世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(08)61690-6.pdf

Closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

This paper reviews the concept of adaptation of human communities to global changes, especially climate change, in the context of adaptive capacity and vulnerability. It focuses on scholarship that contributes to practical implementation of adaptations at the community scale. In numerous social science fields, adaptations are considered as responses to risks associated with the interaction of environmental hazards and human vulnerability or adaptive capacity. In the climate change field, adaptation analyses have been undertaken for several distinct purposes. Impact assessments assume adaptations to estimate damages to longer term climate scenarios with and without adjustments. Evaluations of specified adaptation options aim to identify preferred measures. Vulnerability indices seek to provide relative vulnerability scores for countries, regions or communities. The main purpose of participatory vulnerability assessments is to identify adaptation strategies that are feasible and practical in communities. The distinctive features of adaptation analyses with this purpose are outlined, and common elements of this approach are described. Practical adaptation initiatives tend to focus on risks that are already problematic, climate is considered together with other environmental and social stresses, and adaptations are mostly integrated or mainstreamed into other resource management, disaster preparedness and sustainable development programs. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Adaptation, adaptive capacity and vulnerability

Agriculture is a vital development tool for achieving the Millennium Development Goal that calls for halving by 2015 the share of people suffering from extreme poverty and hunger. That is the overall message of this year's World Development Report (WDR), the 30th in the series. Three out of every four poor people in developing countries live in rural areas, and most of them depend directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihoods. This report provides guidance to governments and the international community on designing and implementing agriculture for development agendas that can make a difference in the lives of hundreds of millions of rural poor. The report highlights two major regional challenges. In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, agriculture is a strong option for spurring growth, overcoming poverty, and enhancing food security. Agricultural productivity growth is vital for stimulating growth in other parts of the economy. But accelerated growth requires a sharp productivity increase in smallholder farming combined with more effective support to the millions coping as subsistence farmers, many of them in remote areas. Recent improved performance holds promise, and this report identifies many emerging successes that can be scaled up. In Asia, overcoming widespread poverty requires confronting widening rural-urban income disparities. Asia's fast-growing economies remain home to over 600 million rural people living in extreme poverty, and despite massive rural-urban migration, rural poverty will remain dominant for several more decades. For this reason, the WDR focuses on ways to generate rural jobs by diversifying into labor intensive, high value agriculture linked to a dynamic rural, non-farm sector. In all regions, with rising land and water scarcity and the added pressures of a globalizing world, the future of agriculture is intrinsically tied to better stewardship of natural resources. With the right incentives and investments, agriculture's environmental footprint can be lightened and environmental services harnessed to protect watersheds and biodiversity.

World development report 2008 : agriculture for development

A model of peasant household behavior, under varying degrees of household-specific food and labor market failures, is constructed to show that these structural features can explain several well known patterns of peasant response which have often been attributed to peculiar motives, presumed specific to peasants. The model explains sluggish response to cash crops prices and high instability in perceived food and labor scarcities; the key role of manufactured consumer goods prices in stimulating peasants' effort in cash crops production; the effectiveness of taxation as opposed to incentives in stimulating cash crops production; and the key role of technological change in food production to enhance cash crop production. Results are obtained analytically in the case of one market failure and by numerical simulation with more than one.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2234892

Peasant Household Behaviour with Missing Markets: Some Paradoxes Explained.

High quality policy design and informed policy debates require rigorous conceptualization and quantification of the economic implications of policy options. In recent years, the array of methods available for this purpose has expanded on many fronts, ranging from the micro to the sectoral and macro levels, and from the analysis of markets to that of public goods and of technological and institutional alternatives. "Quantitative Development Policy Analysis" reviews and extends these methods. It aims to present materials in an accessible fashion. It should be both a reference book for policy analysts and a text for graduate students who wish to apply quantitative methods to policy analysis. The text is organized around 12 subjects and 12 computer exercises. The subjects develop in a systematic fashion the theories and methods for the analysis of consumer demand, producer behaviour, supply response, behaviour and welfare under risk, household models, price distortions and partial equilibrium analysis, real exchange rate analysis, transactions costs and agrarian institutions, social accounting matrices, multimarket models and computable general equilibrium models. The computer exercises offer opportunities to quantify models for policy analysis in each of these themes and to stimulate policy alternatives. The book is accompanied by a diskette with the exercises. Also available is a manual with the answers to the exercises, both in print and on diskette. The text can be used in formal instruction, for self-study and as a source of information.

Quantitative development policy analysis

We develop and estimate a model of supply response when transactions costs create a situation where some producers buy, others sell, and others do not participate in markets. We present two rationales for why producing households may have different relationships to the market: proportional and fixed transactions costs. Using data on Mexican corn producers, we estimate an empirical model that allows for separate tests of the significance of both types of transactions costs, revealing that both fixed and proportional transactions costs matter for the estimation. The results provide consistent estimates of supply elasticity and measures of the relative importance of factors determining both proportional and fixed transactions costs.

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Elisabeth Sadoulet

Papers

World development report 2008 : agriculture for development

Peasant Household Behaviour with Missing Markets: Some Paradoxes Explained.

Quantitative development policy analysis

Transactions Costs and Agricultural Household Supply Response

Income Strategies Among Rural Households in Mexico: The Role of Off-farm Activities