Frédéric Gaspart

Land tenure security and investment incentives : Puzzling evidence from Burkina Faso

Abstract The commonsense logic associating higher land security and higher incentives to invest has been recently called into question in the case of African agriculture. To be meaningful, empirical tests have to be carefully designed so as to take account of the possible endogeneity of the land rights variable. This is done in this paper by applying suitable econometric methods to the original data collected in Burkina Faso. The results obtained cast doubt on the existence of a systematic influence of land tenure security on investment. By reviewing the justifications for scepticism in the recent literature, we are able to conclude that the traditional village order, where it exists, provides the basic land rights required to stimulate small-scale investment.

The Risk of Resource Misappropriation in Community-Driven Development

Community-Driven Development (CDD) is being currently proposed as the main avenue to fighting poverty and circumventing the shortcomings of state-directed aid resources. One of the main difficulties in CDD programmes lies in their vulnerability to capture by local elites. The paper discusses the possibility of mitigating this problem through a so-called leader-disciplining mechanism (LDM) that relies on a sequential disbursement procedure supported by a fraud detection mechanism. On the basis of the LDM framework, it is argued in particular that too quick and massive a rush on CDD may prove self-defeating in the sense that the share of aid resources actually reaching the poor will be low if donor agencies are impatient to achieve results.

Cooperation, status seeking and competitive behaviour: theory and evidence

We study whether a linear income sharing rule (pooling system) can achieve Pareto efficiency in a problem of joint exploitation of fishery resources. When agents are selfish, the homogeneity of individual outputs in equilibrium is a necessary condition for the efficient pooling system. When agents exhibit a preference for status (i.e. for being among the well-performing members of the group), the pooling system can be efficient even without this condition. This is because, on the one hand, relative status considerations enlarge the tolerable range of heterogeneity and, on the other hand, it generates an incentive structure that may homogenise individual output performances.

Strategic Behavior and Marriage Payments: Theory and Evidence from Senegal

This article proposes an original theory of marriage payments based on insights gained from firsthand information collected in the Senegal River valley. This theory postulates that decisions about the bride‐price, which are made by the bride’s father, take into account the likely effects of the amount set on the risk of ill‐treatment of the wife and the risk of marriage failure. Based on a sequential game with three players (the bride’s father, the husband, and the wife) and a matching process, it leads to a number of important predictions that are tested against Senegalese data relating to bride‐prices and various characteristics of women. The empirical results confirm that parents behave strategically by keeping bride‐prices down so as to reduce the risk of marriage failure for their daughters. Other interesting effects on marriage payments and the probability of separation are also highlighted, stressing the role of the bride’s bargaining power in her own family.

Collective Action for Local-Level Effort Regulation: An Assessment of Recent Experiences in Senegalese Small-Scale Fisheries

The 1990s several important fishing communities along teh Senegalese coastline have adopted effort-restraining schemes on their own initiative ought retain attention. In particular, four central questions deserve to be investigated: (1) Have these schemes been motivated by market power or by resource management considerations? (2) Are they effectively run and have they been proven to be sustained? (3) What types of fishermen do apprear to be most convinced or most supportive of effort-limiting measures; and is it possible to understand the characteristics of supportive fishermen in the light of available economic theory? (4) What are the reasons behind the varying incidence of success of such measures in different points of the Senegalese coastline?