The colonial experience of developing countries provides valuable evidence regarding the impact of legal and institutional innovations on economic growth. However, there has been little effort by economists to study colonial policies to gain theoretical insights into the process of institutional reform. This paper considers the introduction of civil courts in colonial India and its impact on ag...

The growing importance of economic factors in farmers’ decision to go organic has raised interest in characterizing the economic behavior of organic versus conventional farms. Published analyses so far have not considered differential uncertainties and farmers’ risk preferences between conventional and organic practices when comparing these techniques. Our article attempts to assess this issue....

Waterlogging and salinization arise in arid areas largely because two essential resources, irrigation water and the assimilative capacity of unconfined aquifers, are not priced or allocated correctly to reflect scarcity values and opportunity costs. Farm-level and project-level models of crop production are examined to identify policies that will encourage farmers to consider opportunity costs ...

The popularity of digital video storage and delivery systems has given rise to the need for video encryption to preserve secrecy and digital rights. Conventional encryption techniques are not appropriate for securing multimedia systems given the need to encrypt a large amount of data in real-time. This paper presents a selective video encryption algorithm that utilizes multiple stream ciphers a...

The Nigerian rice sector has made remarkable improvement in the last decade as production has increased significantly thereby reducing the gap between domestic supply and demand. In the last three decades, rice imports make up greater proportion of Nigerian imports as rice forms a structural component of the Nigerian diet. Past government inconsistent policies were not successful in securing go...

This paper presents an overview and analysis of Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) and its place in securing wireless LANs. A number of specific widely used EAP methods are examined and evaluated for their advantages and susceptibility to types of attack. Next we propose suitable EAP methods for wireless technologies beyond LANs, including RFID and WiMAX. After analyzing requirements for ...

Langa Township, located in Cape Town, South Africa is home to many internal South African migrants and external African immigrants. As a mobile population, many Langa residents have embraced the mobile phone as a means of securing relationships with family members living elsewhere, while also maintaining relationships forged within the township and South Africa in general. Addressing the role o...

Weather variability poses numerous risks to agricultural communities, yet farmers may be able to reduce some of these risks by adapting their cropping practices to better suit changes in weather. However, not all farmers respond to weather variability in the same way. To better identify the causes and consequences of this heterogeneous decision-making, we develop a framework that identifies (1)...

It is now common to hear discussions about governmental accountability, its theorectical basis, the rights of consumers and clients in enforcing it, the strategies for securing it, and the consequences of abiding by it. In part, these discussions have been provoked by and are a response to frontier opening judicial acknowledgments of rights to education and treatment. They also are a response t...

Article history: Received 23 September 2011 Available online 22 December 2011 The medieval Champagne fairs are widely used to draw lessons about the institutional basis for long-distance impersonal exchange. This paper re-examines the causes of the outstanding success of the Champagne fairs in mediating international trade, the timing and causes of the fairs' decline, and the institutions for s...