Investment and Trade in Biofuels: Will there be a Market in the US for Developing Country Ethanol?

Author(s):  
Alphanso Williams ◽  
William A. Kerr

The mandating of increased use of biofuels in transportation fuel in the US initially appeared to offer considerable benefits for developing countries via production and export of sugar cane-based ethanol. This was particularly the case after the contribution of corn-based ethanol was capped at approximately current production levels in the wake of the food price crisis starting in 2007. Closer examination of the complex US biofuels mandate, however, suggests that market access opportunities for developing countries will be much smaller than originally hoped. Current inconsistencies in US biofuels policy increase the riskiness of any developing country investments in the production of biofuels crops and co-requisite infrastructure. As a result, there appears to be little interest in investment in trade-related ethanol activities in developing countries.

2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (05) ◽  
pp. 1385-1403 ◽  
Author(s):  
KITAE SOHN ◽  
ILLOONG KWON

Trust was found to promote entrepreneurship in the US. We investigated whether this was true in a developing country, Indonesia. We failed to replicate this; this failure was true whether trust was estimated at the individual or community level or whether ordinary least squares (OLS) or two stage least squares (2SLS) was employed. We reconciled the difference between our results and those for the US by arguing that the weak enforcement of property rights in developing countries and the consequent hold-up problem make it more efficient for entrepreneurs to produce generic goods than relationship-specific goods—producing generic goods does not depend on trust.


2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-148
Author(s):  
J. MICHAEL FINGER

The WTO, we hope, is an institution that mutes the importance of raw power – provides a system for working out problems among countries in which the interests of smaller countries are not always overwhelmed by those of larger. The two books reviewed both address this issue, but in different ways. The Odell volume (a collection of studies by different analysts) reviews a number of WTO events in which developed and developing country interests were at odds; e.g., the ‘bananas dispute’ involving Ecuador, the US, and the European Communities. The studies in that volume document the skill of developing country negotiators to use the system to their advantage; they demonstrate that the WTO process often came to outcomes more favorable to smaller countries than a simple weighing of relative power would imply.


2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1850101
Author(s):  
Suparna Karmakar

Services have become the engine of growth in a large number of economies in the developing world. Additionally, the rapid development of ICT, and emergence of transnational corporations, has not only made cross-border provision of services easier, but has also increased the demand for and trade in services; developing countries today are increasingly emerging as cost efficient providers of key business and professional services, thereby becoming key players in the services supply chain. In the absence of explicit tariff barriers, as compared to goods, over the years, countries have more intensively regulated services on grounds of protecting consumer interest and ensuring quality and excellence of professional services provided. It is also true that as cheap labour is the resource with comparative advantage in most developing countries, and especially India, access to developed country markets by means of cross-border supply and movement of natural persons have the potential of conferring the maximum benefits from services liberalisation. However, challenges for market access in developed countries in these two modes of supply lie in the range of regulatory barriers, including burdensome visa formalities, stringent quotas and qualification requirements, and discriminatory taxes, levies and standards faced by the developing country service providers. Most professions are closely regulated and certified, and often self-regulated, usually though sectoral trade associations. This paper brings out the key elements of the prevalent regulatory measures and barriers to market access for developing country service providers, and assesses how (if at all) the proposed disciplines on domestic regulations would help in securing or easing market access problems of developing country professionals in the developed country markets. An analysis of select professional services in India indicate that for developing countries in general there exist many elements in the proposed disciplines that are not only desirable but would help them to get better market access into key developed country markets. Also it appears that given the prevailing weaknesses of the domestic legal and institutional framework in most developing countries, commensurate changes in the domestic legal and regulatory systems would need to be incorporated prior to the adoption of the DR Disciplines so as to enable countries to fulfill the requirements under such disciplines. Incorporation of suitable S&DT provisions is needed to ensure proper implementation of the said disciplines and satisfy the development agenda of the Doha Round.


2015 ◽  
pp. 30-53
Author(s):  
V. Popov

This paper examines the trajectory of growth in the Global South. Before the 1500s all countries were roughly at the same level of development, but from the 1500s Western countries started to grow faster than the rest of the world and PPP GDP per capita by 1950 in the US, the richest Western nation, was nearly 5 times higher than the world average and 2 times higher than in Western Europe. Since 1950 this ratio stabilized - not only Western Europe and Japan improved their relative standing in per capita income versus the US, but also East Asia, South Asia and some developing countries in other regions started to bridge the gap with the West. After nearly half of the millennium of growing economic divergence, the world seems to have entered the era of convergence. The factors behind these trends are analyzed; implications for the future and possible scenarios are considered.


Author(s):  
Sarah Blodgett Bermeo

This chapter develops a formal model of targeted development. It starts from the assumption that governments in industrialized states seek to maximize their own utility in interactions with developing countries. Development concerns compete with other policy goals for scarce government resources. The level of development resources an industrialized country government targets to a particular developing country depends on the weight the government places on development in that country as well as the efficiency of the country in turning resources into development outcomes that the industrialized state values. One of the key insights of the model is that, as governments work to maximize the utility gained per dollar (or euro, yen, etc.) spent, development motives will influence policy in multiple issue areas. The chapter also draws out implications of the theory for each of the issue areas examined in the empirical chapters.


Author(s):  
John Toye

Keynes’s writings are often disregarded in the context of economic development, overlooking that Russia was a developing country in his lifetime. He wrote about the experimental economic techniques that the Soviet government employed. He visited Russia three times and wrote A Short View of Russia in which he explained and criticized Bolsheviks’ policy of export and import monopolies, an overvalued exchange rate, inflationary government finance, and the subsidization of industry. These were policies that many developing countries adopted after decolonization. Keynes’s conclusion was that they were inefficient and that ‘bourgeois economics was valid in a communist country’. Did Keynes change his mind in the 1930s? If anything, he grew more harshly critical of Soviet economic policies and carefully distinguished them from his own endorsement of moderate trade protection and government supplementary investment in times of depression.


Author(s):  
Rafael Portillo ◽  
Luis-Felipe Zanna

The chapter presents a small open-economy model to study the first-round effects of international food-price shocks in developing countries. First-round shocks are defined as changes in headline inflation that, holding core inflation constant, help implement relative price adjustments. The model features three goods (food, a generic traded good, and a non-traded good), varying degrees of tradability of the food basket, and alternative international asset market structures. First-round effects depend crucially on the asset market structure. Under complete markets, inter-temporal substitution prevails, making the inflationary impact of international food price shocks proportional to the food share in consumption, which in developing countries is typically large. Under financial autarky, the income channel is dominant, and first-round effects are instead proportional to the country’s food trade balance, which is typically small. The results cast some doubt on the view that international food price shocks inherently have large inflationary effects in developing countries.


Gerontology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Akshaya Srikanth Bhagavathula ◽  
Eyob Alemayehu Gebreyohannes ◽  
Daniela Fialova

<b><i>Background and Aim:</i></b> Polypharmacy and potentially inappropriate medication (PIM) use in older populations (65+ years) have not yet been investigated by meta-analyses in developing countries. This systematic literature review and meta-analysis aimed to investigate the prevalence of polypharmacy and PIM use and major risk factors associated with PIM prescribing in older adults in Ethiopia. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> We searched PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, Embase, and Google Scholar databases to identify relevant studies published between January 1990 and October 2020. Observational studies reporting the prevalence and association of risk factors with polypharmacy and PIM use in the older population were meta-analyzed. A multilevel meta-analysis was conducted to pool the prevalence estimates, and the risk of PIM use was reported as a relative risk (RR) with a 95% confidence interval (CI). <b><i>Results:</i></b> We identified by systematic literature review 404 articles. Of those, 8 studies fulfilled inclusion criteria, comprising a total sample of 2,608 participants. The overall prevalence of polypharmacy and PIM use pooled by meta-analysis in the Ethiopian older population was 33 and 37%, respectively. The risk factors of PIM use were analyzed in the meta-analysis (particularly polymorbidity, polypharmacy, gender, and older age), and only older age of 65+ (RR: 1.71, 95% CI: 1.16–2.51) was significantly associated with PIM use. <b><i>Conclusion:</i></b> This first meta-analysis from a developing country revealed a high prevalence of polypharmacy and PIM use in the Ethiopian older population. There was no awareness about the risk of PIMs in patients with polypharmacy and polymorbidity, and older age significantly predicted PIM use. Interventions ensuring rational geriatric pharmacotherapy are essential in developing countries in order to reduce the expected burden of PIM-related geriatric morbidity, higher costs, and mortality.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (Supplement_4) ◽  
Author(s):  
S Hajian ◽  
M H Khoshnevisan ◽  
S h Yazdani ◽  
M P Jadidfard

Abstract Background Migration of skilled health workers could result in shortage of human resources and rising inequalities in service provision in source countries. To date, most of relevant papers are focused on rate and reasons of migration while the need for conducting studies on modelling of factors is more vividly felt. The aim of this review was to determine the factors influencing the migration decisions of medical and dental graduates migrating from developing countries and to introduce a practical conceptual framework for health worker migration. Methods Electronic databases PubMed, Google Scholar and relevant Journals were systematically searched for English language publications from January 2009 to April 2019. The inclusion criteria were: 1) article stated factors affecting migration decisions of medical doctors and/or dentists, 2) the source country in the study was a developing country, 3) participants’ primary qualification country was in a developing country,4) the study used primary data both qualitative or quantitative. Results The search identified 814 articles from which we included 23 full-text studies after applying eligibility checklist. Push and pull theory was the most popular model to describe the migration driving factors. Poor socio-economic situation, political instability, lack of professional and educational opportunities together with family concerns found as strong common push factors that perpetuate migration. The most influencing pull factors were desire for better quality of life, career and training opportunities and financial gain. Conclusions Despite the fact that health workers migrate for different reasons, they follow a same route for decision to stay or leave their own countries. Un-fulfillment of expectations in mother land in addition to media reconstructed reality of life in foreign land can develop a positive attitude for migration Which should be considered before weighing up the push and pull factors of both sides. Key messages A better understanding of the migration motives of health professionals will help health authorities to improve their workforce recruitment and retention strategies and health service planning. Our simple yet comprehensive framework can mainly identify the development of migration desire through combining different models and concepts of migration, behavioral change, values, needs and so on.


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