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Category: Economics

Published March 25, 2013

African Institutions and the Endangered Species Act

From an op-ed I published in the Star Tribune (Minneapolis–St. Paul) this past weekend:

Not only is Tanzania a relatively corrupt country, but researchers also note extensive corruption in the hunting sector. It is for that reason that Tanzania’s minister for natural resources and tourism issued a stern warning to the Tanzania Safari Outfitters Association at a meeting in Dar es Salaam last fall, noting that corruption usually began with wealthy hunters bribing officials so that they would turn a blind eye to illegal behavior.

Instead of lobbying against placing the African lion on the endangered species list, Tanzania should seek to reform its institutions. Not only would this help protect the country’s big-game reserves, it is also a crucial step toward the sustainable development of the Tanzanian economy. A persistent finding in development economics is that dysfunctional institutions, of which corruption is a symptom, are an important cause of underdevelopment.

 

Published March 6, 2013

Food Aid: Why Local and Regional Procurement Is Better (Updated)

USFoodAid
US Food Aid (Source: Explore.org).

A few weeks ago in my food policy seminar, we discussed food aid. Paarlberg (2011), whose discussion of food aid informs much of the first half of this post, defines food aid as the international shipment of food through noncommercial channels as a gift.

Though almost 60 percent of food aid is delivered by the United Nations’ World Food Programme, the US remains a major provider of food aid. The delivery of food aid by the US is not without its fair share of problems. Among the most decried features of the US food aid program are that

  1. US food aid has to be purchased in the United States, and
  2. US food aid has to be shipped on US-flagged vessels.

As a consequence of those two rules, 65% of US spending on food aid is spent on administrative and transportation costs.

Continue readingFood Aid: Why Local and Regional Procurement Is Better (Updated)
Published March 4, 2013

Assessing the Extent of Student Cheating with List Randomization (Updated)

Last semester in my principles of microeconomics course, one of my teaching assistants (TAs) caught some of our students cheating on problem sets.

I use Mankiw’s Principles of Microeconomics when teaching that course. Because that textbook is widely used, it is perhaps no surprise that the solutions to book problems are (illegally) available online. And because I assign end-of-chapter problems as homework, it is perhaps no surprise that a few unscrupulous enterprising students would use those solutions to prepare their answers to problem sets.

What is more surprising is that some of those students would do so in plain view, in a common area next to the lecture hall where I taught that course. One student even copied the solution manual’s answers verbatim in her homework.

Continue readingAssessing the Extent of Student Cheating with List Randomization (Updated)