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Much African land currently has low productivity and has attracted investors purchasing (or leasing) land as a speculative option on higher future prices or productivity. If land deals are to be beneficial they need to induce productivity enhancing investments. Some of these will be publicly...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009367429
effect on income. However, in Africa rugged terrain afforded protection to those being raided by slave traders. Since the … slave trade retarded subsequent economic development, in Africa ruggedness also has had a historical indirect positive … Africa the indirect positive effect dominates the direct negative effect. Looking within Africa, we provide evidence that the …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005136410
We estimate a time series model of weather shocks on English wheat yields for the early nineteenth century and use it to predict weather effects on yield levels from 1697 to 1871. This reveals that yields in the 1690s were depressed by unusually poor weather; and those in the late 1850s were...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011249371
Most-favoured-nation (MFN) trade liberalizations will always improve global economic welfare provided globally optimal environmental, and other, policies are in place. But since the latter proviso is not met in practice, empirical studies of the environmental and resource depletion effects of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005666805
This paper examines the role of liability for past environmental contamination in the privatization processes of … hypotheses regarding a privatization agency’s responses to the investor’s knowledge of cleanup costs. The empirical section of …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005504606
This paper presents evidence on a national-level electricity ladder which sees countries transition toward coal and natural gas, and finally nuclear power and modern renewables such as wind power, for their electricity needs as they develop. The extent to which countries climb the electricity...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008515763
This paper uses the natural experiment of Argentina's integration into world markets in the late-nineteenth century to provide evidence on the role of internal geography in shaping the effects of external integration. We develop a quantitative model of the distribution of economic activity...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011083840
We construct a model of revolution and transition to democracy under an individualistic and a collectivist culture. The main result is that, despite facing potentially larger collective action problems, countries with an individualistic culture are more likely to end up adopting democracy faster...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011266531
We estimate the income elasticity of government expenditures using variation in the international oil price as a plausibly exogenous source of within-country variation of countries’ permanent income. Our short run elasticity estimates, between 0.25-0.50, are generally somewhat smaller than the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009293665
We describe a model of fundraising in social groups, where private information about quality of provision is transmitted by social proximity. Individuals engage in voluntary provision of a pure collective good that is consumed by both neighbors and non-neighbors. We show that, unlike in the case...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009320406