The long term behavior of commodity prices

This report presents the short- and long-run behavior of primary commodity prices and the implications of movements in these prices for developing countries. Most earlier studies of the long-term trend in the net barter terms of trade between primary commodities and manufactures have suffered from statistical shortcomings. In this analysis, the authors use a fairly new statistical approach called structural time series, which they claim, overcomes those shortcomings. The tests that were run indicate that the deflated commodity price index is a stationary series with a unit root. The derived structural model outperforms ARIMA models in terms of fit and forecasting. The authors argue against the idea of"structural breaks"in the data. The results support the conclusion that the net barter terms of trade has declined an estimated 0.6 percent a year.Geographical Information Systems,Economic Theory&Research,Educational Technology and Distance Education,Econometrics,Environmental Economics&Policies

Capability-Deprivation as Determinant of Underweight in Children: Perspectives from an Indian Case-Study

The Capability Approach argues individual advantage should be evaluated in the space of freedom of choice, that is in the space of capability. Yet, empirical applications are hampered by the lack of appropriate data and indicators. This paper aims at providing a reliable and valid indicator measuring deprivation of capability as lack of relative autonomy. Furthermore, it explores its usefulness through an ad hoc case study. Thus, it analyzes the role of women's relative autonomy for the underweight of infants and young children in a rural patriarchal community of India. Inspired by the extended model of care presented in Engle, Menon and Haddad (1999), we estimate regression coefficients in the model by Ordinary Least Square on a probabilistic random sample purposely collected. Results point out autonomy in mobility in a patriarchal society is negatively associated with the nutritional status of children. The norm-based economic framework suggests focusing on ‘external capabilities’ at the community level for policy interventions aimed at increasing freedom of choice of present and future generations

Revisiting Italian Emigration Before the Great War: A Test of the Standard Economic Model

Among the many studies on migration before the Great War, Italy has received little attention, with a few notable exceptions and without providing a convincing explanation of its economic and demographic determinants. Standard neoclassical approaches explain emigration as driven by relative wages, relative employment rates and the stock of previous emigrants. We aim at improving on earlier contributions by covering all migration outflows from Italy to the most significant destination countries and by adopting the most consistent and up-to-date econometric approaches. As it turns out, the standard model is not fully confirmed and a more nuanced analysis is needed

On Italian Economic Development: What the Long-term Says About the Short-term

In most of the literature on Italian economic development it is generally claimed that it was during the times of Giolitti that Italy came to be a rapidly industrializing country. In this paper we show that Italian economic development increasingly gained in speed during the first half a century after Unity. There are five breaking points that can be taken as “structural”, moments when the GDP growth trajectory changes and the economy enters a new phase. The first phase goes from 1861 to 1913, with its steady growth process, characterized by an acceleration in the last fifteen years. The second phase includes the two World Wars and the twenty-year period in between, from 1914 to 1946, with the ups and downs of the post-war rebound and the Great Depression. The third phase coincides with the post-war growth, from 1947 to the mid-Seventies, when the end of the Bretton Woods system, the first oil “shock” and the buildup of social tensions in Italy brought it to an end. It was in seven thousand days, during that phase, that Italy was able to converge to the other advanced economies’ growth path. Between 1975 and 2001 a fourth phase takes place, characterized by “productive decentralization”, “competitive devaluations”, and a slower growth rate, albeit in line with that of the other main economies. Italy undergoes the years of the “productivity slowdown” exploiting the margins on the cost side, without fundamentally changing its economic structure, with low investment and innovation rates. Between 1999 and 2001 the signs of a further phase start to materialize. Italian capitalism adapts with a jobless growth of its export sector and a non-productive employment growth for the rest of its firms. While industry keeps losing ground, the service sector continues to expand. And yet, it is more and more temporary, part-time, and precarious employment that grow. The lesson is that “nothing is forever”: nothing guarantees that even if we implemented all the “reforms” that we were told we would go back to on the old growth paths. Today we are on a track which is a declining table, and we would have to change too many things, this is what the long term says

Alternative Subsidy Reduction Paths: Commodity, Fiscal, and Monetary Policy Linkages

In the case of the U.S. agricultural policy, this paper shows how governmental intervention can be formally incorporated in a conditional-vector-error-correcting model. From the resulting theoretical framework and empirical analysis, formal hypotheses are tested regarding both forward and backward linkages among money, exchange rates, and agricultural and nonagricultural markets. Consistent with the current Uruguay Round of the GATT negotiations, a number of policy simulations are conducted with the constructed empirical model. Phased reductions in the degree of subsidization in the U.S. agricultural sector are shown, through these policy simulations, to alter the feedback effects from money to prices as well as the dynamic path for exchange rates

Swords and Plowshares: Regional Trade Agreements and Political Conflict in Africa

The end of the Cold War and the apparent stability of the contemporary international system, in which the probability of a major war is at its lowest for centuries, have spurred a lively debate on the causes of peace. One of the most popular explanations is based on the classic liberal statement that economic interdependence reduces political conflict. Globalisation, narrowly defined as the increase in the quantity and quality of international economic exchanges experienced in the last few years, would then be one of the main reasons for international political stability. Even at the regional level, therefore, the increase in economic intercourse should bring, as a welcome political externality, the amelioration of international conflict. This view posits, for instance, that the emergence of a «zone of peace» within Western Europe has been brought about by the creation of a common market which has created a powerful incentive to avoid political conflict. Or that in other areas, such as Latin America, the recent increase in regional stability would rest on the launch of Mercosur and the greater interdependence that it has brought about. The hypothesis is that Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) facilitate economic interdependence, which in turn facilitate political stability. In this paper we apply this hypothesis to the African case where a significant number of RTAs has been created in the last decades. Expectations of increased political stability have not, however, been confirmed. This does not necessarily undermine the general proposition of a positive correlation between interdependence and peace, but it does suggest that the relationship between the two elements may be more complicated than often acknowledged. On the one hand, African RTAs may simply not have produced the necessary level of trade and investment for a significant modification of political preferences. On the other hand, interdependence may be a necessary condition for peace, but it may also be insufficient, as its full impact on political preferences may require specific domestic institutions

Loan Size and Credit Rationing Under Asymmetric Information

In this paper we analyze the effects of adverse selection due to asymmetric information on the optimizing behavior of risk neutral firms and banks in a competitive loan market. Realized film returns have the monotone likelihood ratio property (MLRP) with respect to quality, in the sense of Milgrom (1981). This property encompasses the assumptions which characterize previous models such as Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) and De Meza and Webb (1987), allowing for a more general framework. Moreover, similary to Milde and Riley (1988), the present model has loans of variable size, as opposed to the fixed loan size of Stiglitz and Weiss and De Meza and Webb. The references to a parameter of “organizational complexity”of the firm, defined by the prevailing type of economies of scale and costs, and to a Wilson (1977) construction of the contracting game, whereby uninformed lenders move first in a three-stage pure strategy game, differentiate the present model from Milde and Riley's with respect to two main elements: (i) while Milde and Riley's model is based on three different and unrelated cases, our model is able to subsume the various cases within a unified framework; (ii) while Milde and Riley's assumptions rule out the possibility of pooling equilibria, the Wilson construction in our model entails the possibility of both separating and pooling equilibria. In particular, pooling equilibria obtain whenever applicants of different quality have indifference curves so similar that banks are unable to screen out their projects. This result strengthens the possibility of credit rationing even in the presence of signaling through the size of the loan. Both separating and pooling equilibria entail the possibility of type I” credit rationing of given quality types

Cento ragazzi e un capitano. La brigata Giustizia e Libert\ue0 "Montagna" e la Resistenza sui monti dell'alto Reno tra storia e memoria

Il volume ricostruisce la cronaca e la storia di venti mesi di guerra partigiana sulle montagne dell'alto Reno (Bo) e le vicende della Brigata Giustizia e Libert\ue0 "Montagna" e delle altre formazioni che agirono su quei monti. Fu a Gaggio Montano, tagliati a mezzo dalla linea difensiva messa in piedi dalle armate germaniche per resistere all'avanzata alleata, che un gruppo di giovani nel giugno del '44 diede vita a una formazione partigiana che si copr\uec d'onore, la Brigata Giustizia e Libert\ue0 "Montagna". Tra quei giovani c'erano tra gli altri Enzo Biagi, Renato Frabetti, Gigino Amaduzzi, Leonardo Gualandi, oltre a Sisto Ardeni (padre dell'autore del volume) e il diciottenne Francesco Berti Arnoaldi Veli, il partigiano Checco, con suo fratello minore Paolo. Sulla base di fonti documentali, di materiali lasciati dalla Brigata e di testimonianze scritte e orali tra cui il prezioso diario di Paolo, il libro traccia, giorno per giorno, il percorso compiuto da quei "cento ragazzi" al comando del capitano Pietro Pandiani nei lunghi mesi alla macchia e descrive la liberazione di Gaggio, Lizzano e dei paesi limitrofi, l'amministrazione di guerra delle giunte nominate dal CLN e il lungo dopoguerra con i suoi strascichi di sangue

La verifica dell'ipotesi di non stazionarietà nelle serie temporali

Classical asymptotic theory cannot be applied to the estimation of nonstazionary autoregressive processes. Unit-root tests have been developed by Fuller (1976), and Dickey and Fuller (1979,1981). Later contributions by Evans and Savin (1981,1984), Sargan and Bargawa (19839, and Phillips (1987a,1987b,1988) have developed a new asymptotic theory for integreted stochastic processes. However, the application to economic time series appears to be unable to discriminate between stochastic and deterministic trends, as both can be nested in a model whose empirical characteristics can hardly be distinguished on a pure statistical ground, due to the low power of the tests and to the small samples that are available