Agricultural Economics—Without Apology
The Center for Global Development‘s Charles Kenny, in his weekly column for Foreign Policy:
With supermarket chains from Whole Foods to Safeway trumpeting their healthy produce from farmers just down the road, buying local and eating non-genetically modified (GM) organic food is surely the best thing for you and the planet. And that’s something government should get behind, right?
That’s the title of a new working paper by Fred Finan and Laura Schechter:
While vote-buying is common, little is known about how politicians determine who to target. We argue that vote-buying can be sustained by an internalized norm of reciprocity. Receiving money engenders feelings of obligation. Combining survey data on vote-buying with an experiment-based measure of reciprocity, we show that politicians target reciprocal individuals. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of social preferences in determining political behavior.
Corporate Social Responsibility: Marketing By Any Other Name…
Signals transmitted
Message received
Reaction making impact
Invisibly
— Rush, “Chemistry,” Signals (1982).
[This post is part of the Aid Blog Forum launched this week by J., who blogs over at Tales from the Hood. For more on the Aid Blog Forum, click here.]
J. writes:
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the new sexy thing in the philanthropy and humanitarian fundraising worlds. “Doing well while doing good” is the buzz phrase, and I admit — it’s got a nice, maybe even sensible ring to it. On the other hand, like many humanitarian practitioners I know, I come to the CSR conversation with a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism. I’ve seen it be really lame a lot of the time, and I’ve seen it go really bad a few times. But the ship has also very obviously sailed. Corporate social responsibility is here to stay. It’s part of the global humanitarian context, for better and/or for worse. As humanitarian relief and development professionals we have to deal with CSR. Here’s where you come in. What do you think?