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In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and in light of socio-economic and geopolitical challenges facing governments old and new, women's rights and empowerment have gained new urgency and relevance. Groups in power, or groups contesting for power, are more conservative than expected, and there are serious threats to roll back some of the gains women had achieved over the past 20-30 years on economic and social fronts.The global gender debate has neglected the economic dimension of women's empowerment and a great deal of debate and interest among researchers is needed to push the topics further. This timely book brings together leading regional researchers to offer original research linking gender equality with economic policy, reinforcing the agenda from a broad-based perspective.
This study has been undertaken to understand and evaluate the potential negative consequences of export taxes which are implemented by many countries today and which are not disciplined by any international agreement. This paper uses a new detailed global dataset on export taxes at the HS6 (Harmonized System 6 level) level and the MIRAGE (Modeling International Relationships in Applied General Equilibrium) global computable general equilibrium model to assess the impact of export taxes on the world economy. We find that limitations on export taxes would have worldwide effects: the average export tax on global merchandise trade was 0.48 percent in 2007, with the bulk of these taxes imposed on...
"In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and in light of socio-economic and geopolitical challenges facing governments old and new, women's rights and empowerment have gained new urgency and relevance. Groups in power, or groups contesting for power, are more conservative than expected, and there are serious threats to roll back some of the gains women had achieved over the past 20-30 years on economic and social fronts. The global gender debate has neglected the economic dimension of women's empowerment and a great deal of debate and interest among researchers is needed to push the topics further. This timely book brings together leading regional researchers to offer original research linking gender equality with economic policy, reinforcing the agenda from a broad-based perspective."--Publisher summary.
In this paper the impact of removing all Tunisian tariffs on imports from EU, while maintaining protection on imports from the rest of the world, is evaluated using computable general equilibrium (CGE) models. Either competitive or Cournot oligopolistic commodities market structures with and without barriers to entry and exit are considered. It is found that FTA improves welfare in all cases, and these gains are the most important with oligopoly and free entry and exit. At the sectoral level, the FTA benefits to the different industries at the expanse of agriculture and services, which are relatively intensive in primary factors of production.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on bloomsburycollections.com. How much would poor nations need to invest to eliminate poverty, get all children in school and provide adequate basic health care for all? Can they afford it? Financing Human Development in Africa, Asia and the Middle East provides some clear answers to these questions. The contributors assess feasible financing strategies underpinning actions to enhance human development in pursuance of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The contributors analyse these strategies in the context of broader concerns of economic development in nine countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The assessments stress the importance of redesigning macroeconomic policies so as to make these more supportive of long-term economic growth and employment creation, while ensuring sufficient investments in human development in order to end poverty and overcome deep-rooted inequalities.
The relationship between social movements and their countermovements is an underrepresented research topic, given the bulk of social movement studies that have been published to date. Moreover, empirical research on this topic primarily covers certain geographic areas of the world, specifically what is commonly called the “global North”. The mobilization of religious and women’s movements against social change, which strive for a preservation of the status quo and can be held responsible for a delayed expansion of reform-oriented interest articulation, is a rare topic of social movement literature, too. The authors of this volume address the issue of women’s movements and countermovements in countries of Southeast Asia and the North African part of the MENA region. They arrive at interesting constellations of coalition and competition between state and non-state actors, and religious and secular movements, as well as within women’s movements. Covering case studies from Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco and Tunisia, the pattern of Islamist movements countering the goals of (Muslim) women’s movements emerges as dominant.
The paper extends the methodology of parametric decomposition of the Malmquist productivity index using an output distance function. This approach addresses common methodological issues in total factor productivity estimation to produce credible and relevant results. The Malmquist index can be decomposed into several components: technical change (further broken down into technical change magnitude, input bias, and output bias), technical efficiency change, scale efficiency change, and output-mix effect. A translog output distance function is chosen to represent the production technology, and each component of the Malmquist index is computed using the estimated parameters. This parametric approach allows us to statistically test hypotheses regarding different components of the Malmquist index and the nature of production technology. The empirical application to Chinese agriculture shows that productivity grows at 2 percent per year on average from 1978 through 2010. The growth is mostly driven by technical change, which is found to be technology neutral.
In the wake of the global food crisis of 200708 and additional price spikes since then, greater attention has been given to the welfare impact of food price increases in developing countries. The standard approach in this type of analysis, proposed by Deaton (1989), is based on income and expenditure data from household surveys. Given the widespread use of this method, it is important to revisit the assumptions behind it and examine the sensitivity of results to those assumptions. In this paper, we explore the distributional impact of higher maize, rice, and food prices in Ghana and analyze the robustness of those results to changes in several key assumptions. The results suggest that high...
It is widely agreed that reducing poverty in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA) depends largely on stimulating growth in agriculture. To this end, heads of state in Africa rallied to form the pan-African Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) with the goal of raising investments and improving strategy implementation. However, while implementing an agricultural agenda under the CAADP framework, more and more countries have realized that increasing public investment in agriculture alone is not enough. Policy can play an important role not only to make public investment more efficient, but also is crucial for incentivizing private sector and farmer investment in agricultu...