Economics and Finance

The way jurisdiction over land is distributed among members of a community has a powerful influence over how efficiently land is used, the incidence of poverty, and the level of inequality in the community. Yet much land in less developed countries is underutilized and/or misused from a sustainability standpoint: lack of access to land or unfavorable terms of access remain a fundamental cause of poverty. In addition, unmet demands for land can be a source of political destabilization. At the same time, there presently exist unusual opportunities to reopen the issue of access to land. They include an increasing concern with the efficiency costs of inequality in land distribution, devolution of common property resource management to users, large scale redefinitions of property rights in the context of transition economies in Eastern and central Europe and the end of white rule in South Africa, liberalization of land markets, mounting pressure to deal with environmental issues, the proliferation of civil society organizations voicing the demands of the rural poor, and more democratic forms of governance. Much attention has been given to state-led redistributive land reforms. Other channels include inheritance and inter-vivos transfers, intrahousehold and intracommunity land allocations, community titling of open access resources, the distribution of common property resources and the individualization of rights, decollectivization, land markets and land market-assisted land reforms, and land rental contracts. This book analyzes each of these channels of access to land, and recommends ways of making them more effective.

Adam Smith's thought was indebted to the classical training prevailing in the educational system of his day. A careful reading of all his writings can prove the extent of this debt. Classical influences are obviously more numerous and easily discernible in the philosophical works, but are not absent from the economic masterpiece. They have been described by the author without having recourse to conjectures or implications, rather by analysing the topics whose classical origin can be ascertained. The book has been divided into chapters devoted to the traditional branches of knowledge treated by Adam Smith: natural philosophy, ethics, jurisprudence, economics, literature; plus a postscript.

Smith was not only influenced by classical doctrines but he also selected from them arguments

suited to support his own ideas.

Adam Smith's System is a study in classical economic thought and methodology. It portrays Adam Smith as a Stoic philosopher who wanted virtue to be relevant to this life rather than to the next. His central purpose was to define a set of laws, a jurisprudence in the widest possible sense, which would permit economic and political liberalism to proceed without triggering long‐run moral degeneration. Smith argued that the conflict between morals and wealth was only apparent, because it was possible to synthesize the seeming contraries with better laws and moral rules.

All of Smith's writings are analysed, including his writings on morals and methodology, art and rhetoric, and his political and economic writings. The relevance of Wealth of Nations is analysed, and Smith's theories of free trade and economic growth are put into context. It is shown that Smith was primarily concerned with the very broad intellectual endeavour to replace the Aristotelian world‐view, the bulwark and inspiration of medieval Christian thought, with an outlook that was more consistent with Newtonian science.

The Arab Spring constitutes perhaps the most far-reaching political and economic transition since the end of communism in Europe. For too long, the economic aspirations of the people in the region, especially young people, have been ignored by leaders in Arab countries and abroad. Competing views as to how best to meet these aspirations are now being debated in the region. The outcome will shape Arab societies for generations to come. This book argues that significant economic reforms must accompany the major political transitions that are underway. Although each country has a different economic structure and history and must make its own way forward, there are spill-overs from trade and investment linkages, the contagion of news cycles, interaction of people and sharing of expectations that are too great to ignore. Some common foundation of the new Arab economies is needed. Towards that end, this volume addresses four central challenges of economic reform in the Arab world. First, with two-thirds of the population under the age of thirty, the disproportionate burdens of unemployment and poor education can no longer be heaped on youth. Second, while some government policies may have improved the living standards of Arab citizens in the past, they have also entrenched cronies, enriched a small elite, and become unaffordable. Third, if Arab economies are to compete in the 21st century they cannot depend solely on oil and gas money, remittances, and tourism, but will require active, independent private sectors. And finally, the relative isolation of Arab economies—both from each other and from the world—must end. Rather than providing specific lists of recommendations, this book sets forth a set of guidelines and priorities for reformers who will begin creating new opportunities for youth, rebuilding the institutions of the state, diversifying the private sector, and cooperating with each other and integrating with the world economy.

The increase in life expectancy is arguably the most remarkable by‐product of modern economic growth. In the last 30 years we have been gaining roughly 2.5 years of longevity every decade both in Europe and in the United States. This progress has outpaced the most optimistic scenarios and documented that demographic projections are no more reliable than economic forecasts. This book looks closely into those challenges, raising a few fundamental issues at both the macroeconomic and microeconomic levels. Among these: is it possible to turn the challenges faced by ageing and longevity into a long‐term productive opportunity? Can advanced economies engineer a healthy ageing scenario with long‐term spillovers in terms of enhanced technological progress and acceleration of long‐term growth? What is the microeconomic relationship between ageing and productivity, and how can specific policies postpone any age‐related decay in productivity at the firm and individual levels?

This book presents the report on the European economic system, which was submitted to the President of the European Commission in July 2003. The report is divided into three parts. The first contains an assessment of the economic performance in terms of growth, stability, and cohesion. The second explores the challenges facing the European Union. The third presents a series of policy recommendations for the future.

This book contains chapters that deal with the agricultural crisis in India. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the macroeconomic and micro-level issues associated with the crisis, as well as the underlying historical forces. It examines the factors contributing to the crisis, including environmental degradation, the decrease in landholding size, plateauing of crop yields from the present farm technology, and withdrawal of state support. The book shows that rapid growth of India's gross domestic product has not created enough opportunities for rural labour force to make the transition from agriculture to the rapidly growing sectors of the economy. Agricultural transformation has been slow due to low growth of farm productivity, low agricultural prices, inadequate employment opportunities outside agriculture, and low demand for agricultural products due to stagnation of per capita food consumption during 1993–2005. The book presents case studies on farmer suicides and provides insights into their underlying causes, arguing that suicides are symptomatic of a deep-rooted crisis in agriculture. The book claims that agriculture in India can be revived only by addressing two dimensions of the agricultural distress, namely, agricultural development crisis and agrarian crisis. It emphasizes the need to improve public investment in agricultural infrastructure and social overheads such as quality education and health facilities in rural areas.

This book examines the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the social and economic context of poverty and economic crisis in developing and transition countries. It challenges the assumption — implicit in AIDS policy — that differences in sexual behavior are adequate to explain differences in HIV prevalence between populations. Using an epidemiological approach, the book shows how people who are malnourished, burdened with parasites and infectious diseases, and who lack access to medical care are more vulnerable to all diseases. It explains the specific mechanisms by which undernutrition, micronutrient deficiency, malaria, soil-transmitted helminths, schistosomiasis, and other parasitic illnesses increase the risk of HIV transmission and epidemic spread of HIV/AIDS in poor populations. A theme throughout the book is that the sexual transmission of HIV diverts attention from the social and economic context of profound poverty. The distraction of sex is compounded by Western stereotypes of African sexuality, perpetuated through reliance on anecdotal evidence and the construction of a notion of fundamental dissimilarity among peoples of different world regions. The book evaluates current methods in epidemiology and health economics, which do not take account of the interactions among diseases that increase risk of transmission of HIV in poor populations. It criticizes HIV-prevention policies as narrow, shortsighted, and dead-end because they fail to address the economic and social context in which risky behaviors occur. Finally, the book offers pragmatic solutions to social, economic, and biological factors that promote disease transmission, including the spread of HIV.

This book explores the genesis and evolution of the Anti-dumping Agreement (ADA) from the perspective of the developing countries. It also outlines the evolution of the legal provisions in the existing agreement and the current ADA in a non-technical manner from a developing country viewpoint. The use of anti-dumping in developed and developing countries in a comparative framework is explained. It then deals with various economic and non-economic justifications of anti-dumping use. The wide-ranging proposals for the reform of the World Trade Organization (WTO) anti-dumping code are reported. It finally indicates the suggestions regarding the proposals that these countries need to focus on in the current round of negotiations. It is mentioned that the Agreement and its implementation both are heavily biased against the developing countries.

Important results in the applied welfare literature are used to extend a conventional Harberger cost-benefit analysis. A conventional welfare equation is obtained for marginal policy changes in a general equilibrium economy with tax distortions. It is extended to accommodate internationally traded goods, time, income taxes, and non-tax distortions, including externalities, non-competitive behaviour, public goods, and price-quantity controls. The welfare analysis is developed in stages, and where possible is explained using diagrams, to make it more amenable to the different institutional arrangements encountered in applied work. Computable welfare expressions are solved using demand-supply elasticities. In a conventional cost-benefit analysis, lump sum transfers are used to separate the welfare effects of individual policy variables. This is important because it allows policy evaluation to be divided across specialist agencies. These transfers are carefully examined to identify the important role played by the marginal social cost of public funds (MCF) in policy evaluation when governments balance their budgets with distorting taxes. This book separates income effects for marginal policy changes in the shadow value of government revenue. As a scaling coefficient that converts efficiency effects into dollar changes in private surplus, it makes income effects irrelevant in single (aggregated) consumer economies, and conveniently isolates distributional effects in heterogeneous consumer economies. This decomposition is used to test for Pareto improvements, and to examine the separate, but related roles of the shadow value of government revenue and the MCF in applied work.