世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

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

In this book, Andrew Harvey sets out to provide a unified and comprehensive theory of structural time series models. Unlike the traditional ARIMA models, structural time series models consist explicitly of unobserved components, such as trends and seasonals, which have a direct interpretation. As a result the model selection methodology associated with structural models is much closer to econometric methodology. The link with econometrics is made even closer by the natural way in which the models can be extended to include explanatory variables and to cope with multivariate time series. From the technical point of view, state space models and the Kalman filter play a key role in the statistical treatment of structural time series models. The book includes a detailed treatment of the Kalman filter. This technique was originally developed in control engineering, but is becoming increasingly important in fields such as economics and operations research. This book is concerned primarily with modelling economic and social time series, and with addressing the special problems which the treatment of such series poses. The properties of the models and the methodological techniques used to select them are illustrated with various applications. These range from the modellling of trends and cycles in US macroeconomic time series to to an evaluation of the effects of seat belt legislation in the UK.

Forecasting, Structural Time Series Models and the Kalman Filter

We investigate whether income inequality affects subsequent growth in a cross-country sample for 1965-90, using the models of Barro (1997), Bleaney and Nishiyama (2002) and Sachs and Warner (1997), with negative results. We then investigate the evolution of income inequality over the same period and its correlation with growth. The dominating feature is inequality convergence across countries. This convergence has been significantly faster amongst developed countries. Growth does not appear to influence the evolution of inequality over time. Outline

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/81822/1/02-28.pdf

Economic growth and income inequality

Emploi, productivité et inclusion pour réduire la pauvreté : un diagnostic de la situation de l'emploi en Côte d'Ivoire

Studies of risk and its consequences tend to focus on one risk factor, such as a drought or an economic crisis. Yet 2003 household surveys in rural Kilimanjaro and Ruvuma, two cash-crop-growing regions in Tanzania that experienced a precipitous coffee price decline around the turn of the millennium, identified health and drought shocks as well as commodity price declines as major risk factors, suggesting the need for a comprehensive approach to analyzing household vulnerability. In fact, most coffee growers, except the smaller ones in Kilimanjaro, weathered the coffee price declines rather well, at least to the point of not being worse off than non-coffee growers. Conversely, improving health conditions and reducing the effect of droughts emerge as critical to reduce vulnerability. One-third of the rural households in Kilimanjaro experienced a drought or health shocks, resulting in an estimated 8 percent welfare loss on average, after using savings and aid. Rainfall is more reliable in Ruvuma, and drought there did not affect welfare. Surprisingly, neither did health shocks, plausibly because of lower medical expenditures given limited health care provisions.

Gauging the Welfare Effects of Shocks in Rural Tanzania

The agri-food system (AFS) employs about one third of the global workforce and contributes about one third of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This together with its large exposure to the effects of climate change and environmental degradation makes what happens in AFS central to the green transition and its implications for jobs and the structural transformation. Microeconomic evidence suggests that the adoption of climate smart agricultural practices will increase labor requirements, at least in the short run and at lower levels of incomes, when its mechanization is still limited. Econometric macro-model-based simulations suggest however that especially substantial investment in climate friendly agricultural R&D as well as soil and water preserving practices and market integration will more than offset the negative effects of climate change and even accelerate the structural transformation, especially in Sub Saharan Africa. Overall, the findings underscore the tremendous potential of increasing agricultural and climate friendly R&D investment for brokering an environmentally sustainable structural transformation. Repurposing of agriculture&#x2019;s current US$ 638 billion support package towards supporting more climate friendly practices, including to overcome the time lag between the moment of investment and the realization of the benefits, provides an important policy entry point. 

Luc Christiaensen

Papers

Emploi, productivité et inclusion pour réduire la pauvreté : un diagnostic de la situation de l'emploi en Côte d'Ivoire

Gauging the Welfare Effects of Shocks in Rural Tanzania

Jobs, Food and Greening: Exploring Implications of the Green Transition for Jobs in the Agri-food System