Hisaki Kono

Foreign Aid and Recurrent Cost: Donor Competition, Aid Proliferation, and Budget Support

Recent empirical studies reveal that effectiveness of aid on growth is ambiguous. The authors consider aid proliferation-excess aid investment relative to recurrent cost-as a potential cause that undermines aid effectiveness, because aid projects can only produce sustainable benefits when sufficient recurrent costs are disbursed. They consider the donors budget support as a device to supplement the shortage of the recipients recurrent cost and to alleviate the misallocation of inputs. However, when donors have self-interested preferences for the success of their own projects over those conducted by others, they provide insufficient budget support relative to aid, which results in aid proliferation. Moreover, aid proliferation is shown to be worsened by the presence of more donors. Copyright

Heterogeneous Contests and Less Informative Signals

We consider rank-order contests with heterogeneous agents in which the principal is restricted to using a fair contest (or a symmetric contest), focusing on the optimal accuracy of output signals. As opposed to the absolute performance evaluation, we show that it is optimal for the principal to deliberately make the signals noisier according to the degree of heterogeneity. Some economic interpretations of controlling noise are discussed.

Price and non-price information frictions in regional arbitrage: The case of rice traders in Antananarivo, Madagascar

Traders’ arbitrage is crucial for regional market integration. We investigate the patterns of regional arbitrage of rice traders in Antananarivo, Madagascar. On the basis of a trader-level biweekly survey, we find that most traders do not buy rice at the lowest price including observed transportation costs. Random provision of regional price information, intended to reduce search costs, did not improve arbitrage performance. Traders continue trading with districts that they are used to because they worry about quality uncertainty and the trustworthiness of new partners. These findings suggest that nonprice information frictions are important obstacles of regional arbitrage and market integration.

Economic Integration and Poverty

Covering a wide range of aspects surrounding economic integration in East Asia, this well-researched text will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students of development studies, regional economics and Asian studies. It will be of particular value to those on courses concerned with economic and regional integration.

Publicly Provided Primary Healthcare Services in Rural India: Achievements, Problems and Possible Solutions

The recent decades of poverty research have convincingly shown the value of a well-functioning health system in the development process. One of the ways in which poverty manifests itself is in the vicious cycle of ill-health and low income. Many studies have documented how temporary shocks to people’s health can have long-lasting effects on their welfare when healthcare is not available at affordable costs. Acknowledging this, more emphasis is now being placed on health outcomes as a primary policy goal across the developing world. The Millennium Development Goals notwithstanding, the Government of India (GOI) has always been a keen advocate of achieving good health among the general public.