Effects of Deforestation on Household Time Allocation among Rural Agricultural Activities: Evidence from Western Uganda

A non-separable (non-recursive) model was developed to test the  participation of households in fuelwood collection and farming activities using data from rural areas of Western Uganda. The results of the  quantitative analysis showed that traditional measures of economic  conditions – shadow wages and prices, labour time, gender composition of the household, seasonality and agro-ecological differences – were  important variables that affect household labour allocation decisions. The results provided no support to earlier studies that contended that as  deforestation increases and fuelwood gets scarce, household members will divert time away from farming. The fact that there was no evidence of labour relocation away from agriculture to fuelwood collection implied that the former was a key activity and fuelwood products have not become  costly enough to significantly tighten household labour constraints. Efforts were needed to alleviate the labour bottlenecks of subsistence farmers through agro-forestry programmes, efficient use of fuelwood and adoption of efficient cooking equipment, fuelwood substitutes which will relieve  environmental good collection labour burdens or reduce collection time for fuelwood.Keywords: Forests, time allocation, agriculture, firewood household

The use of census migration data to approximate human movement patterns across temporal scales

Human movement plays a key role in economies and development, the delivery of services, and the spread of infectious diseases. However, it remains poorly quantified partly because reliable data are often lacking, particularly for low-income countries. The most widely available are migration data from human population censuses, which provide valuable information on relatively long timescale relocations across countries, but do not capture the shorter-scale patterns, trips less than a year, that make up the bulk of human movement. Census-derived migration data may provide valuable proxies for shorter-term movements however, as substantial migration between regions can be indicative of well connected places exhibiting high levels of movement at finer time scales, but this has never been examined in detail. Here, an extensive mobile phone usage data set for Kenya was processed to extract movements between counties in 2009 on weekly, monthly, and annual time scales and compared to data on change in residence from the national census conducted during the same time period. We find that the relative ordering across Kenyan counties for incoming, outgoing and between-county movements shows strong correlations. Moreover, the distributions of trip durations from both sources of data are similar, and a spatial interaction model fit to the data reveals the relationships of different parameters over a range of movement time scales. Significant relationships between census migration data and fine temporal scale movement patterns exist, and results suggest that census data can be used to approximate certain features of movement patterns across multiple temporal scales, extending the utility of census-derived migration data

El poder de mercado en industrias minoristas de gas natural vehicular

La alta concentración del mercado minorista de Gas Natural Vehicular (GNV) en Colombia permite el ejercicio de poder de mercado