Land Encroachment: India’s Disappearing Common Lands

Opportunistic land encroachment, resulting from costly and incomplete enforcement of common land boundaries, is a problem in many less-developed countries. A multi-period model of such encroachment is presented in this paper. The model accounts explicitly for the cumulative effects of non-compliance of regulations designed to protect a finite, non-renewable resource . in this case common land . from private expropriation. Gradual evolution of property rights from common to private . the consequence of encroachment . is demonstrated to be an equilibrium. To prevent the complete loss of common land, full enforcement must be the rule rather than the exception.enforcement, encroachment, dynamic optimisation, India,

Wanted dead and alive: Are hunting and protection of endangered species compatible?

The paper shows that civil war in Burundi in the 1990s has provoked an unprecedented decline in government revenue. Both foreign aid transfers and revenue from domestic sources dried up, inducing the government to rely more on inflation tax. Using quarterly data covering the period from 1980:1 to 2002:4 to measure the sensitivity of money demand to inflation we find that the long-run semi-elasticity of inflation to real money in circulation trebled between the pre-war to the war period. The remarkable increase of the semi-elasticity translates what is known in the literature as economic agents. .flight from domestic currency., a strategy that limits the governments capacity to use inflation tax to compensate for the loss in more traditional revenue sources. Shedding light on the behaviour of the demand for real money amidst persistent political and economic instability, illustrates the limits of using inflation and money creation as a dependable source of government revenue.

Analytic cell decomposition and analytic motivic integration

The main results of this paper are a Cell Decomposition Theorem for Henselian valued fields with analytic structure in an analytic Denef-Pas language, and its application to analytic motivic integrals and analytic integrals over \FF_q((t)) of big enough characteristic. To accomplish this, we introduce a general framework for Henselian valued fields $K$ with analytic structure, and we investigate the structure of analytic functions in one variable, defined on annuli over $K$. We also prove that, after parameterization, definable analytic functions are given by terms. The results in this paper pave the way for a theory of \emph{analytic} motivic integration and \emph{analytic} motivic constructible functions in the line of R. Cluckers and F. Loeser [\emph{Fonctions constructible et int\'egration motivic I}, Comptes rendus de l'Acad\'emie des Sciences, {\bf 339} (2004) 411 - 416]

Polytopes of Minimum Positive Semidefinite Rank

The positive semidefinite (psd) rank of a polytope is the smallest $k$ for which the cone of $k \times k$ real symmetric psd matrices admits an affine slice that projects onto the polytope. In this paper we show that the psd rank of a polytope is at least the dimension of the polytope plus one, and we characterize those polytopes whose psd rank equals this lower bound. We give several classes of polytopes that achieve the minimum possible psd rank including a complete characterization in dimensions two and three

Parks, Buffer Zones, and Costly Enforcement

The reality of protected area management is that enforcing forest and park boundaries is costly and so most likely incomplete, due in part to the pressures exerted on the boundaries by local people who often have traditionally relied on the park resources. Buffer zones are increasingly being proposed and implemented to protect both forest resources and livelihoods. Developing a spatially-explicit optimal enforcement model, this paper demonstrates that there is a trade-off between the amount spent on enforcement, the size of a formal buffer zone, and the extent to which a forest can be protected from illegal extraction. Indeed, given the reality of limited enforcement budgets, a forest manager with a mandate to protect a whole forest may in fact end up doing a worse job than one who is able to incorporate an appropriately sized buffer zone into their management plans that, combined with more effective enforcement of a smaller exclusion zone, provide the appropriate incentives for villagers to extract only in the periphery of the forest, rather than venture further into the forest.

Spatial and Temporal Modeling of Community Non-Timber Forest Extraction

This paper examines the interaction of spatial and dynamic aspects of resource extraction from forests by local people. Highly cyclical and varied across both space and time, the patterns of resource extraction resulting from the spatial-temporal model bear little resemblance to the patterns drawn from focusing either on spatial or temporal aspects of extraction, as is typical in both the modeling and empirical literature to date. Combining the spatial-temporal model with a measure of success in community forest management.the ability to avoid open-access resource degradation.characterizes the impact of incomplete property rights on patterns of resource extraction and stocks. Key words: Spatial and temporal modeling; renewable resources; non-timber forest products; common property resources

Analyzing the Impact of Excluding Rural People from Protected Forests: Spatial Resource Degradation and Rural Welfare

This paper examines how forest-dependent villagers meet a resource requirement when they are excluded from some area of a forest. Forest managers who value both pristine and degraded forest should take into account a .displacement effect. resulting in more intensive villager extraction elsewhere, and a .replacement effect. in which villagers purchase more of the resource from the market. Similarly, forest managers who have poverty concerns should recognize that exclusion zones tend to be more costly to villagers without market access and those with low opportunity costs of labour- typically the poorest villagers.