Development and Comp Systems 

About: Development and Comp Systems is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Poverty & Productivity. Over the lifetime, 145 publications have been published receiving 6223 citations.

Greed and grievance in civil war

Abstract: This study investigates the causes of civil war, using a new data set of wars during 1960-99. Rebellion may be explained by atypically severe grievances, such as high inequality, a lack of political rights, or ethnic and religious divisions in society. Alternatively, it might be explained by atypical opportunities for building a rebel organization. Opportunity may be determined by access to finance, such as the scope for extortion of natural resources, and for donations from a Diaspora population. Opportunity may also depend upon factors such as geography: mountains and forests may be needed to incubate rebellion. These explanations are tested and find that opportunity provides considerably more explanatory power than grievance. Economic viability appears to be the predominant systematic explanation of rebellion. The results are robust to correction for outliers, alternative variable definition, and variations in estimation method

The Water Poverty Index: an International Comparison

Abstract: This paper reports on the construction of an International Water Poverty Index, part of the first phase of a research project into building a locally based version of the index. The purpose of the Water Poverty Index is to express an interdisciplinary measure which links household welfare with water availability and indicates the degree to which water scarcity impacts on human populations. Such an index makes it possible to rank countries and communities within countries taking into account both physical and socio-economic factors associated with water scarcity. This enables national and international organisations concerned with water provision and management to monitor both the resources available and the socio-economic factors which impact on access and use of those resources. This paper presents details of the methodology used and the results obtained for 140 countries covering measures of resources, access, capacity, use and environment.

Economic Fundamentals Of the Knowledge Society

Abstract: This article provides an introduction to fundamental issues in the development of new knowledge-based economies. After placing their emergence in historical perspective and proposing a theoretical framework that distinguishes knowledge from information, the authors characterize the specific nature of such economies. They go on to deal with some of the major issues concerning the new skills and abilities required for integration into the knowledge-based economy; the new geography that is taking shape (where physical distance ceases to be such an influential constraint); the conditions governing access to both information and knowledge, not least for developing countries; the uneven development of scientific, technological (including organizational) knowledge across different sectors of activity; problems concerning intellectual property rights and the privatization of knowledge; and the issues of trust, memory and the fragmentation of knowledge. This monograph is concerned with the nature of the process of macroeconomic growth that has characterized the U. S. experience, and manifested itself in the changing pace and sources of the continuing rise real output per capita over the course of the past two hundred years. A key observation that emerges from the long-term quantitative economic record is that the proximate sources of increases in real GDP per head in the century between 1889 and 1999 were quite different from those which obtained during the first hundred years of American national experience. Baldly put, the economy's ascent to a position of twentieth century global industrial leadership entailed a transition from growth based upon the interdependent development and extensive exploitation of its natural resources and the substitution of tangible capital for labor, towards a the maintenance of an productivity leadership through rising rates of intangible investment in the formation and exploitation of technological and organizational knowledge.

Basic Principles of Sustainable Development

Abstract: This paper explores what a critical commentary on micro principles texts might look like, examining what is to be critiqued and how to do it.

Market Value and Patent Citations: A First Look

Abstract: As patent data become more available in machine-readable form, an increasing number of researchers have begun to use measures based on patents and their citations as indicators of technological output and information flow. This paper explores the economic meaning of these citation-based patent measures using the financial market valuation of the firms that own the patents. Using a new and comprehensive dataset containing over 4800 U. S. Manufacturing firms and their patenting activity for the past 30 years, we explore the contributions of R&D spending, patents, and citation-weighted patents to measures of Tobin's Q for the firms. We find that citation-weighted patent stocks are more highly correlated with market value than patent stocks themselves and that this fact is due mainly to the high valuation placed on firms that hold very highly cited patents. We also find that self-citations are worth about twice as much as ordinary citations, especially to smaller firms.