Speculative Price Bubbles in the Rice Market and the 1974 Bangladesh Famine

This paper investigates the role played by speculative price bubbles in destabilizing food markets in Bangladesh during the 1974 famine. The hypothesis of speculative price bubbles in the rice market is tested using weekly price data. These tests are based on a theoretical model of storable food markets in which agents exhibit rational expectations. It is shown that such markets are susceptible to destabilizing trends by self-fulfilling expectations. While ¡°explosive price bubbles¡± have received extensive attention in macroeconomics, they have not been used in development economics to explain famines. Amartya Sen has hypothesized that speculative forces are a possible source of instability in the food market. Our empirical tests based on techniques from the recent literature on price bubbles lend some credence to the hypothesis that excessive speculation may have produced price bubbles in the rice market which directly contributed to the Bangladesh famine in 1974.

Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity--A Review Article

Contemporary economics is currently undergoing a crisis as reflected by a decline in its influence on public policy discourse. The abject failure of academic economics to effectively address issues of the transitional economies or to produce a satisfactory explanation of the East Asian economic crisis has added to this negative image. This paper reviews Francis Fukuyama's recent book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity to present an interdisciplinary perspective on many of the topics economists have come to claim as theirs only. According to Fukuyama, there are many issues in societal behavior that cannot be satisfactorily explained by the assumption of rational economic agents. He believes that social capital is a major contributing factor in building economic prosperity around the world.Economics

Relations between the growth of mathematics and economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Includes bibliographical references (p. 20-22)