Nutrition-sensitive value chains from a smallholder perspective: A framework for project design

"The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) gratefully acknowledges permission from IFAD to re-publish that work as an Alliance Working Paper, with updated acknowledgements, author information and information on additional resources.

Small State, Giant Tax Credits: Hawaii’s Leap into High Technology Development

In 2001, the State of Hawaii established a 100 percent tax credit to promote investment in several targeted high technology industries. We chronicle the evolution of Hawaii’s high technology tax credits, describe their provisions, and catalog a host of problems associated with determining whether or not the tax credits have achieved results desired by lawmakers. We conclude that it was a mistake to initiate a generous tax credit program without adequate monitoring by public agencies or disclosure of how public funds are being used by recipients of tax credits.tax credit, Hawaii, Act 221, qualified high technology business

Contracts for environmental outcomes: the use of financial contracts in environmental markets

In environmental markets, parties frequently exchange obligations through environmental contracts. These contracts imply a distribution of risk between parties. The main focus of our paper is to identify contracts that enable risk in environmental markets to be reduced, distributed at least cost, or managed efficiently. The risks that we consider are: moral hazard risk, price risk, exogenous environmental risk, measurement risk and production risk. The first section of our paper outlines some of the contracts currently utilised in financial and insurance markets to achieve these objectives. These are: futures and options contracts, spread contracts, weather contracts and catastrophe bonds. We then provide a snapshot of current applications of these contracts both in real markets and in the literature. Finally we discuss some possible applications in the environmental sector and indicate how the use of these contracts may alter the way government manages environmental assets and responsibilities. We also suggest a staged process to the introduction of contracts that recognises the current limitations faced by government. This paper does not propose new or novel contracts for tackling the problems of risk in exchange. Rather it extends the application of existing contractual arrangements to a new type of problem: environmental markets.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Existence of Double Vortex Solutions

We show analytically and numerically the existence of double vortex solutions in two-Higgs systems. These solutions are generalizations of the \no vortices and exist for all values of the parameters in the Lagrangians considered. We derive analytically the asymptotic behavior of the solutions and confirm it numerically by solving the field equations. Finally, we show that these solutions can be embedded in realistic theories like the two-doublet extension of the standard model.Comment: 10 pages plus 2 figures, use latex. To appear in Phys. Lett. B. Preprint No. CfA-370

The Political Economy of Urban Land Reform in Hawaii

In the mid 1960s there were about 22,000 single-family leasehold homes in Honolulu. Dissatisfaction with leasehold led to reform legislation in 1967, allowing lessees to buy leased land. By 1991 less than 5000 lessees remained. This paper examines why landowners elected to lease rather than sell land and attributes the rise of leasehold to legal constraints on land sales by large estates, duties of estate trustees and the federal tax code. Idelogical forces initiated land reform in 1967, but rent-seeking forces captured the process in the mid 1970s. It is concluded that Hawaii's experiment with leasehold was a failure due to the difficulties associated with specifying and enforcing long-term contracts in residential land.

The Impact of Approved Destination Status on Chinese Travel Abroad: An Economic Analysis

Since the early 1990s China’s government has negotiated Approved Destination Status (ADS) with 120 countries. The agreements allow government-approved travel agencies to market group tours and obtain visas in bulk to ADS destinations. We apply a gravity model framework to analyze how ADS has affected Chinese outbound tourist travel from China using Chinese visitor arrivals data from 61 main foreign destinations of mainland Chinese tourists (which account for vast majority of international departures from China) from 1995 to 2005. Fixed effects estimates indicate ADS resulted in significant increases in arrivals from China (averaging 52 percent over three years). We also find evidence of travel diversion as more countries received ADS.China Outbound Travel, Approved Destination Status, Gravity Model, Tourism, International Agreements, Travel Liberalization

Semantic variation operators for multidimensional genetic programming

Multidimensional genetic programming represents candidate solutions as sets of programs, and thereby provides an interesting framework for exploiting building block identification. Towards this goal, we investigate the use of machine learning as a way to bias which components of programs are promoted, and propose two semantic operators to choose where useful building blocks are placed during crossover. A forward stagewise crossover operator we propose leads to significant improvements on a set of regression problems, and produces state-of-the-art results in a large benchmark study. We discuss this architecture and others in terms of their propensity for allowing heuristic search to utilize information during the evolutionary process. Finally, we look at the collinearity and complexity of the data representations that result from these architectures, with a view towards disentangling factors of variation in application.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, GECCO 201