I received the following announcement from the Index Insurance Innovation Initiative, which is funding my work on index insurance for cotton producers in Mali:
The BASIS Assets and Market Access Collaborative Research Support Program at the University of California, Davis seeks to hire a post-doc in economics or agricultural economics to assist with the development and implementation of its research program on risk and insurance. BASIS and its sister Index Insurance Innovation Initiative (I4) currently have ten rural insurance pilot projects underway. There is burgeoning interest in determining whether and how index insurance instruments can be used to solve long-standing development problems associated with uninsured risk, and the newly refunded BASIS program anticipates funding additional research in this area using its core grant funds from the US Agency for International Development. In addition, we expect opportunities to develop further research in this area by working directly with USAID’s missions worldwide.
Working in collaboration with the BASIS director, Michael Carter, and USAID staff, the Post-Doc will engage in a program of outreach to USAID missions. We anticipate that the results of these visits will be further demands for technical analysis of possible index insurance solutions and research project design. The post-doc will have ample opportunity to participate and direct resulting research programs on this topic. In addition to these research activities, the post-doc will take responsibility for preparing a set of “how-to” briefs explaining index insurance issues and options for practitioners. The post-doc will interact and may collaborate with the full team of I4 researchers, which includes faculty members and researchers at a broad range of institutions, including Australian National University, the Universities of Athens, California-Berkeley, California-Davis, California-San Diego, Colorado, Cornell, Duke, Namur, Oxford, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the International Livestock Research Institute.
The position requires a PhD in economics and agricultural economics. Prior research on agricultural risk and insurance is highly desirable, as is experience with impact evaluation of complex programs. Excellent writing and communication skills are a must. Funding is available for up to five years, although it is anticipated that most individuals will want to hold the position for only a fraction of that time period. The position will require extended trips to various world regions several times per year. Interested individuals should send an application letter describing qualifications, a CV, a list of references and a research paper to ifour@ucdavis.edu. Questions may also be directed to that address. Applications must be received by 1 March to receive full consideration. The position will be available by 1 April 2012, although it is expected that most candidates will not be available to start the position until mid-year.
Spring Break Classic Posts: Seven Billion People on Earth: Enough with the Fear Mongering
(It’s Spring Break here this week, so I am taking the week off from blogging to work to revise a few articles and begin working on new research projects. As a result, I am re-posting old posts that some new readers might have missed but which were very popular the first time I posted them. The following was initially posted on October 31, 2011.)
The seven billionth person on Earth will be born today according to the United Nations. To mark occasion, the BBC has developed an application that allows calculating your own number. I learned that, of all the people now alive, I was born 4,133,669,462nd.
As is inevitably the case when talking about the world’s population, the birth of the seven billionth person has caused a rash of newspaper articles, newscasts, and blog posts about how this really is a sign that at least two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — famine and death — will soon be here.
For a perfect example of that type of fear mongering, see this presentation, by Australian journalist Julian Cribb.
The Reverend’s New(est) Clothes
But really, Cribb is merely serving us the reheated leftovers of Reverend Thomas Malthus‘ Essay on the Principle of Population. In this book, first published in 1798, Malthus asserted that disease and famine would naturally arise to limit the size of any population.
Thus, because population growth would outpace agricultural growth (after all, there is only a limited amount of arable land in the world), disease and famine would take care of keeping the size of the population in check. Malthus actually estimated that the upper bound was equal to about one billion.