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Category: Development

Published October 17, 2012

Two Good Documentaries for Anyone Interested in Development

I spent the weekend before last bed-ridden because of migraines. When that happens, the only two things I can do while my migraines pass are listening to podcasts, reading on paper, or watching movies on my tablet computer.

As per my usual when I suffer from migraines, I did all those things, but I wanted to discuss two documentaries I watched that weekend. Both can be streamed from Netflix.

The first is The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, a documentary about the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. Here is the official trailer:

The fruit of high modernist urban planning aimed at eliminating the slums of St. Louis, Pruitt-Igoe opened its doors in 1954. Less than 20 years later, the various levels of government involved agreed to demolish all 33 of the 11-story apartment buildings that formed Pruitt-Igoe because of the poverty, crime, and segregation found therein. Here is a critical review in City Journal.

Continue readingTwo Good Documentaries for Anyone Interested in Development
Published October 16, 2012

Question 1 from My Development Midterm

Refer to the figure above, and consider the unitary agricultural model and the case where the Separation Property (Singh et al., 1986) holds, which we discussed in lecture.

The household produces a quantity [math]q=F(L,E^A)[/math] of a staple crop, where [math]L[/math] denotes a household’s labor allocation and [math]E^A[/math] denotes its endowment of land, which we assume fixed in this case. The household consumes a quantity [math]c[/math] of the staple crop. The household also has an endowment of labor time [math]E^L[/math], which it allocates among on-farm labor [math]L[/math], leisure [math]\ell[/math], and market labor [math]L^m[/math], though do note that the household can also hire in labor if it needs to, and that hired labor is denoted [math]L^h[/math]. The household faces wage [math]w[/math] and staple price [math]p[/math].

Pick one of the following three changes in the household’s economic circumstances:

  1. An increase in the household’s labor endowment, possibly as a result of one of the household’s children attaining adulthood. In other words, the household’s preference structure for consumption and labor remains the same, but the household simply has more labor time,
  2. An increase in the price of the staple paired with a decrease in the prevailing wage, or
  3. The adoption of better soil fertility management practices.

Illustrate the change you choose in a graph, and discuss its consequences for the household. Make sure your answer completely describes what happens to the economic circumstances of the household and provides some intuition (or brief explanations) as to why variables change the way they do as a consequence of the change you pick.

Continue readingQuestion 1 from My Development Midterm

Published October 2, 2012

Two New Papers on Political Power in Africa

First, a new working paper by Patrick Francois et al.:

This paper presents new evidence on the power sharing layout of national political elites in a panel of African countries, most of them autocracies. We present a model of coalition formation across ethnic groups and structurally estimate it employing data on the ethnicity of cabinet ministers since independence. As opposed to the view of a single ethnic elite monolithically controlling power, we show that African ruling coalitions are large and that political power is allocated proportionally to population shares across ethnic groups. This holds true even restricting the analysis to the subsample of the most powerful ministerial posts. We argue that the likelihood of revolutions from outsiders and the threat of coups from insiders are major forces explaining such allocations. Further, over-representation of the ruling ethnic group is quantitatively substantial, but not different from standard formateur premia in parliamentary democracies. We explore theoretically how proportional allocation for the elites of each group may still result in misallocations in the non-elite population.

The emphasis is mine, and in light of my one-observation sample — the 2009 coup d’état in Madagascar — I can’t say that I am surprised.

Second, a new working paper by Rainer and Trebbi:

The study of autocracies and weakly institutionalized countries is plagued by scarcity of information about the relative strength of different players within the political system. This paper presents novel data on the composition of government coalitions in a sample of fifteen post-colonial African countries suited to this task. We emphasize the role of the executive branch as the central fulcrum of all national political systems in our sample, especially relative to other institutional bodies such as the legislative assembly. Leveraging on the impressive body of work documenting the crucial role of ethnic fragmentation as a main driver of political and social friction in Africa, the paper further details the construction of ethnic composition measures for executive cabinets. We discuss how this novel source of information may help shed light on the inner workings of typically opaque African political elites.

Again, the emphasis is mine.