Imperfect markets: A case study in Senegal.

Farmers in developing countries are confronted with imperfect markets. This has an impact on their production activities. When implementing developing projects these market imperfections should be taken into account. This paper is an attempt to discuss the impact of imperfect markets in the context of an irrigation project in village Pata, Senegal. The first section models the production decision of the agricultural household. The second section presents the irrigation project in Pata. The third section tests for the presence of imperfections in the credit and labour markets of Pata. I conclude by discussing the implications for the project.Case studies; Market; Markets; Studies;

Measure for measure: how well do we measure micro-level conflict intensity?.

Rich measures of micro-level violent conflict intensity are key for successfully providing insight into the legacy of civil war.Yet, the debate on how exactly conflict intensity should be measured has just started. This paper aims to fuel this awakening debate. It is demonstrated how existing and widely available data - population census data- can provide the basis for a useful measure of micro-level conflict intensity, i.e. a fine Wartime Excess Mortality Index (WEMI). In contrast to measures that are based on news reports or data from transitional justice records, WEMI is relatively neutral to the cause of excess mortality, giving equal weight to victims belonging to the conquering and defeated party, to victims of large-scale massacres and dispersed killings, to victims of violence in easily accessable locations and remote areas, and to direct and indirect victims of violence. The measure is illustrated for the case of Rwanda and it is shown that in straightfoward empirical application of the impact of armed conflict on schooling different measures for micro-level conflict intensity yield strikingly different results.armed conflict,micro-level conflict intensity measures,difference-in-difference,Rwanda,schooling;

Imperfect Markets: a Case Study in Senegal

Farmers in developing countries are confronted with imperfect markets. This has an impact on their production activities. When implementing developing projects these market imperfections should be taken into account. This paper is an attempt to discuss the impact of imperfect markets in the context of an irrigation project in village Pata, Senegal. The first section models the production decision of the agricultural household. The second section presents the irrigation project in Pata. The third section tests for the presence of imperfections in the credit and labour markets of Pata. I conclude by discussing the implications for the project.

Household coping in war- and peacetime: cattle sales in Rwanda, 1991-2001

The economic literature has given due attention to household coping strategies in peacetime. In contrast, little is known about such strategies in wartime. This paper studies the use of cattle as a buffer stock by Rwandan households during 1991-2001, a period characterized by civil war and genocide. It is found that the probability of selling cattle increases upon the occurrence of both peacetime and wartime covariant adverse income shocks. The peacetime cattle sales are largely explained by shifts in the household asset portfolio. In contrast, in 1994, the year of the genocide, almost half of the cattle sales were motivated by the need to buy food. However, we argue that the effectiveness of this coping strategy was severely reduced due to the wartime conditions. First, during the year of ethnic violence, cattle prices plummeted to less than half of their pre-genocide value. Second, we find that households most targeted in the violence did not sell cattle. We discuss several explanations for this latter finding.Coping Strategies, Buffer Stock Model, Cattle, Violent Conflict, Rwanda

Food Prices, Social Unrest and the Facebook Generation

Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Genocide and Land Scarcity: Can Rwandan Rural Households Manage?

During the nineties, Rwandan households had to cope with severe shocks of war and genocide. In addition, two major structural problems in Rwanda, land scarcity and declining soil fertility, remain unsolved. How do Rwandan households manage? This is an important question from a development perspective, but also from a security perspective, because uneven development increases the risk of peace collapse. To find an answer to our question, we study welfare gains and losses of a sample of 189 Rwandan rural households over the period 1990-2002. In our sample, many households were severely affected by the genocide. In addition, poverty and inequality increased. Moreover, we observe a lot of income mobility. Only one quarter of the households remained in the same income quintile over time. Especially the households headed by widows and prisoner's wives moved downward in the income distribution. Households who reduced their dependence on subsistence agriculture moved upward.

Leave None to Claim the Land. A Malthusian Catastrophe in Rwanda?

More than 200 years after its first publication, the Malthusian thesis is still much debated, albeit in a modified form. Rather than predicting a global catastrophe, most neo-Malthusians stress the local character of the relationship between population pressure, natural resource scarcity, and conflict as well as its dependency on the socio-political and economic context. This softened version of Malthus' thesis has received little empirical support in cross-country studies. In contrast, a number of sub-national analyses have provided some evidence for local conditional Malthusian catastrophes, although "catastrophe" is a big word since these studies have largely focused on low-intensity violence. This article adds to the small body of sub-national studies, but focuses on a high-intensity conflict, the Rwandan genocide. In particular, it provides a meso-level analysis of the relation between population pressure and the intensity of violence measured by the death toll among the Tutsi across 1,294 small administrative units. The results indicate that the death toll was significantly higher in localities with both high population density and little opportunity for young men to acquire land. On the one hand, this finding can be interpreted as support for the neo-Malthusian thesis. On the other hand, it is possible that another mechanism played, i.e. in densely populated areas it may have been relatively easy for the elite to mobilize the population, because of dependency relations through the land and labor market. Alternatively, in densely populated areas, there may have been more lootable assets, and the violence may have been opportunistic rather than driven by need or by fear.Armed Conflict, Micro-level Conflict Measures, Rwanda, Schooling

Household coping in war- and peacetime: cattle sales in Rwanda, 1991-2001.

The economic literature has given due attention to household coping strategies in peacetime. In contrast, little is known about such strategies in wartime. This paper studies the use of cattle as a buffer stock by Rwandan households during 1991-2001, a period characterized by civil war and genocide. It is found that the probability of selling cattle increases upon the occurrence of both peacetime and wartime covariant adverse income shocks. The peacetime cattle sales are largely explained by shifts in the household asset portfolio. In contrast, in 1994, the year of the genocide, almost half of the cattle sales were motivated by the need to buy food. However, we argue that the effectiveness of this coping strategy was severely reduced due to the wartime conditions. First, during the year of ethnic violence, cattle prices plummeted to less than half of their pre-genocide value. Second, we find that households most targeted in the violence did not sell cattle. We discuss several explanations for this latter finding.Case studies; Market; Markets; Studies; Sales;

Measure for Measure: How Well Do We Measure Micro-level Conflict Intensity?

Rich measures of micro-level violent conflict intensity are key for successfully providing insight into the legacy of civil war. Yet, the debate on how exactly conflict intensity should be measured has just started. This paper aims to fuel this awakening debate. It is demonstrated how existing and widely available data - population census data - can provide the basis for a useful measure of micro-level conflict intensity: a fine Wartime Excess Mortality Index (WEMI). It is argued that the proposed measure is particularly well suited for studying the legacy of civil wars that are characterized by a large death toll and by different forms of violence. The measure is illustrated for the case of Rwanda and it is shown that, in a straightforward empirical application of the impact of armed conflict on schooling, the estimated impact varies widely across WEMI and a large set of alternative conflict intensity measures for Rwanda. While the conflict intensity measure proposed in this paper requires further study and one probably needs a combination of various methodologies, this finding suggests the need for a careful understanding of what underlies the different measures and methodologies in use.