If services aren't delivered, people won't pay: the role of measurement problems and monitoring in Payments for Environmental Services

The idea of Payments for environmental services (PES) has an appealing simplicity, which may explain the success of the concept. However, successful projects are far limited though and two constraints have been identified in literature. The first is limited demand: too few service users are so confident about the mechanism that they are willing to pay. The second obstacle is poor knowledge on the institutional requirements entailing incentive and livelihood mechanisms which so far have received comparatively less attention. This paper focuses on both constraints by arguing that monitoring effectiveness and conditionality of PES schemes are crucial and that institutional arrangements for monitoring should be in place. By analysing in a systematic way what types of measurement problems there are, the paper shows that the type of monitoring that is required within a PES has consequences for the institutional arrangement needed for a successful PES. We find that the institutional arrangements for monitoring vary according to (i) the type of environmental service and its underlying production process, (ii) the extent to which the environmental service can be freely observed or measured, (iii) the extent to which activities of the resource managers who provide the environmental service can be freely observed, and finally (iv) the deterministic or stochastic nature of production processes.PES, monitoring, measurement, institutional arrangement, Environmental Economics and Policy,

Now we are 13. Open Research Online becomes a teenager!

The history of the Open University (UK) institutional repository (Open Research Online) is one of changing requirements as defined by its research community, institutional administrators and external HE policy. How the repository has responded to these changes has ensured its success. However, how we manage the (potentially) competing requirements of compliance monitoring and Open Access dissemination will determine the future of the repository

The Pitfalls of Transition: Crowding Out the National Virtues

In this paper a view is advanced that explains why the transition to markets did not always lead to the outcomes predicted by the Washington Consensus type strategies. Institutional portfolio theory is used to define a myriad of interests and goals of a transition economy. A model is developed in which external intervention and increased external monitoring are shown to lead to lessening of the intrinsic motivation within transition economies to pursue the reforms as prescribed by Washington Consensus sometimes resulting in very slow growth rates or even a decline of the GDP.external monitoring, institutional change, intrinsic motivation, portfolio theory, Washington consensus, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, P21, O43,

Blockholder Identity, Equity Ownership Structures and Hostile Takeovers

We determine firms' equity ownership structures and provide a theory of hostile takeovers by distinguishing the roles of two types of blockholders: rich investors and institutional investors. We also distinguish the roles of two types of stock markets: the block market and the market with small investors. Rich investors have their own money at stake while institutional investors are run by proffessional managers and hence face agency conflicts. Because rich investors face no agency problems they are better at monitoring managers. If their wealth is insufficient to control all corporations, then "agency-cost free" capital is scarce. We investigate the allocation of this scarce resource. A hostile takeover is the consequence of a state-contingent allocation of agency-cost free capital. We show that only rich investors engage in hostile takeovers. Institutional investors instead are either permanent blockholding monitors or facilitate takeovers by selling blocks to rich investors. Even though all firms are ex ante identical, some may rely on the takeover mechanism while others rely on permanent institutional monitoring. We characterize the ownership structure of firms showing, in particular, that (ex ante) identical firms can have different ownership structures. Some can have initially dispersed ownership while others have an institutional blockholder.

Improving women's and children's nutrition in sub-Saharan Africa : an issues paper

The main sources of malnutrition in Africa, as elsewhere, are inadequate food intake, excessive disease, maternal malnutrition, and deleterious food and health behavior. The authors review several successful innovative approaches to addressing nutrition problems in Africa: the Iringa Nutrition Program in Tanzania, the Zimbabwe Children's Supplementary Feeding Program, the Zaire Weaning Foods Processing Program, and the Senegal Growth Promotion Program. They identify the lessons from these programs, including the need: (a) to involve the community actively in program development; (b) for training in nutrition at all levels, from doctor to village health worker; (c) for strong growth monitoring and nutrition education components; (d) for close supervision, including regular supervisory visits to villages and health huts, discussions with clients, and observations; and (e) for a variety of institutional and financing mechanisms. Africa's nutrition problems require many of the same services as problems elsewhere - growth monitoring, nutrition education, targeted feeding, and food fortification. Africa shares the universal need for good training, management, communications, and information systems. But new and innovative institutional mechanisms are needed to address Africa's nutrition problems. Each country must look for its own institutional strengths and weaknesses in developing nutrition programs.Early Child and Children's Health,Nutrition,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Primary Education,Health Monitoring&Evaluation

Do UK Institutional Shareholders Monitor their Investee Firms?

As institutional investors are the largest shareholders in most listed UK firms, one expects them to monitor the firms they invest in. However, there is mounting empirical evidence which suggests that they do not perform any monitoring. This paper provides a new test on whether UK institutional investors engage in monitoring. The test consists of an event study on directors’ trades. If institutional shareholders act as monitors, their monitoring activities convey new information about a firm’s future value to other outside shareholders and reduce the informational asymmetry between the managers and the market. As a result, directors’ trades convey less information to the market, and the stock price reaction is weaker. However, our results show that institutional shareholders do not have any significant impact on the stock price reaction which stands in marked contrast with the impact that families, individuals and other firms have on stock prices.Insider trading;institutional investor monitoring;shareholder activism;corporate governance;ownership and control

Technology transfer potential of an automated water monitoring system

The nature and characteristics of the potential economic need (markets) for a highly integrated water quality monitoring system were investigated. The technological, institutional and marketing factors that would influence the transfer and adoption of an automated system were studied for application to public and private water supply, public and private wastewater treatment and environmental monitoring of rivers and lakes

Pattern of Interdependence of Aggregate FDI from the Same Source Country

This paper explores the possibility that monitoring resources explain the clustering in space of aggregate FDI from the same source country. Theoretically, the paper shows that independently of any institutional incentive setting, costly monitoring incites headquarters to locate new plants where monitoring resources are relatively cheap. Clustering of rms from the same source country is therefore interpreted as information sourcing. Empirical application finds that the importance of geographic neighbors to the location choice of US non-manufacturing FDI in Europe conform to the advanced hypothesis.Foreign direct investment, Spillovers, geographic agglomeration