Identifying the Sex Pheromone of the Sugarcane Borer Moth Economic impact of ACIAR project CS2/1991/680

Crop Production/Industries,

Measuring the poverty impact of ACIAR projects: a broad framework

This report sets out some broad ideas about how poverty evaluation could be conducted for ACIAR research projects. As with good benefit–cost analysis, there are good practices that need to be observed when undertaking poverty analysis. While poverty is a broad concept, and can be addressed through many means, these need to be grounded in some common understanding of the economics of poverty. This report is concerned mostly with quantitative evaluation, in the same sense that current ACIAR project evaluations are quantitative. That is, it is concerned with saying something about the order of magnitude of the effects of the project. Of course, qualitative analysis is important, and in most cases is a prelude to quantification — there is little point quantifying if you don’t understand what you are talking about. Quantification, however, provides a discipline and focus for qualitative speculation and provides an important extra dimension when comparing the effects of different projects. When quantifying, there are many sensible approaches that could be adopted. We will focus here on approaches that are broadly consistent with the current approaches to benefit–cost analysis and that could readily be used to augment those approaches. The report begins by reviewing some basic notions of poverty (Chapter 2) and then goes on (Chapter 3) to discuss in principle the ways that agricultural research could influence poverty. Chapter 4 explains, with the use of some examples, a range of analytical approaches that could be taken, and Chapter 5 draws some specific implications for ACIAR.poverty evaluation, benefit-cost analysis, poverty analysis, economics of poverty, quantitative evaluation, analytical, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Crop Production/Industries, Farm Management, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, International Development, Livestock Production/Industries, Production Economics,

RURAL AMERICA AND THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION: AN EXPLORATION OF POSSIBILITIES AND POTENTIALITIES

Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Zero Tillage for Weed Control in India: the Contribution to Poverty Alleviation

Crop Production/Industries, Food Security and Poverty,

Public and private spending for environmental protection: a cross-country policy analysis

OECD data are used to investigate public and private environmental expenditures and, although they are more complete and consistent than other datasets, they are still poor. This is important in the context of measuring the benefits of environmental protection, when little is really known about its actual costs. Despite these limitations, this study demonstrates that there has been no shift towards an increasing private sector burden relative to the public sector over time. The paper also finds little evidence to show that environmental expenditures negatively impact on economic growth, although there is inconsistency between the "no effects" finding of the competitiveness literature and the "negative effects" finding of most of the productivity literature. Finally, the elasticity of expenditure with respect to income is found to be 1.2, lower than would be expected if the "environmental demand effect" is significant in explaining the downward slope of the environmental Kuznets curve.

Shelf-life Extension of Leafy Vegetables: Evaluating the Impacts

Crop Production/Industries,

A Behavioral Model of Bargaining with Endogenous Types

We enrich a simple two-person bargaining model by introducing "behavioral types" who concede more slowly than does the average person in the economy. The presence of behavioral types profoundly influences the choices of optimizing types. In equilibrium, concessions are calculated to induce "reciprocity": a substantial concession by player i is followed by a period in which j is much more likely to make a concession than usual. This favors concessions by i that are neither very small nor large enough to end the bargaining immediately. A key difference from the traditional method of perturbing a game is that the actions of our behavioral types are not specified in absolute terms, but relative to the norm in the population. Thus their behavior is determined endogenously as part of a social equilibrium.Bargaining, Reputation, Endogenous type

Surface Free Energies, Interfacial Tensions and Correlation Lengths of the ABF Models

The surface free energies, interfacial tensions and correlation lengths of the Andrews-Baxter-Forrester models in regimes III and IV are calculated with fixed boundary conditions. The interfacial tensions are calculated between arbitrary phases and are shown to be additive. The associated critical exponents are given by $2-\alpha_s=\mu=\nu$ with $\nu=(L+1)/4$ in regime III and $4-2\alpha_s=\mu=\nu$ with $\nu=(L+1)/2$ in regime IV. Our results are obtained using general commuting transfer matrix and inversion relation methods that may be applied to other solvable lattice models.Comment: 21 pages, LaTeX 2e, requires the amsmath packag

Saving a Staple Crop: Impact of Biological Control of the Banana Skipper on Poverty Reduction in Papua New Guinea

Crop Production/Industries, Food Security and Poverty,