Christine M. Moser

Missed Opportunities and Missing Markets: Spatio-temporal Arbitrage of Rice in Madagascar

This paper uses an exceptionally rich data set to test the extent to which markets in Madagascar are integrated across space, time, and form (in converting from paddy to rice) and to explain some of the factors that limit arbitrage and price equalization within a single country. In particular, we use rice price data across four quarters of 2000-2001 along with data on transportation costs and infrastructure availability for nearly 1400 communes in Madagascar to examine the extent of market integration at three different spatial scales sub-regional, regional, and national and determine whether non-integration is due to high transfer costs or lack of competition. The results indicate that markets are fairly well integrated at the sub-regional level and that factors such as high crime, remoteness, and lack of information are among the factors limiting competition. A lack of competition persists at the regional level and high transfer costs impede spatial market integration at the national level. Only six percent of rural communes appear to be intertemporally integrated and there appear to be significant untapped opportunities for interseasonal arbitrage. Income is directly and strongly related to the probability of a commune being in interseasonal competitive equilibrium.

Do Property Rights Institutions Matter at the Local Level? Evidence from Madagascar

Abstract While several cross-country studies have demonstrated that property rights institutions are crucial for economic growth, empirical evidence of this relationship within countries is limited. This article analyses the link between property rights institutions and development at a local level with two rounds of a unique dataset covering almost all of Madagascar at a level akin to counties in the United States. We find robust evidence that property rights institutions in the form of formal land titles do matter for the emergence of large firms at very low administrative levels. We also find evidence that growth in enterprise development strengthens formal property rights, supporting the notion that the causality between institutions and growth runs both ways even at a low administrative level.

The effect of social health insurance on prenatal care: the case of Ghana

Many developing countries have introduced social health insurance programs to help address two of the United Nations’ millennium development goals—reducing infant mortality and improving maternal health outcomes. By making modern health care more accessible and affordable, policymakers hope that more women will seek prenatal care and thereby improve health outcomes. This paper studies how Ghana’s social health insurance program affects prenatal care use and out-of-pocket expenditures, using the two-part model to model prenatal care expenditures. We test whether Ghana’s social health insurance improved prenatal care use, reduced out-of-pocket expenditures, and increased the number of prenatal care visits. District-level differences in the timing of implementation provide exogenous variation in access to health insurance, and therefore strong identification. Those with access to social health insurance have a higher probability of receiving care, a higher number of prenatal care visits, and lower out-of-pocket expenditures conditional on spending on care.

Structural Model of Agricultural Markets in Developing Countries

Switching regime models, including the Parity Bounds Model, are commonly used for assessing market integration, although they are not well suited to multiple market contexts. We develop an alternative structural model of markets that incorporates explanatory variables and generates the probability that a single market is integrated, therefore making it possible to identify specific factors or regions of a country associated with low integration. Our application to intraprovincial rice markets in Madagascar predicts that 56% of markets are integrated. High crime areas are less likely to be integrated, while the center of the country has a higher level of integration. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.

An economic analysis of deforestation in Madagascar in the 1990s

Abstract Madagascar is well-known among conservationists for both its unique forest ecosystems and its alarmingly high rates of deforestation. This paper studies the factors driving deforestation in Madagascar using a nation-wide data set of commune-level variables. The analysis suggests that higher population and fertility rates were associated with higher deforestation in the moist forest region in the 1990s. Deforestation was lower in vanilla producing areas and higher in coffee producing areas. This finding runs counter to the theory that higher prices for crops drive deforestation, since prices for vanilla growers in Madagascar were more favourable than for coffee growers. Provincial road access also led to more forest loss, but other road and market access variables were insignificant. In the dry and spiny forest areas, market-oriented maize production plays a significant role. The study also makes a methodological contribution by addressing the potential bias introduced by missing data due to cloud cover in satellite images.

Cloud Cover and Satellite Images of Deforestation

Most studies of deforestation rely on land-cover data interpreted from satellite images. However, it is often difficult, particularly in moist forest areas, to obtain cloud-free images. Dropping or imputing missing values from satellite data relies on the assumption of independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA), which implies that clouds are independent of the occurrence of forests. We test whether IIA holds for the case of Madagascar. We reject IIA for the amount of forest lost, demonstrating that estimates of deforestation and studies that use deforestation data from satellite images could potentially be biased without the proper corrections for cloud cover. (JEL Q23)