On behalf of Mr. Koichiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO, it is my great pleasure to welcome you all to this international scientific conference. Drylands are often considered fragile ecosystems, yet they have a remarkable resilience to stress. They are home to unique and well-adapted plant and animal species that we need to conserve. Some of the world’s greatest cultures and belief systems have originated in drylands. On the other hand, desertification and land degradation in drylands often result in poverty and cause environmental refugees to abandon their homes. These problems can only be addressed in a holistic manner, based on sound scientific research and findings. Solutions to the problems of dryland degradation need to be communicated as widely as possible through education at all levels. These are many reasons why UNESCO – within its mandate of science, education, culture and communication – took the intiative to organize this conference. And we are glad that so many partners have responded to our call. UNESCO considers this conference as its main contribution to the observance of the International Year of Deserts and Desertification in 2006. We have deliberately chosen the title ‘The Future of Drylands’ as we feel it is time to redefine our priorities for science, education and governance in the drylands based on 50 years of scientific research in arid and semi-arid zones. In fact UNESCO has one of the longest traditions, within the UN system, of addressing dryland problems from an interdisciplinary, scientific point of view. In 1955, the ‘International Arid Land Meetings’ were held in Socorro, New Mexico (USA). They were organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), sponsored by UNESCO and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. One important output of the International Arid Land Meetings was a book entitled The Future of Drylands, edited by Gilbert F. White and published in

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

We explore the impact of reduced transaction costs on risk sharing by estimating the effects of a mobile money innovation on consumption. In our panel sample, adoption of the innovation increased from 43 to 70 percent. We find that, while shocks reduce consumption by 7 percent for nonusers, the consumption of user households is unaffected. The mechanisms underlying these consumption effects are increases in remittances received and the diversity of senders. We report robustness checks supporting these results and use the four-fold expansion of the mobile money agent network as a source of exogenous variation in access to the innovation. (JEL E42, G22, O16, O17, Z13) In developing countries, informal networks provide an important means by which individuals and households share risk, though the insurance they provide is often incomplete. Economists have proposed a number of reasons for this incompleteness, including information asymmetries, which manifest in problems of moral hazard, and limited commitment, both of which induce positive correlations between realized income and consumption. In this article we emphasize a complementary source of incompleteness: transaction costs—literally, the costs of transferring resources between individuals. We test the impact of transaction costs on risk sharing by analyzing data from a large panel household survey that we designed and administered in Kenya over a three-year period to capture the expansion of “mobile money.” This financial innovation has allowed individuals to transfer purchasing power by simple short messaging service ( SMS) technology and has dramatically reduced the cost of sending money across large distances. Mobile money is a recent innovation in developing economies—one of the first and most successful examples to date is Kenya’s “M-PESA.” 1 In just four years after its

https://www.uh.edu/%7Ebsorense/risk_sharing_and_transactions_costs.pdf

Risk Sharing and Transactions Costs: Evidence from Kenya's Mobile Money Revolution

The world is now in the midst of a major policy debate about the objectives of public policy. What should be the world’s Sustainable Development Goals for the period 2015-2030? The World Happiness Report 2013 is offered as a contribution to that crucial debate. In July 2011 the UN General Assembly passed a historic resolution.1 It invited member countries to measure the happiness of their people and to use this to help guide their public policies. This was followed in April 2012 by the first UN high-level meeting on happiness and well-being, chaired by the Prime Minister of Bhutan. At the same time the first World Happiness Report was published,2 followed some months later by the OECD Guidelines setting an international standard for the measurement of well-being. The present Report is sponsored by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

http://kstp.com/kstpimages/repository/cs/files/worldhappinessreport2013_online.pdf

World happiness report 2013

Peer Effects, Teacher Incentives, and the Impact of Tracking

In this paper, we exploit a new multi-country historical dataset on public (government) debt to search for a systemic relationship between high public debt level growth and inflation our main result is that whereas the link between growth and debt seems relatively weak at “normal” debt levels, median growth rates for countries with over roughly ninety percent of gdp are about one percent lower than otherwise; average (mean) growth rates are several percent lower . surprisingly,

Growth in a Time of Debt

Using subjective well-being survey data for Latin America, we present evidence that both inflation and unemployment reduce well-being; where the cost of inflation in terms of unemployment, hence the relative size of the weights in a social well-being functions, is about one to eight, almost double of that found for OECD countries. The trade-off, and therefore the misery index, differs across subgroups. For example, the young and left-leaning citizens are more concerned with unemployment than inflation.

Monetary policy and happiness: Preferences over inflation and unemployment in Latin America

This report addresses several critical questions regarding Caribbean nations. Does size matter for economic growth and volatility? To what degree has Caribbean economic growth been inferior to that of ROSE? What could account for the Caribbean growth gap and what economic policies might decision-makers adopt to promote higher and sustainable growth? The answers to these questions will support the overarching hypothesis that the Caribbean suffers sclerosis. The almost-exclusive focus on economic growth in this report does not imply that it should be the sole criterion to judge economic performance. Nevertheless, economic growth is the central concern of Caribbean policymakers, who recognize that it is critical to improve broad economic development, and hence to improve the welfare of Caribbean citizens. The central focus here is on six countries in the region, which will be referred to as the C6: The Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago. However, the analysis will sometimes include, most often in the aggregate, the countries of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). The six members of the OECS used in this report are Antigua and Barbuda, the Commonwealth of Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Is There a Caribbean Sclerosis? Stagnating Economic Growth in the Caribbean

This paper tests the hysteresis hypothesis in unemployment for 13 Latin American countries covering the period 1980-2005. The tests exploit the time series and the cross sectional variation of the series, and allows for cross section dependence and a different number of endogenously determined structural breakpoints. The findings give support to the hysteric dynamic hypothesis for the majority of the countries analyzed. The implications of the results have ramifications regarding macro-stabilization, structural reform, and the design of social safety protection.

/pdf/hysteresis-in-unemployment-evidence-from-latin-america-jadxjmkk67.pdf

Hysteresis in Unemployment: Evidence from Latin America

In today's knowledge-based societies, understanding basic scientific concepts and the capacity to structure and solve scientific questions is more critical than ever. Accordingly, in this article we test an innovative methodology for teaching science and environment in public primary schools where traditional (teacher-centred) teaching was replaced with student-centred activities using LEGO kits. We document positive and significant improvements of 0.18 standard deviations in standardised test scores. Such positive results are mainly concentrated within boys that were located above the median of baseline academic performance.

http://www.cedlas-er.org/sites/default/files/aux_files/beuermann-paper.pdf

The Pedagogy of Science and Environment: Experimental Evidence from Peru

This paper presents the findings of an evaluation of Chile's Progressive Housing Program (PHP), which is a public housing program that finances the purchase of a new house for lower income households. The evaluation finds that the programs' package (savings requirement, voucher and mortgage) design is inappropriate if the program is targeted to the poor. In fact the pro-poor targeting of the program was poor with high under-coverage and high leakage. Furthermore, the benefit of a minimum quality new house was not sustainable as many households slipped back into the housing shortage category overtime. This impact evaluation reveals that although the program had significant positive effects on materiality conditions (access to water, sewerage, and electricity), it had a negative effect on overcrowding, and had no discernible effects on welfare indicators (poverty, school attendance, occupation ratio).

Inder J. Ruprah

Papers

Monetary policy and happiness: Preferences over inflation and unemployment in Latin America

Is There a Caribbean Sclerosis? Stagnating Economic Growth in the Caribbean

Hysteresis in Unemployment: Evidence from Latin America

The Pedagogy of Science and Environment: Experimental Evidence from Peru

An Impact Evaluation of Chile's Progressive Housing Program