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on Africa |
| By: | Paul Collier; Tony Venables |
| Abstract: | In many African countries a market for private provision of formal sector mass housing is largely absent. This is not inevitable, but is the consequence of policy failure surrounding five key issues. The affordability of housing, with costs often inflated by inappropriate building regulations and inefficient construction sectors; lack of clarity in land titling and legal enforcement; lack of innovation in supply of housing finance; failure to supply supporting infrastructure and to capture development gains to finance this; and failure to plan cities in a manner conducive to employment creation. Since responsibility for these policies is divided between different parts of government, a coordinated push is needed to secure reform and activate this market. |
| Date: | 2013–01–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oxf:wpaper:wps/2013-01&r=afr |
| By: | Goodness C. Aye (Department of Economics, University of Pretoria); Mehmet Balcilar (Department of Economics, Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, North Cyprus,via Mersin 10, Turkey); Rangan Gupta (Department of Economics, University of Pretoria); Anandamayee Majumdar (Soochow University Center for Advance Statistics and Econometric Research, Suzhou, China.) |
| Abstract: | Forecasting aggregate retail sales may improve portfolio investors’ ability to predict movements in the stock prices of the retailing chains. Therefore, this paper uses 26 (23 single and 3 combination) forecasting models to forecast South Africa’s aggregate seasonal retail sales. We use data from 1970:01–2012:05, with 1987:01-2012:05 as the out-of-sample period. We deviate from the uniform symmetric quadratic loss function typically used in forecast evaluation exercises. Hence, we consider loss functions that overweight forecast error in booms and recessions to check whether a specific model that appears to be a good choice on average is also preferable in times of economic stress. To this end, we use the weighted RMSE and weighted version of the Diebold-Mariano tests to evaluate the different forecasts. Focussing on the single models alone, results show that their performances differ greatly across forecast horizons and for different weighting schemes. However, the combination forecasts models in general produced better forecasts and are largely unaffected by business cycles and time horizons. |
| Keywords: | seasonality, weighted loss, retail sales forecasting, combination forecasts, South Africa |
| JEL: | C32 C53 E32 |
| Date: | 2013–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pre:wpaper:201312&r=afr |
| By: | Pettersson, Jan (Department of Economics); Wikström, Johan (Statistics Sweden) |
| Abstract: | In many parts of the world, soils poor in nutrients are farmed with little addition of fertilizer, further depleting the farmland. The very same farmers often face poor sanitary solutions. So-called ecological sanitation aims at providing sanitation and at recycling nutrients as fertilizer. This human fertilizer may act as a substitute for artificial fertilizers (improving the household budget) or as a complement (improving soil quality, increasing agricultural yields). We collected demographic, economic and farming data from 618 households in southern Mali, of which 155 benefitted from an ecological sanitation investment program. We do not find any support for human fertilizer being used complementary, although the effect on yields varies over crops. Instead, we find that beneficiary households substitute artificial fertilizer with human fertilizer at 10 to 15 per cent of the average household use of artificial fertilizers. While our results imply small economic incentives at the household level for investing in ecological sanitation, we do not account for health effects at the household or community level. |
| Keywords: | Household Productivity; Ecological Sanitation; UDDT; Mali; Fertilizer; Matching |
| JEL: | D13 O12 O13 Q12 |
| Date: | 2013–01–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:uunewp:2013_001&r=afr |
| By: | AfDB |
| Date: | 2013–02–26 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:adb:adbwps:447&r=afr |
| By: | Debopam Bhattacharya (University of Oxford); Pascaline Dupas (Stanford University); Shin Kanaya (Aarhus University and CREATES) |
| Abstract: | Regular use of effective health-products such as insecticide-treated mosquito nets (ITN) by a household benefits its neighbors by (a) reducing chances of infection and (b) raising awareness about product-effectiveness, thereby increasing product-use. Due to their potential social benefits and high purchase price, causing free-riding and sub-optimal private procurement, such products may be subsidized in developing countries through means-testing. Owing to associated spillover effects, cost-benefit analysis of such subsidies requires modelling behavioral responses of both the subsidized household and its neighbors. Using experimental data from Kenya where subsidies were randomized, coupled with GPS-based location information, we show how to estimate aggregate ITN use resulting from means-tested subsidies in the presence of such spatial spillovers. Accounting for spillovers introduces infinite-dimensional estimated regressors corresponding to continuously distributed location coordinates and makes the inference problem novel. We show that even if individual ITN use unambiguously increases with increasing incidence of subsidy in the neighborhood, ignoring spillovers may over- or under-predict overall ITN use resulting from a specific targeting rule, depending on the resulting aggregate incidence of subsidy. Applying our method to the Kenyan data, we find that (i) individual ITN use rises with neighborhood subsidy-rates, (ii) under means-testing, predicted ITN use is a convex increasing function of the subsidy incidence and (iii) ignoring spillovers implies a nearly-linear increasing relationship leading to over-estimation of ITN use at lower and under-estimation at higher subsidy rates. |
| Keywords: | Treatment effect, policy targeting, spillover, externality, overlapping neighborhood, social learning, experimental data, three-step estimation, bootstrap validity, Kenya |
| JEL: | C01 H23 H4 H51 I38 O1 |
| Date: | 2013–02–28 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aah:create:2013-06&r=afr |
| By: | Senbeta, Sisay R. |
| Abstract: | How do key macroeconomic variables of a small open economy with segmented labour markets behave in response to domestic and external shocks? In this paper we attempt to address this question by modeling the coexistence of a formal labour market with higher wage rates and search frictions, and an informal labour market with the opposite attributes in the standard multi-sector small open economy New Keynesian DSGE model. The model is calibrated for a typical Sub-Saharan African economy and the behaviour of key macroeconomic variables in response to domestic and external shocks is analysed. The results show that almost all the impulse response functions of our model are consistent with what theory predicts and what other empirical works show about the responses of low income countries to the shocks we consider. However, our results do not seem to corroborate the widely held wisdom that the existence of an informal sector plays a stabilizing role in the event of shocks. |
| Date: | 2013–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ant:wpaper:2013002&r=afr |
| By: | AfDB |
| Date: | 2013–02–26 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:adb:adbwps:446&r=afr |
| By: | Cristina Bodea; Adrienne LeBas |
| Abstract: | How do social contracts come into being? This paper argues that norm adoption plays an important and neglected role in this process. Using novel data from urban Nigeria, we examine why individuals adopt norms favoring a citizen obligation to pay tax where state enforcement is weak. We find that public goods delivery by the state produces the willingness to pay tax, but community characteristics also have a strong and independent effect on both social contract norms and actual tax payment. Individuals are less likely to adopt pro-tax norms if they have access to community provision of security and other services. In conflict-prone communities, where "self-help" provision of club goods is less effective, individuals are more likely to adopt social contract norms. Finally, we show that social contract norms substantially boost tax payment. This paper has broad implications for literatures on state formation, taxation, clientelism, and public goods provision. |
| Date: | 2013–01–24 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oxf:wpaper:wps/2013-02&r=afr |