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Hungry Capital: The Financialization Of Food, Luigi Russi Mar 2013

Hungry Capital: The Financialization Of Food, Luigi Russi

Luigi Russi

Over the past thirty years, the ability of global finance to affect aspects of everyday life has been increasing at an unprecedented rate. The world of food bears vivid testimony to this tendency, through the scars opened by the 2008 world food price crisis, the iron fist of retailing giants that occupy the supply chain and the unsustainable ecological footprint left behind by global production networks. Hungry Capital offers a rigorous analysis of the influence that financial imperatives exert on the food economy at different levels: from the direct use of edible commodities as an object of speculation to the …

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Federal Competition And Economic Growth, Katrina Kosec, John William Hatfield Dec 2012

Federal Competition And Economic Growth, Katrina Kosec, John William Hatfield

Katrina Kosec

This paper exploits exogenous variation in the natural topography of the United States to estimate the causal impact of inter-jurisdictional competition on income growth. We find that doubling the number of county governments in a metropolitan area leads to a 17% increase in the average annual growth rate of earnings per employee over 1969-2006, and a 10% increase in 2006 income per employee. Decomposing income effects using 2000 Census worker-level data, we find that approximately half of the effect stems from making workers more productive, while the other half comes from changing the composition of the workforce and inducing workers …

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Malnutrition, Child Health, And Water Quality: Is There A Role For Private Sector Participation In South Asia?, Katrina Kosec Mar 2012

Malnutrition, Child Health, And Water Quality: Is There A Role For Private Sector Participation In South Asia?, Katrina Kosec

Katrina Kosec

This article discusses the potential of private sector participation (PSP) to improve the urban water supply in South Asia. I first provide background on the literature linking a safe and adequate water supply with malnutrition, morbidity, and mortality. To better understand the selection mechanism underlying the decision to undergo PSP, I then analyze factors associated with the award of private water contracts worldwide. I next present empirical evidence that PSP in water is associated with a lower incidence of diarrheal disease and higher rates of access to piped water among young children in urban Africa. Finally, I conclude by reviewing …

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Oil For What?—Illicit Iraqi Oil Contracts And The U.N. Security Council, Paul Heaton Oct 2005

Oil For What?—Illicit Iraqi Oil Contracts And The U.N. Security Council, Paul Heaton

Paul Heaton

Over a 6½-year period the Iraqi government issued over 1300 oil contracts through the U.N. Oil-For-Food Program. This paper demonstrates that Security Council members obtained significantly more contracts than non-members and contract receipt is associated with pro-Hussein votes on resolutions. For non-permanent seat holders Council membership is associated with a 46% premium in contract value, while permanent seat holders obtained an estimated benefit of approximately $29 million each over the life of the program. A 10% increase in the probability of casting a pro-Iraq vote on the Council corresponds to $55 million in additional contracts. Contrary to median voter models, …

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