Dirk Bezemer

Understanding Long-Run African Growth: Colonial Institutions or Colonial Education?

Abstract Long-term growth in developing countries has been explained in four frameworks: ‘extractive colonial institutions’ (Acemoglu et al., 2001), ‘colonial legal origin’ (La Porta et al., 2004), ‘geography’ (Gallup et al., 1998) and ‘colonial human capital’ (Glaeser et al., 2004). In this paper we test the ‘colonial human capital’ explanation for sub-Saharan Africa, controlling for legal origin and geography. Utilising data on colonial era education, we find that instrumented human capital explains long-term growth better, and shows greater stability over time, than instrumented measures for extractive institutions. We suggest that the impact of the disease environment on African long-term growth runs through a human capital channel rather than an extractive-institutions channel. The effect of education is robust to including variables capturing legal origin and geography, which have additional explanatory power.

The Credit Crisis and Recession as a Paradigm Test

This paper contributes to the debate on what economics can learn from the credit crisis and recession. It asks what are the elements in the mainstream paradigm that caused many economists to misjudge the state of the economy so dramatically in the years leading up to the 2007 credit crisis and the 2008-2009 recession. It scrutinizes the work of twelve economists who warned of the crisis and identifies, as the common elements in their thinking, financial assets, debt, the flow of funds and behavioral assumptions on uncertainty, bounded rationality and non-optimizing behavior. These are then contrasted to mainstream thinking. The conclusion is that economics, if it is to be relevant to reality, should stop neglecting money, wealth and debt, and turn away from an individualistic view and toward a systemic view of the economy.

Rural livelihoods in Armenia

This article explores the structure of the rural economy in Armenia from a farm household perspective. Ownership of capital and access to activities are examined on the basis of data from a recent large‐scale survey of farm households in Armenia. Different measures for the outcome of livelihood strategies in terms of well‐being are observed. Income‐poor households are found to be less well endowed especially with financial and social capital. They derive smaller income shares from economic activities and more from dissaving and social payments. The findings are relevant to policies aimed at alleviating rural poverty.

Credit Markets for Agriculture in the Czech Republic

(2002). Credit Markets for Agriculture in the Czech Republic. Europe-Asia Studies: Vol. 54, No. 8, pp. 1301-1317.

Livelihoods and farm efficiency in rural Georgia

This study contributes to the literature on the role of livelihood strategies in rural growth and poverty reduction. It distinguishes between livelihood diversity strategies that contribute to sustainable growth in household incomes, and those that mainly have a ‘coping’ function. It suggests that typically, the contribution of livelihood diversity to growing household income is through relaxing dependence on credit for access to capital. In this scenario, livelihood diversity would lead to higher technical efficiency in agriculture via investment and thereby to higher household incomes. Survey data from Georgia are introduced and used to test these hypotheses using a Bayesian stochastic frontier approach. The findings are relevant to defining more clearly the scope and aims of policies to stimulate the rural non-farm economy in developing and transition countries.

De-Collectivization in Czech and Slovak Agriculture: An Institutional Explanation

One of the surprises in the post-socialist transformation process in Central and Eastern Europe has been the persistence of production structures in the agricultural sectors. Amid the dramatic and sudden changes that ended the continuity of the Central and Eastern European socialist economies, the observation made by Douglass North which serves as the motto of this article remains true for the structure of farms in large parts of the region. Socialist farms were either collective or state farms, both of which were corporate organizations. There were separations between farm ownership, control over the production process, and implementation of production tasks. These were wage-labor farms, as distinct from the Western-type family farm. In the Western agricultural economics literature preceding the liberal revolutions of 1989-1991 in the region, socialist agriculture had long been identified as cost-inefficient due to incentive problems inherent in the governance structure of wage-labor farms. This view was also the dominant approach in the early transformation years and is expressed explicitly and in most detail in a paper by G. Schmitt (1993), originally written in 1990. The argument was an application to post-communist farming of theoretical work on household production by R. Pollak (1985). For contemporary expositions of it, see Sarris et al. 1999 or Swinnen and Mathijs 1999 (4-8).

Finance Is Not the Economy: Reviving the Conceptual Distinction

Abstract: Conflation of real capital with finance capital is at the heart of current misunderstandings of economic crisis and recession. We ground this distinction in the classical analysis of rent and the difference between productive and unproductive credit. We then apply it to current conditions, in which household credit — especially mortgage credit — is the premier form of unproductive credit. This is supported by an institutional analysis of postwar U.S. development and a review of quantitative empirical research across many countries. Finally, we discuss contemporary consequences of the financial sector’s malformation and overdevelopment.

The Rural Non-farm Economy in Romania: Overview of Findings

The literature on transition economies devotes relatively attention to agriculture and the rural non-farm economy, despite the importance of the sector and its importance to the livelihoods of the majority of the worlds poor. This paper is part of growing volume of valuable empirical work on agriculture in transition countries and especially on the topic of the rural non-farm economy and livelihood diversification among the poor. The focus of this paper is on rural non-farm livelihoods in Romania. The main aim of this paper is to improve understanding of the dynamics of the RNFE in providing employment and income diversification opportunities in Romania.

The Rural Non-farm Economy in Georgia: Overview of Findings

The literature on transition economies devotes relatively attention to agriculture and the rural non-farm economy, despite the importance of the sector and its importance to the livelihoods of the majority of the worlds poor. This paper is part of growing volume of valuable empirical work on agriculture in transition countries and especially on the topic of the rural non-farm economy and livelihood diversification among the poor. The focus of this paper is on rural non-farm livelihoods in Georgia. The main aim of this paper is to improve understanding of the dynamics of the RNFE in providing employment and income diversification opportunities in Georgia.

The Rural Non-farm Economy in Armenia: Overview of Findings

The literature on transition economies devotes relatively attention to agriculture and the rural non-farm economy, despite the importance of the sector and its importance to the livelihoods of the majority of the worlds poor. This paper is part of growing volume of valuable empirical work on agriculture in transition countries and especially on the topic of the rural non-farm economy and livelihood diversification among the poor. The focus of this paper is on rural non-farm livelihoods in Armenia. The main aim of this paper is to improve understanding of the dynamics of the RNFE in providing employment and income diversification opportunities in Armenia.