Liberalization and globalization:Trojan horse for the cotton traders' domination in francophone Africa

The Francophone African Countries (FACs) exclusively fight for the abolition of subsidies applied by a few big cotton producing countries. Although legitimate, it is doubtful that the outcome could be so much satisfactory because subsidizing countries have room in re-arranging measures of their support policies. The FACs are missing the effect of market structure on price formation. Market power of trading Multinational Companies (MNCs) is getting stronger and stronger. It concerns cotton too and there are signs that an international price index serves as an expression of this power. The FACs were protected from MNCs in the cotton trade. Within less than one decade, and thanks to the implementation of the liberalization process, these companies have become totally dominant. Liberalization then served as Trojan Horse for the MNCs penetration.Negative price impact resulted. Unilateral and unfair change of cotton transaction rules took place. Historical private regulation systems are being pushed down to the sole benefit of traders and at the expense of cotton producers.It is worth noting the paradox of exacerbated concentration of the commodity trade at the international level while developing countries were forced to go into a fragmentation movement by abolishing marketing boards or public monopoly companies which provided some price protection to farmers. This fragmentation movement made easier the domination of trading MNCs in developing countries through power in price formation and adjustment of transaction rules

The Real K-Theory of Compact Lie Groups

Let $G$ be a compact, connected, and simply-connected Lie group, equipped with a Lie group involution $\sigma_G$ and viewed as a $G$-space with the conjugation action. In this paper, we present a description of the ring structure of the (equivariant) $KR$-theory of $(G, \sigma_G)$ by drawing on previous results on the module structure of the $KR$-theory and the ring structure of the equivariant $K$-theory

Manin's conjecture on a nonsingular quartic del Pezzo surface

Given a nonsingular quartic del Pezzo surface, a conjecture of Manin predicts the density of rational points on the open subset of the surface formed by deleting the lines. We prove that this prediction is of the correct order of magnitude for a particular surface.Comment: 29 page

Liberalization and globalization: Trojan Horse for the cotton traders' domination in Francophone Africa

The Francophone African Countries (FACs) exclusively fight for the abolition of subsidies applied by a few big cotton producing countries. Although legitimate, it is doubtful that the outcome could be so much satisfactory because subsidizing countries have room in re-arranging measures of their support policies. The FACs are missing the effect of market structure on price formation. Market power of trading Multinational Companies (MNCs) is getting stronger and stronger. It concerns cotton too and there are signs that an international price index serves as an expression of this power. The FACs were protected from MNCs in the cotton trade. Within less than one decade, and thanks to the implementation of the liberalization process, these companies have become totally dominant. Liberalization then served as Trojan Horse for the MNCs penetration.Negative price impact resulted. Unilateral and unfair change of cotton transaction rules took place. Historical private regulation systems are being pushed down to the sole benefit of traders and at the expense of cotton producers.It is worth noting the paradox of exacerbated concentration of the commodity trade at the international level while developing countries were forced to go into a fragmentation movement by abolishing marketing boards or public monopoly companies which provided some price protection to farmers. This fragmentation movement made easier the domination of trading MNCs in developing countries through power in price formation and adjustment of transaction rules.Cotton trade; Africa; Multinational companies; transaction rules; price capture

State and market interactions: Cotton variety and seed maket development in China

La Chine est premier producteur mondial de coton depuis plus de 20 ans. L'adoption du coton transgénique, dès 1997, à travers de nombreuses variétés, lui a permis de maintenir son rang en surmontant le problème de résistance aux insecticides. La contribution variétale a résulté d'un changement radical du cadre légal pour promouvoir les marchés des variétés et des semences. Néanmoins, aujourd'hui, tous les acteurs du secteur coton admettent qu'il y a un gros problème de concurrence excessive à partir d'un grand nombre de variétés, responsable des mélanges de variétés et de semences. Cette situation a conduit le gouvernement chinois à décider une nouvelle politique de soutien à l'utilisation des semences de qualité. L'évolution de la politique chinoise dans le domaine des variétés et des semences offre un cas intéressant d'interaction entre l'Etat et le marché en l'espace de vingt ans. Notre papier est une contribution pour analyser le développement des marchés des variétés et des semences en nous penchant sur les interactions entre Etat et marché. Un changement dans la politique cotonnière, consistant à libérer les marchés des variétés et des semences, peut se révéler efficace quand les compétences et les capacités d'investissements existent au moment du changement de politique. Le succès qui en résulte serait de courte durée en absence de régulation pour protéger le développement des marchés d'une concurrence excessive et déloyale. Le cas étudié est une illustration des limites d'une concurrence non régulée. Il est cependant inefficace de réguler en imposant ce que les paysans doivent utiliser. Une telle approche induit déjà des effets pervers en menaçant la viabilité des sociétés semencières. (Résumé d'auteur

Modeling the diffusion of scientific publications

This paper illustrates that salient features of a panel of time series of annual citations can be captured by a Bass type diffusion model. We put forward an extended version of this diffusion model, where we consider the relation between key characteristics of the diffusion process and features of the articles. More specifically, parameters measuring citations' ceiling and the timing of peak citations are correlated with specific features of the articles like the number of pages and the number of authors. Our approach amounts to a multi-level non-linear regression for a panel of time series. We illustrate our model for citations to articles that were published in Econometrica and the Journal of Econometrics. Amongst other things, we find that more references lead to more citations and that for the Journal of Econometrics peak citations of more recent articles tend to occur later.diffusion of innovations;multi-level regression

Multiple-factor adoption of GM Cotton in China: Influence of conventional technology development and rural change in Jiangsu Province

La grande diffusion du coton génétiquement modifié (CGM) en Chine, plus précisément du coton-Bt, est bien reconnue même si les craintes sur la durabilité de ce succès ont émergé récemment. Ce papier vise à indiquer que l'adoption du coton-Bt en Chine n'a pas dépendu seulement de ses avantages pour contrôler les ravageurs. Il évoque le cas spécifique de la Province du Jiangsu, dans la Vallée du Yangse, pour laquelle l'utilisation du CGM est peu rapportée dans les publications accessibles à la communauté internationale. Le papier synthétise les analyses récentes publiées en chinois par des auteurs relevant de la recherche ou du développement et il s'appuie sur les résultats d'une enquête réalisée en 2005 et sur ceux du réseau multi-local d'expérimentations variétales de la Vallée du Yangse. Il ressort que dans la Province du Jiangsu, la diffusion du CGM a beaucoup bénéficié d'une modernisation du secteur des semences qui a intégré le caractère Bt dans les variétés hybrides très adaptées à la technique de production par transplantation. En dépit d'une réduction plutôt limitée du coût de contrôle des ravageurs, les paysans ne devraient pas abandonner l'usage du coton-Bt car l'évolution de l'agriculture chinoise ne pousse plus les paysans à être aussi vigilants pour optimiser les coûts de production, à moins que les prix des semences continuent à croître de manière phénoménale. La poursuite d'une utilisation rentable du CGM requiert des initiatives pour mieux réguler le secteur des semences.coton-Bt; Chine, agriculture; industrie semencière; transplantation

Institutional Evolution, static and dynamic approaches in assessing performance related to development goals

1. The Resocot Projet is a research project which brought together teams of researchers from the North and Africa, not all of which were familiar with the theoretical approach used at the outset. This project aims at developing a methodology and materials to help assess the performance of the cotton commodity sectors of different countries and to assist the players concerned to steer these sectors towards improving their performance. At a time when several African sectors have already gone over to a inter-professional type of management, the output from the project could prove useful for facilitating exchanges between stakeholders, so as to enable them to develop a common vision of the problems before deciding on the actions required to resolve them.Cotton; Africa; commodity chain; methodology; theory; New Economics of institution; Benin; Mali, Burkina Faso; Ghana; Mali; Cameroon

Impulse-response analysis of the market share attraction model

We propose a simulation-based technique to calculate impulse-response functions and their confidence intervals in a market share attraction model [MCI]. As an MCI model implies a reduced form model for the logs of relative market shares, simulation techniques have to be used to obtain the impulse-responses for the levels of the market shares. We apply the technique to an MCI model for a five-brand detergent market. We illustrate how impulse-response functions can help to interpret the estimated model. In particular, the competitive and dynamic structure of the model can be analyzed.market shares;forecasting;attraction models;impulse-response analysis