Duncan Boughton

Institutional Diversity and Performance in African Cotton Sectors

This article analyses the performance of cotton sectors across East, Southern, and West Africa, paying particular attention to the wide diversity of institutional arrangements that they now exhibit. It finds strong support for earlier contentions regarding trade-offs between competition and coordination, and between the roles of public and private sectors. New insights provide concrete and context-specific guidance to policy-makers and stakeholders regarding the key challenges they will face and the risks they will need to manage as they work to improve productivity and ensure an equitable division of benefits within cotton sectors.

Processing and preparation costs for rice and coarse grains in urban Mali: Subjecting an Ipse Dixit to empirical scrutiny☆

Abstract This article uses household survey data from Bamako, Mali, to address three questions, important in the policy debate concerning the determinants of the substitution from coarse grains to rice in West African diets, and policy options. The questions are: (1) what are the relative costs of rice and coarse grain-based dishes, with and without complementary sauce costs? (2) What are the shares in total cost of individual processing and preparation stages? (3) Are pre-processed coarse grains (e.g. dehulled grain or flour) cheaper to consume than coarse grains processed in the household? Contrary to prevailing opinion, the paper shows that despite higher processing costs, coarse grain-based dishes are cheaper than rice-based dishes. The main contributory factors to the higher cost of rice-based dishes are sauce cost, cereal cost and preparation (cooking and sauce preparation) time. The result holds true over a wide range of rice and coarse grain prices, and opportunity costs of womens time, suggesting that the finding applies more generally to the urban Sahel and not just Bamako. Moreover, coarse grain-based dishes need not take longer to process and prepare than rice-based dishes if the dehulling step is mechanized. However, pre-processed coarse grains are not competitive with household processing given present technology and opportunity costs of womens time. Nor will coarse grains be able to retain the extent of their cost advantage over rice as incomes and labor opportunity costs rise without improvements in the efficiency of processing services.

Measuring Hope: A Quantitative Approach with Validation in Rural Myanmar

ABSTRACT Development economists are increasingly considering the role of hope in behaviours relating to investment, production, and consumption decisions of the poor. Although several studies have examined how the concepts of hope and aspirations may fit into economic theories, empirical studies have yet to validate a reliable measurement of hope. We adapt a quantitative approach to measure hope in the context of rural Myanmar. We present three tests of measurement validity. This study finds that hope measurements are correlated with covariates in a way supported by theory, are distinct from other psychological concepts, and are positively correlated with welfare perceptions.