Starting from a representative welfare function, this paper developed a simple method to endogenously specify the weights for the Human Development Index (HDI), and finds that the current equal-weighted HDI significantly biases down the weight of life expectancy. The weights proposed by this...

Media reports could help shape consumer attitudes towards food quality and safety. By introducing an information treatment with positive or negative media coverage, we study the impact on consumer preference for pork products. The hypothesis is tested by a hypothetical choice experiment with 788...

In China führten Reformen seit 1978 zu gewaltigen wirtschaftlichen Umwälzungen, doch die zunehmende Urbanisierung stellt das Land vor große Herausforderungen. Zunächst fehlt für die Produktivitätssteigerung der Industrie ein adäquates ländliches Bildungssystem. Zweitens verbleiben durch...

This thesis addresses 3 different aspects of food and poverty related problems in developing countries. The first essay presents a new operational concept of transaction costs that firstly allows assessing the magnitude and secondly recognizing the non homogeneity of food products. This is...

The thesis contains three essays in the field of environmental policy. In the first paper, we study the relationship between the agri-environmental payments for farmers and wildlife. The effects of EU agri-environmental programs (AEPs) on the environment have been mixed. Spending on AEPs has...

Over the past four decades, China has made fruitful achievements in agricultural development, which attracted a great deal of attention within the academy. Meanwhile, Chinese agriculture has also undergone dramatic and continuing structural changes (Chen et al. 2009; Cao and Birchenall 2013),...

Diese Dissertation enthält vier Essays über die Messung und Determinanten von Armut, Gender Gap, Ernährungsunsicherheit und Unterernährung in Pakistan. Alle Arbeiten verwenden aktuelle Methoden und Ansätze der einschlägigen Literatur und erweitern teilweise die angewandte Literatur. Eine...

While there is rich literature covering theoretical concepts of transaction costs very few empirical strategies have been provided to estimate them. The theoretical framework proposed in this paper is based on a unit value decomposition and dedines transaction costs as the difference between a...

In this paper we study the latent demand structure for food diversity in India using data from the 2012 Consumer Expenditure Survey. We assume that consumers who have not yet attained calorie sufficiency favor calories over food diversity and once passing a threshold of subsistence substitute...