Suchergebnisse

"This paper analyzes how electoral incentives affected the performance of a major decentralized conditional cash transfer program intended on reducing school dropout rates among children of poor households in Brazil. We show that while this federal program successfully reduced school dropout by 8 percentage points, the program's impact was 36 percent larger in municipalities governed by mayors who faced reelection possibilities compared to those with lame-duck mayors. First term mayors with good program performance were much more likely to get re-elected. These mayors adopted program implementation practices that were not only more transparent but also associated with better program outcomes"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

Uninsured natural disasters can have devastating effects on human welfare and economic growth, particularly in developing countries where large segments of the population are in poverty and government resources and capacity to assist in relief, recovery, and reconstruction are limited. Therefore there is interest in exploring how these countries can design and implement disaster relief financing and insurance programs. This paper discusses four aspects of the microeconomics of disaster relief financing and insurance programs that are important for the ex post impact evaluation of such programs: (1) use of game setups to analyze the private willingness-to-pay for disaster protection through risk transfer or risk retention instruments; (2) use of ex post analysis of existing disaster relief financing and insurance schemes (such as Mexico's programs) to analyze the willingness to provide political support to such schemes; (3) use of ex post analysis of existing schemes to analyze not only ex post coping with shock, but also the ex ante risk management impact of disaster relief financing and insurance schemes, with the expectation that the latter can have a large effects on growth; and (4) use of mainly global data to do ex post impact analysis of natural disasters and the resilience-enhancing value of disaster relief financing and insurance schemes (examples exist for the disaster-impact relationship that can be extended to the role of disaster relief financing and insurance in risk reduction, coping with shock, and risk management). The paper proposes concrete research projects to pursue the analysis of these four dimensions of micro-level impacts of disaster relief financing and insurance.

Contemporary Latin America experiences a rapidly declining share of agriculture in the total labour force, weak capacity for creating non-agricultural employment in rural areas and rapidly increasing migration to the towns, leaving the peasantry largely as an impoverished refuge sector. Suggested solutions include improving access to land, correcting relative factor price distortions and creating non-agricultural jobs in rural areas

Eine Analyse von Projekten der ländlichen Entwicklung seit 1970 zeigt, daß ihr Erfolg entscheidend davon abhängt, in welchem Umfang die betroffene soziale Regionaleinheit und die individuellen Haushalte von den Maßnahmen profitieren - sei es direkt oder aufgrund von wirtschaftlichen, sozialen oder ökologischen Folgewirkungen. Der Artikel gibt Anregungen für eine institutionelle Reorganisation entsprechender Projekte im lateinamerikanischen Raum

The laws of motion of capital in the world economic system are analyzed through the fundamental necessary relation between production and consumption capacities. The structural contrasts between center and periphery and domination of the former over the latter create specific barriers to the pro cess of accumulation that are overcome through external relationships among them. Specifically, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall in the center and, in the periphery, the deficit in the balance of payments, the low rate of investment, the limited market size, and the food crisis create the internal possibilities for these external relations. The laws of motion provide the objective basis for the contrasted relations between growth and income distribution in center and per iphery and for the deepening of dualism in the latter.