This paper discusses the policy issues facing the country of Sno TomJ e PrRncipe, a small island country in the Gulf of Guinea, given the discovery and imminent exploitation of large reserves of oil in its territorial waters. While presenting huge opportunities, the history of other African...

The turn to the use of mixed qualitative and quantitative (Q-Squared) methods in the analysis of poverty is a welcome development with large potential payoffs. While the benefits of mixing are not in doubt, the tensions involved in so doing have not received adequate attention. The aim of this...

How does concern for consumption relative to others (”relativity”) affect the progressivity of the optimal income tax structure? In this paper we revisit this literature and present a more detailed analysis of the solution to the non-linear income tax problem with consumption interdependence...

A structural model is developed to simulate the probability distributions of corn prices by month. The intent is to determine the relationship between model specifications, based on a rational expectations competitive storage framework, and the probability distributions of monthly prices....

This paper analyzes the impact of an ethanol import tariff in conjunction with a consumption mandate and tax credit. A tax credit alone acts as a subsidy to ethanol producers, equally benefiting exporters like Brazil. If an import tariff is imposed to offset the tax credit, world prices of...

Economists are now familiar with “between” and “within” group inequality decompositions, for race, gender, spatial units, etc. But what exactly is the normative significance of the empirical results produced by these decompositions? This paper raises some basic questions about policy...

In May 2004 a conference was held at Cornell University entitled “75 Years of Development Research.”.1 Apart from the usual array of theoretical and empirical papers on development, a number of panels took stock of the state of development economics and discussed a range of methodological...

GDP accounts are customarily compiled in several alternative ways, each aggregating transactions in different ways, but all (at least in theory) adding to the same total. Two of the most common aggregations are that focused on expenditures (based on the standard national income accounting...

If the absolute number of poor people goes up, but the fraction of people in poverty comes down, has poverty gone up or gone down? The economist’s instinct, framed by population replication axioms that undergird standard measures of poverty, is to say that in this case poverty has gone down....

This paper presents an overview of the economics of international aid, highlighting the historical literature and the contemporary debates. It reviews the “trade-theoretic” and the “contract-theoretic” analytical literature, and the empirical and institutional literature. It demonstrates...