Poverty and policy

In this analysis of public policy to reduce poverty, the authors point out, among other things, that typically the highest incidence and severity of poverty are still found in rural areas, especially if ill-watered. For many of the rural poor, the only immediate route out of poverty is by migration to towns, to face a higher expected income, although often a more uncertain one. This may or may not reduce aggregate poverty. We can be more confident that growth in agricultural output -- fueled by investment in human and physical infrastructure -- is pro-poor, though not because the poor own much land. The policies pursued by most developing countries up to the mid-1980s -- and by many still -- have been biased against the rural sector in various ways. The same is true -- although different policies are involved -- of the other major sectoral concentration of poor, namely, the urban informal sector. There are clear prospects for reducing poverty by removing these biases. Looking ahead (far ahead, in some cases), it is less clear how much further gain to the poor can be expected from introducing a bias in the opposite direction. Neutrality should be the aim. We need good data and measurement to identify which public actions are effective in fighting poverty. There have been a number of advances in household data and analytic capabilities for poverty analysis over the last ten years. We are in a better position than ever to devise well-informed policies. The authors identify two important roles for public action. One is to foster the conditions for pro-poor growth, particularly by providing wide access to the necessary physical and human assets, including public infrastructure. The other is to help those who cannot participate fully in the benefits of such growth, or who do so with continued exposure to unacceptable risks. Here there is an important role for aiming interventions by various means to improve the distribution of the benefits of public spending on social services and safety nets in developing countries. Those means range from the selection of key categories of public spending (such as primary education and basic health care) to more finely targeted transfers (including nutrition and health interventions) based on poverty indicators, or some self-targeting mechanism. Though disappointing outcomes abound, many countries have demonstrated what is possible with timely and well-conceived interventions.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Poverty Assessment,Achieving Shared Growth

An Approach to Ecosystem-Based Fishery Management

Marine scientists and policymakers are encouraging ecosystem-based fishery management (EBFM), but there is limited guidance on how to operationalize the concept. We adapt financial portfolio theory as a method for EBFM that accounts for species interdependencies, uncertainty, and sustainability constraints. Illustrating our method with routinely collected data available from the Chesapeake Bay, we demonstrate the gains from taking into account species variances and covariances in setting species total allowable catches. We find over the period from 1962–2003 that managers could have increased the revenues from fishing and reduced the variance by employing ecosystem frontiers in setting catch levels.ecosystem-based fishery management, portfolio, trophic modeling, precaution

Getting real about food prices

The 2008 price spike in world grain prices had serious impacts on food security and poverty but analysts have consistently described these real food prices as low in historical terms. The inconsistency between the severity of the food crisis and low real prices results from the use of advanced and global economy price indices to calculate real prices. This ignores the high share of food in poor people’s expenditures and indirect effects of income growth on expenditure patterns of rich and poor consumers. Poor consumers have not experienced the same falls in real food prices as those with growing incomes and are more vulnerable to price shocks. As high and fluctuating international grain prices appear to be a feature of the current world economy, food price and policy analysis must recognise this, and develop and use different price indices that take account of differences between consumer groups

Tender Offers for Corporate Control

A Review of Tender Offers for Corporate Control by Edward Ross Aranow and Herbert A. Einhor

Measurement of the photon+b+b-jet production differential cross section in ppˉp\bar{p} collisions at \sqrt{s}=1.96~\TeV

We present measurements of the differential cross section dsigma/dpT_gamma for the inclusive production of a photon in association with a b-quark jet for photons with rapidities |y_gamma|< 1.0 and 30<pT_gamma <300 GeV, as well as for photons with 1.5<|y_gamma|< 2.5 and 30< pT_gamma <200 GeV, where pT_gamma is the photon transverse momentum. The b-quark jets are required to have pT>15 GeV and rapidity |y_jet| < 1.5. The results are based on data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 8.7 fb^-1, recorded with the D0 detector at the Fermilab Tevatron $p\bar{p}$ Collider at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV. The measured cross sections are compared with next-to-leading order perturbative QCD calculations using different sets of parton distribution functions as well as to predictions based on the kT-factorization QCD approach, and those from the Sherpa and Pythia Monte Carlo event generators.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Phys. Lett.

Search For Heavy Pointlike Dirac Monopoles

We have searched for central production of a pair of photons with high transverse energies in $p\bar p$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 1.8$ TeV using $70 pb^{-1}$ of data collected with the D\O detector at the Fermilab Tevatron in 1994--1996. If they exist, virtual heavy pointlike Dirac monopoles could rescatter pairs of nearly real photons into this final state via a box diagram. We observe no excess of events above background, and set lower 95% C.L. limits of $610, 870, or 1580 GeV/c^2$ on the mass of a spin 0, 1/2, or 1 Dirac monopole.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure