Perceived Wealth as a Poverty Measure for Constructing a Poverty Profile. A Case Study Of Four Villages In Rural Tanzania

Poverty assessment and targetting usually relies on expensive, large scale survey data. We argue that, in some cases, exploiting information villagers have on their immediate neighbors in close-knit agricultural societies might provide an alternative. We use the results of a participatory wealth ranking gathered in four villages in Tanzania and explore correlations between perceived wealth and indicators related to household characteristics, human capital, housing and durables, and productive assets. Comparing our results to a similar analysis using houshold expenditure survey data, we find that participatory methods confirm the validity of most commonly used poverty indicators, but we also find some remarkable differences.

Modelling Trends in Food Market Integration: Method and an Application to Tanzanian Maize Markets

Pushed by increasing availability of price data and extensive market liberalisation efforts in many developing countries, research on food market integration has evolved rapidly over the last two decades. Empirical methods to measure market integration diverged in two directions: on the one hand, there is the Parity Bounds Model (PBM), while on the other hand the use of Threshold Autoregressive (TAR) Models has been proposed. This article provides a discussion of the two methods and argues that TAR models are more able to capture the dynamics of the arbitrage process underlying interconnected markets. Furthermore, we extend the standard TAR model to include a time trend in both the threshold and the adjustment parameter. Using weekly maize price data on seven selected markets in Tanzania, we illustrate how both transaction cost and the speed of adjustment have changed during the nineties.market integration, transaction costs, thresholds, maize, Tanzania, Agribusiness, F15, O18,

Dynamic Price Adjustment in Spatially Separated Food Markets with Transaction Costs

This paper presents an alternative technique to analyze market integration using price data, linking the cointegration version of Ravallion's dynamic model with the recent switching regression approaches as in Baulch's Parity Bounds Model. The Band- Threshold Autogression (Band-TAR) model allows for dynamic analysis of the adjustment process as well as for trade discontinuities and transaction costs, thereby avoiding some of the unrealistic assumptions of both approaches. We apply the model to the same rice price data on the Philippines as Baulch and find that, contrary to Baulch, the efficient arbitrage conditions are often not satisfied and unexploited profits are common, albeit relatively small. At least on one important trade route, we find evidence of substantial inefficiences.

In Search of Financial Globalization Traps

The question whether global financial integration is beneficial for everyone remains highly disputed. It is often assumed that financial globalization involves threshold effects, where integration is worthwhile only when certain preconditions are met. However, it has also been noted that financial account liberalization also brings about considerable additional indirect benefits. These indirect benefits are often the same as the preconditions, such that there exists a complex two-way relationship between financial globalization and the preconditions/additional benefits. Such a relationship can lead to financial globalization traps, where some economies are trapped at a low level stable equilibrium, while others enjoy ever increasing financial integration. In this paper, we use de facto indicators of international financial integration to investigate if the dynamics of financial integration exhibit signs of such thresholds and traps. We present a parametric way of estimating these important parameters, based on recently developed sample splitting and threshold estimation methods. We find that there are indeed signs of multiple equilibriums if we look at the growth rates of total assets and liabilities. We also find that a group of countries are apparently caught in a high debt stock trap.

Aid Effectiveness, Debt Relief and Public Finance Response: Evidence from a panel of HIPC Countries

Through the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, substantial amounts of debt relief have been granted to a set of low-income countries as an alternative instrument of aid delivery. The theoretical (and moral) arguments in favour of debt relief are well established. However, the question whether debt relief is a more effective instrument of development assistance in practice is an empirical question. Hence, in this paper we investigate, for a panel of 28 decision point HIPC countries, the intertemporal linkages between debt relief and other fiscal variables such as current expenditure, government investment, taxation and domestic borrowing, in comparison to the effects of more traditional forms of development assistance, namely (non-debt relief) grants and concessional loans. To do so, we estimate a panel VAR and look at impulse response functions. Overall, we find that HIPC (only) debt relief impact on fiscal variables to follow fairly complex dynamics. For example, debt relief initially reduces government investment, but the effect becomes positive after two years, well outperforming other modes of aid delivery.

Building an Application-specific Memory Hierarchy on FPGA

The high potential performance of FPGAs cannot be exploited if a design suffers a memory bottleneck. Therefore, a memory hierarchy is needed to reuse data in on-chip memories and minimize the number of accesses to off-chip memory

Finding Bounds on Ehrhart Quasi-Polynomials

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Who Engages in Water Scarcity Conflicts? A Field Experiment with Irrigators in Semi-arid Africa

Does water scarcity induce conflict? And who would engage in a water scarcity conflict? In this paper we look for evidence of the relation between water scarcity and conflictive behavior. With a framed field experiment conducted with smallholder irrigators from semi-arid Tanzania that replicates appropriation from an occasionally scarce common water flow we assess what type of water users is more inclined to react in conflictive way to scarcity. On average, water scarcity induces selfish appropriation behavior in the experiment which is regarded as conflictive in the Tanzanian irrigator communities where strong noncompetition norms regulate irrigation water distribution. But not all react to water scarcity in the same way. Poor, marginalized, dissocialized irrigators with low human capital and with higher stakes are most likely to react with conflictive appropriation behavior to water scarcity. Viewed from a political ecology perspective we conclude that circumstances in Tanzania are conducive to resource scarcity conflicts. Water scarcity and water values are increasing, and water governance institutions entail exclusionary elements. Moreover, a higher likelihood to react in a conflictive way to water scarcity coincides with real economic and political inequalities which could form a basis for mobilization for more violent ways of competing for scarce resources