The experience and lessons of the last two decades have shown that ignoring the key differences between the economics of peace and the economics of development has been a major reason why countries relapse into conflict. This paper briefly analyses such differences and their important implications for effective policymaking in war-torn countries, and against this background, it makes recommenda...

In March 2004 the Kenyan government set out its radical Strategy for Revitalising Agriculture (SRA). Almost a decade on, remarkably little progress has been made on its priority areas. Beyond bureaucratic resistance to economic reform, we explain the political roots of inertia in the SRA case, encompassing both the political logic of maintaining commodity chain-based state organisations and the...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate economic benefits associated with agricultural landscape-cultivating services provided as an input on behalf of the tourism sector in Austria. Applying the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) 4600 tourists spending vacations in Austria were asked about their willingness to pay for these services in the summer of 1991. The mean and median was 9.20 ATS and 3...

We introduce a new interpretation of two re­ lated notions conditional utility and utility independence. Unlike the traditional inter­ pretation, the new interpretation render the notions the direct analogues of their prob­ abilistic counterparts. To capture these no­ tions formally, we appeal to the notion of util­ ity distribution, introduced in previous paper. We show that utility distributi...

We propose the group knockoff filter, a method for false discovery rate control in a linear regression setting where the features are grouped, and we would like to select a set of relevant groups which have a nonzero effect on the response. By considering the set of true and false discoveries at the group level, this method gains power relative to sparse regression methods. We also apply our me...

In this paper we consider the classical problem of dividing a land among many agents so that everybody is satisfied with the parcel she receives. In the literature, it is usually assumed that all the agents are endowed with cardinally comparable, additive, and monotone utility functions. In many economic and political situations violations of these assumptions may arise. We show how a family of...

†Background Agricultural systems are amended ecosystems with a variety of properties. Modern agroecosystems have tended towards high through-flow systems, with energy supplied by fossil fuels directed out of the system (either deliberately for harvests or accidentally through side effects). In the coming decades, resource constraints over water, soil, biodiversity and land will affect agricultu...

In this research we consider the impact of export-driven, soybean agriculture in Mato Grosso on regional economic growth. Here we argue that the soybean sector has served as a motor to the state's economy by increasing the demand for services, housing, and goods, and by providing a source of investment capital to the non-agricultural sector. Specifically, we show that each square kilometer of s...

Timor-Leste’s first ten years of independence have been turbulent and a large share of the population remains poor. Broad-based improvements in living standards will require improvements in agricultural production since most Timorese are subsistence farmers and since there is no modern sector to absorb a fast-growing population. This paper discusses what determines agricultural development in T...

Rapid population growth, increasingly complex economies and novel industrial uses of agricultural products call for further intensification of agriculture, particularly in the tropics. How to achieve sustainable intensification of food production systems in tropical regions that are challenged by ongoing climate change, loss of natural resources and biodiversity is a matter of debate. Here we h...