Strukturwandel in Ressourcenreichen Ökonomien

The present dissertation addresses the question of how environmental quality, wealth distribution and economic development are related. It focuses on the impact of resource abundance and wealth distribution on the structural transformation during the growth process, the effect of financial development on resource use and how the lack of rules and regulations in developing countries affect environmental quality and production. It uses theoretical modeling, model calibration and econometric techniques with data from field studies in Azerbaijan, India and Iran to answer this question

Rural-Urban Migration and The Re-organization of Agriculture

This paper studies the response of agricultural production to rural labor loss during the process of urbanization. Using household microdata from India and exogenous variation in migration induced by urban income shocks interacted with distance to cities, we document sharp declines in crop production among migrant-sending households residing near cities. Households with migration opportunities do not substitute agricultural labour with capital, nor do they adopt new agricultural machinery. Instead, they divest from agriculture altogether and cultivate less land. We use a two-sector general equilibrium model with crop and land markets to trace the ensuing spatial reorganization of agriculture. Other non-migrant village residents expand farming (land market channel) and farmers in more remote villages with fewer migration opportunities adopt yield-enhancing technologies and produce more crops (crop market channel). Counterfactual simulations show that over half of the aggregate food production losses driven by urbanization is mitigated by these spillovers. This leads to a spatial reorganization in which food production moves away from urban areas and towards remote areas with low emigration

Optimal Gaussian Filtering for Polynomial Systems Applied to Association-free Multi-Target Tracking

This paper is about tracking multiple targets with the so-called Symmetric Measurement Equation (SME) filter. The SME filter uses symmetric functions, e.g., symmetric polynomials, in order to remove the data association uncertainty from the measurement equation. By this means, the data association problem is converted to a nonlinear state estimation problem. In this work, an efficient optimal Gaussian filter based on analytic moment calculation for discrete-time multi-dimensional polynomial systems corrupted with Gaussian noise is derived, and then applied to the polynomial system resulting from the SME filter. The performance of the new method is compared to an UKF implementation by means of typical multiple target tracking scenarios

Potential Analysis for Further Nature Conservation in Azerbaijan: A Spatial and Political Investment Strategy

Financed by the MAVA Foundation (Switzerland), the Michael Succow Foundation (MSF), in cooperation with various experts from Azerbaijan, conducted a detailed gap analysis of potential future protected areas in Azerbaijan. This report presents the results of this project and constitutes a part of the strategy of the MSF: to provide sound background information on the biological value and its further potential for protection in Azerbaijan. From the very beginning of the foundation’s engagement in Azerbaijan nine years ago, the sciencebased protection of landscapes and species has been the main focus of our work in the country.researc

Use Rights for Common Pool Resources and Economic Development

This paper explores the long–run development of an economy with a traditional sector based on common–pool resource-use, a modern, resource–independent sector with fixed entry costs, and an imperfect capital market. We show theoretically that introducing resource-use regulations increases incomes in the traditional sector and that this can trigger a development process with labor reallocation to the modern sector. Allowing trade of resource-use rights, or distributing resource-use rights unequally, broadens the scope for development

The contrasting effects of farm size on farm incomes and food production

Small-scale farming provides both food and livelihoods for the vast majority of the global poor. Thus, increasing and stabilizing farm incomes and food production in developing countries is fundamental to reducing global poverty. Policies for rural development such as improved access to non-agricultural incomes or land titling may benefit farmers, but they may also lead to farm consolidation with unintended consequences for aggregate food supply. Using a large panel dataset of rural households in Uganda, we parse apart how farm size affects the level and riskiness of agricultural incomes as well as of local food supply. Our findings indicate that while output per unit of land does decline with increasing farm size as suggested by previous literature, agricultural incomes increase with farm size. We show further that while the variance of agricultural incomes declines with increasing farm size, the variance of local food production increases with farm size. These results suggest that farmers benefit from larger farms, earning higher and more stable incomes while consumers suffer from lower and more volatile food supply

Informal credit markets, common-pool resources and education

The paper analyses the effect of interest rate changes on education and child labor in an economy with a high-skilled sector, a low-skilled sector and fragmented credit markets. The high-skilled sector takes educated labor as input. The low-skilled sector takes unskilled labor, physical capital and natural common-pool resources as inputs. Credit supply consists of (a) loans with collateral in form of productive investments in the low-skilled sector and (b) higher-priced loans without collateral. Lower interest rates increase the net present value of the returns to education. They also reduce costs of capital investment in current production. This increases labor productivity and the opportunity costs of education. Overuse of the common-pool resource can reverse this productivity effect. We show that the overall effect of interest rate changes on education depends on the initial wealth of the household, resource use and the credit market segment that is subject to improvements

Identifying the landscape drivers of agricultural insecticide use leveraging evidence from 100,000 fields

Agricultural landscape intensification has enabled food production to meet growing demand. However, there are concerns that more simplified cropland with lower crop diversity, less noncrop habitat, and larger fields results in increased use of pesticides due to a lack of natural pest control and more homogeneous crop resources. Here, we use data on crop production and insecticide use from over 100,000 field-level observations from Kern County, California, encompassing the years 2005-2013 to test if crop diversity, field size, and cropland extent affect insecticide use in practice. Overall, we find that higher crop diversity does reduce insecticide use, but the relationship is strongly influenced by the differences in crop types between diverse and less diverse landscapes. Further, we find insecticide use increases with increasing field size. The effect of cropland extent is distance-dependent, with nearby cropland decreasing insecticide use, whereas cropland further away increases insecticide use. This refined spatial perspective provides unique understanding of how different components of landscape simplification influence insecticide use over space and for different crops. Our results indicate that neither the traditionally conceived "simplified" nor "complex" agricultural landscape is most beneficial to reducing insecticide inputs; reality is far more complex

Crop diversity buffers the impact of droughts and high temperatures on food production

Weather extremes like droughts and heat waves are becoming increasingly frequent worldwide, with severe consequences for agricultural production and food security. Although the effects of such events on the production of major crops is well-documented, the response of a larger pool of crops is unknown and the potential of crop diversity to buffer agricultural outputs against weather extremes remains untested. Here, we evaluate whether increasing the diversity of crop portfolios at the country level confers greater resistance to a country’s overall yield and revenues against losses to droughts and high temperatures. To do this, we use 58 years of annual data on weather, crop yields and agricultural revenues for 109 crops in 127 countries. We use the spatial distribution of each crop and their cropping cycle to determine their exposure to weather events. We find that growing greater crop diversity within countries reduces the negative impacts of droughts and high temperatures on agricultural outputs. For drought, our results suggest that the effect is explained not only by crop diversity itself, but also by the sensitivity of the most abundant crops (in terms of harvested areas) to this extreme. Countries dedicating more land to minor, drought-tolerant crops reduce the average sensitivity of country-scale crop portfolios and show greater resistance of yield and revenues to drought. Our study highlights the unexploited potential for putting crop biodiversity to work for greater resilience to weather, specifically in poorer developing countries that are likely to suffer disproportionately from climate change impacts

Die Schifffahrt der Zukunft -�Von der Automation zur Autonomie

Neue Forschungsprojekte, Testgebiete und erste autonome Schiffsdemonstratoren schreiten in Ländern wie Norwegen, Finnland oder Korea mit großen Schritten voran. Die Weltschifffahrtsorganisation (IMO) hat sich des Themas angenommen und untersucht aktuell in einem ersten Sichtungsprozess Möglichkeiten und Rahmenbedingungen für eine regulative Einbeziehung zukünftiger autonomer Schiffe in den Seeverkehr. Der Vortrag enthält Aussagen zu Begrifflichkeiten, zu Zielen und Thesen der autonomem Schifffahrt, zum Stand der Technik und zu den Herausforderungen