Bank in particular. For the World Bank, a series of specific operational and resource reallocation implications are drawn from the reasoning.

Poverty and development : the Human Development Report and the World Development Report, 1990

After the"adjustment decade"of the 1980s, attention in the 1990s seems to be turning once again to longer-term issues of development - particularly of poverty alleviation. Just as the 1980s were heralded by a series of reports on adjustment, so the 1990s have seen two major reports on poverty: World Development Report 1990: Poverty, by the World Bank, and Human Development Report 1990 by the UNDP. The author presents an overview of conceptual issues and the best policies for alleviating poverty, based on a review of these two reports. He poses basic questions on the definition and measurement of poverty, looks at what has actually happened to poverty in developing countries in the last three decades, and reviews policies to help alleviate poverty. The consensus represented in these two reports, he concludes, offers hope that the polarization of policy analysts into"camps"is a thing of the past - and that policies for the 1990s can be built on fundamental agreement about the basics: (a) that poverty alleviation requires growth, but growth is not enough; (b) that growth must be broad-based and labor-intensive, and must go hand in hand with targeted basic social expenditures; and (c) that the international community must do its share, by supporting these efforts in the 1990s through greatly increased capital flows to development countries.Poverty Assessment,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Achieving Shared Growth,Governance Indicators

Conceptualising Informality: Regulation and Enforcement

The informality discourse is large and vibrant, and is expanding rapidly. But there is a certain conceptual incoherence to the literature. New definitions of informality compete with old definitions leading to a plethora of alternative conceptualisations. While some individual studies may apply a tight definition consistently, the literature as a whole is in a mess. This article proposes that informality and formality should be seen in direct relation to economic activity in the presence of specified regulation(s). Relative to the regulation(s), four conceptual categories that can help frame the analysis are: (A) regulation applicable and compliant, (B) regulation applicable and non-compliant, (C) regulation non-applicable after adjustment of activity, and (D) regulation non-applicable to the activity. Rather than use the generic labels 'informal' and 'formal', it would be preferable if the analysis focused on these four categories (or even more disaggregated as appropriate). A central determining factor in the impacts of regulation on economic activity across these four categories is the nature and intensity of enforcement. While lack of enforcement is well-documented, an understanding of its determinants − why and to what extent a government would not enforce a regulation that it has itself passed, and why non-enforcement varies from one context to another, is relatively neglected in the literature. Thus, specificity on regulation and on enforcement is the key to achieving conceptual clarity in the analytical literature and in the policy discourse on informality.informality, regulation, enforcement

CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES IN POVERTY AND INEQUALITY:ONE DEVELOPMENT ECONOMIST'S PERSPECTIVE

The last thirty years in the analysis of inequality and poverty, especially in developing countries, has seen two phases-a phase of conceptual advancement, followed by a phase of application and policy debate. Both phases were exciting and useful in their own way, but the applied phase has significantly exhausted the potential of the conceptual advances of two decades ago, and new advances have been few and far between. However, there is now a need, and an opening, for a new phase of conceptual advances, advances that will make use of shifting methodological terrain in mainstream economics, and that will answer emerging policy questions that would otherwise have no easy answers (or, perhaps, too easy answers).Food Security and Poverty,