A detailed examination of Amartya Sen's theory of famines shows that it is logically impossible: it cannot work in the real world. His attempt to apply it to the Bengal Famine of 1943 relies on repeated and consistent misstatements of the evidence in his sources. He relies almost entirely on the...

This report examines the current state of knowledge about green growth in cities and outlines the key research questions and protocols that will guide the OECD Green Cities programme. It builds the case for an urban green growth agenda by examining the economic and environmental conditions that...

There is a large literature on the estimation of frontier production functions, much of it applied to low-income agriculture. However, much of this literature largely ignores nature's role in agricultural production. Because exogenous, natural production conditions (e.g., rainfall, soil quality,...

This paper introduces a method for estimating structural labor supply models in the presence of unobservable wages and deviations of households' marginal revenue product of self-employed labor from their shadow wage. This method is therefore remarkably robust to a wide range of assumptions about...

This paper introduces a method for estimating structural labor supply models in the presence of unobservable wages and deviations of households' marginal revenue product of self-employed labor from their shadow wage. This method is therefore robust to a wide range of assumptions about labor...

Background: Although the food crisis of 2007/2008 was a global one, arid countries, particularly those in the Arab region, were especially hard hit. Many subsequent policy prescriptions for food security emanated from multilateral organizations, NGOs and the countries themselves. While still...

This paper brings together development accounting techniques and the dual economy model to address the role that factor markets have in creating variation in aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). Development accounting research has shown that much of the variation in income across countries...

In this article, we simulate the concentration process within the German dairy sector employing a sector?wide optimization model. As a result, we get cost minimizing structures of the dairy sector for various time horizons depending on varying levels of transportation costs. We show that the...

Many nonmarket valuation models, such as the Ricardian model, have been estimated using cross sectional methods with a single year of data. Although multiple years of data should increase the robustness of such methods, repeated cross sections suggest the results are not stable. We argue that...

The issue of global warming has become a major topic in the international environmental debate. Alternative climate policy measures can be evaluated with the help of a simulation model that integrates economic and natural science considerations. A fully integrated assessment of the two-way...