In Israel, rural communities are those with up to 2000 residents, and rural areas include only rural communities. This paper explores the dependence of rural incomes on nearby urban areas. This dependence is mostly implied by rural-to-urban or urban-to-rural selective migration (or both)....

Replaced with revised version of paper Jan. 11, 2012

Democracy tends to cultivate short-sighted politicians, for whom the horizon extends more or less till next election. This feature gives rise to a discrepancy between the time rate of discount of a country’s polity and the interest rates at which the country borrows. I show how this...

The income inequality implications of land reform are examined for the case of Georgia using regression-based inequality decomposition techniques. An egalitarian land redistribution is likely to equalize per-capita income among farm households, implying that continuing the land reform process in...

This paper explores the relationship between income distribution, prices, production efficiency and aggregate output in a decentralized search economy. We show that income distribution determines how competitive the market is, and thereby affects production efficiency and aggregate output. It is...

This article reviews the evidence on agricultural service cooperatives in two countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—Ukraine and Kazakhstan—and considers the reasons for their lack of development compared to the countries of North America and Western Europe. Only one farm...

Tajikistan, with 93% of its surface area taken up by mountains and 65% of its labor force employed in agriculture, is judged to be highly vulnerable to risks, including climate change risks and food insecurity risks. The article examines a set of land use policies and practices that can be used...